MOT fail - seat belt anchorage (sill) area, rear suspension mounting area

[sgould]

The Carlsson is being sold by one of the Beds, Bucks & Herts members, Michael Lawton.

Anyone interested?  Details here:

https://www.autotrader.co.uk/classified/advert/201901264323715?onesearchad=New&onesearchad=Nearly%20New&onesearchad=Used&year-from=2010&radius=1501&body-type=Saloon&transmission=Automatic&make=SAAB&maximum-mileage=80000&sort=sponsored&advertising-location=at_cars&postcode=mk451dw&page=1

[Geoff1951]

£555 a year road tax !

Lovely car though.

[sgould]

You can't take it with you!

[Geoff1951]

You can't take it with you!

I'd like to try!
That annual charge will only encourage the premature scrapping of perfectly good motors like that lovely 9-3. The pollution output isn't likely to be three times the output of my Octavia vRS (with almost identical performance figures), or 27.5 (twentyseven point five!) times that of of my OH's VW Up. It really is an unequal tax. The driver of the 9-3 will certainly pay more at the petrol pump, so why pitch the tax so high - around £300 would be a little fairer.

Rant over.

[Audax]

That annual charge will only encourage the premature scrapping of perfectly good motors like that lovely 9-3. The pollution output isn't likely to be three times the output of my Octavia vRS (with almost identical performance figures), or 27.5 (twentyseven point five!) times that of of my OH's VW Up. It really is an unequal tax. The driver of the 9-3 will certainly pay more at the petrol pump, so why pitch the tax so high - around £300 would be a little fairer.

I agree, I'd like to see VED abolished and have it put on fuel instead, that's immediately a much better way to encourage people to buy more fuel efficient cars or consider if all the trips they make are really needed. I'm paying over £500 a year for a petrol 9-3 that is going to be driven once or twice a week as I now walk to work, my colleague with a TTiD is doing 180 miles 3 times a week just to get to and from work and is paying under £50 for his VED. Given it is a tax on emissions that makes no sense at all that I pay so much more when the car doesn't emit as much co2 as it's not used! The only other sensible option would be to scale it based on mileage you do and the co2 output of the vehicle but obviously that won't work as it would have to be collected in arrears...

[fka]

You could always pay in advance for X number of estimated miles per year. The balance, so to speak, is checked each year when the mileage is logged during the MOT.. Slight caveat of new cars not requiring an MOT 

[sgould]

In the old Greenpeace days and Friends of the Earth, Jonathan Porritt drove a very old smokey Austin Maxi.  He claimed that it could never pollute the future more than making a new car would.

If the government were serious about pollution they would penalise new cars heavily.  I know there's a special VED of new cars for one year, but it's nothing like enough.  People should be encouraged to buy older and older cars.  No more idiotic scrappage schemes.  No more recording increasing new car sales as something to encourage.

And allowing insurance companies to use second hand parts would be another way forward.  The price of new parts is ridiculous and is causing perfectly good cars to be written off.

A bit of sanity in political management would be nice, but probably impossible while parties are supported by big business.

[fka]

I completely agree. But it's not in the interests of the economy to keep an old car on the road, there's far more profit in manufacturing and selling new cars.
It's exactly like the IT industry, your average server now has about 4 or 5 years max before it's deemed end of life. It's become so economically unviable for businesses to refresh kit at this rate that it now apparently makes more economic sense to hire server space from the likes of Microsoft, Amazon, Google etc .. i.e cloud solutions. Which come at ridiculous cost once you factor in SLAs, redundant connectivity etc. All the while there's been no major advances in the technology and the end of life kit is probably more than capable of carrying on for another 5 or 10 years, with a little maintenance. It's pure BS, cooked up for the sole purpose of keeping the economic wheels turning (Excuse the pun!)..

[Audax]

It's exactly like the IT industry, your average server now has about 4 or 5 years max before it's deemed end of life.

I'd say it's nothing like the the IT industry, one of the major costs of computing is electricity and rack space, given the rate that computers increase in speed very often it's worthwhile trashing them after only a year or two as you can replace them with something that uses half the electrical power for twice the computing performance after a couple of years. If cars were doing that then it would be worthwhile to replace them every few years and a litre of petrol would last you a year! When you factor the overall costs of computing then running things in the cloud it can provide massive savings. Even though I work for a cloud service provider and am responsible for providing cloud services to customers in over 50 locations worldwide (I run a content delivery network) we still run a significant amount of our infrastructure on other cloud providers as it's cheaper than us running it ourselves as the options we have to scale demand up and down reduces our costs to be negligible for a large amount of the time. It's also well understood in scientific computing circles that for hard problems that will take a few years to compute that sometimes it's better to spend a year optimising code and then buy the latest hardware as it's cheaper in costs of computers electricity than starting the computation now and waiting.

The only real advancements in cars today from one designed in the late 1980's is that the safety aspects are significantly improved. They still all broadly accelerate and brake at the same speeds and keep up with one another on modern roads, a bit more fuel economy has been found but then lost due to the increasing weight of the vehicles due to safety aspects.

[fka]

We're currently replacing 5 year old multi million $ broadcast production infrastructure. It still serves it's original function, our requirements haven't really changed significantly and there's still a low failure rate of hardware. Some low level systems will switch to cloud, but our base PAM and MAM will remain in-house, due to the large amounts of data storage and datarates required to edit hi-res video - Proxy workflows are not always desirable. However there is talk of, and a general industry trend, for these systems to move to cloud solutions - Something I strongly disagree with and a personal current bugbear. 
As you mention improvements in code can also significantly improve efficiency, point in hand I'm currently holding off a major release software upgrade of our array used for video transcoding because the hardware is end of life and due the the impact of the upgrade, it may as well be carried out in conjunction with the hardware refresh. This is despite the fact the current software version will run more efficiently on the end of life hardware, especially when running framerate conversion.
I completely understand the scalability of cloud solutions and the real-estate costs of hosting in-house. But I would still argue that the environmental costs of refreshing hardware at such a rate outweighs the energy savings, especially when the generation of electricity via renewable sources is increasing at the rate it is.. Again, like the motor industry, it primarily comes down to economic not environmental reasons.

[Audax]

I completely understand the scalability of cloud solutions and the real-estate costs of hosting in-house. But I would still argue that the environmental costs of refreshing hardware at such a rate outweighs the energy savings, especially when the generation of electricity via renewable sources is increasing at the rate it is.. Again, like the motor industry, it primarily comes down to economic not environmental reasons.

Hah, we actually provide cloud based transcoding services and run networks delivering large amounts of content for what are local equivalents of iplayer. It makes a lot of sense on the current hardware cycles for people to pay us for the transcode and delivery side. As we see more and more people needing to use HTTPS and moving to edge processing we need faster and faster CPU's, it's not just the power requirement it's the cooling side too and the available space in data centres. When a new machine can do four times as much as the old generation hardware it really becomes necessary for us to replace hardware frequently, our first generation appliances could do 2Gb/sec on a favourable day about 7 years ago, we're now three generations of hardware ahead and now pushing 40Gb/second using a single machine in the same rack space which is a combination of much faster hardware and code optimisation but the old machines would never do more than 4Gb/sec and would never be able to contain a 40Gb network card anyway. To achieve this using the older hardware we'd need an entire rack and associated management costs and overhead which is where environmentally, physically and practically it just wouldn't work for us.

[fka]

Love it 
I rue the day we follow suit but it is the future. I sat through a meeting with Avid at IBC this year, who have sold us a cloud solution for their Media Central that we currently host in-house. At the time and I think is still in development. It works with proxy video so will have zero impact for the end user and has some amazing search features that incorporate auto transcribing and facial recognition. It's Azure based so unlikely but if there is an outage, I greatly dislike the idea of calling a data centre to resolve the issue. Whatever level SLA we buy, at least currently we have hands on the hardware and understand the urgency of the end users. I've also seen the pricing of Azure, anything CPU heavy seems quite extortionate to me.

In hind sight, not the most clean cut comparison to make!

BTW I don't think we could be further off topic if we tried 

[Audax]

BTW I don't think we could be further off topic if we tried 

....we could, we could be talking about Volvo...

[Geoff1951]

BTW I don't think we could be further off topic if we tried 

....we could, we could be talking about Volvo...

At least we'd be talking about cars...

[Audax]

At least we'd be talking about cars...

I only like cars as they have so many computers in them.