Driving off-road can be a thrilling way to explore the wilderness, but if you’re not careful, it can also be highly destructive. Many animals make their homes off the beaten track, and endangered plants still survive in areas untouched by civilisation. A 4WD can be a great way to explore the pristine bush, but it’s...

Rear vision cameras help keep your care safe when you lend it out If you’ve been driving in your vehicle for a while, then you tend to get a sense of its quirks and foibles. You develop an instinct for the turning circle, for the dimension, and you start to have a fairly reliable intuition...

When you think camouflage, chances are that you don’t think of a car park. You probably think about wildlife, using evolutionary defence mechanisms to avoid detection by predators. Zebras and chameleons come to mind. Or maybe you think about military uniforms, with their carefully patterned colours to help soldiers conceal themselves in combat zones. But...

I’m kind of a science fiction buff. And when you’re watching Star Trek, one thing you notice is that at the helm of a starship, there are all sorts of sensors and readouts that tell the crew what’s going on in different parts of the ship, and measuring all the different things that are going...

Some driveways are just impossible to turn around in. They seem to obey some sort of twisted, warped geometry, like an MC Escher artwork or a bent region of space-time too close to a black hole. Maybe it’s because they’re narrow, because part of them is blocked with boxes or bushes, or just because they’re...

Now that daylight savings time has ended, you’re likely to be doing a lot more driving in the dark, and I can tell you from experience that this can be pretty tricky without a camera. The other day I saw someone cycling at night without any lights or reflective clothing, and it genuinely made me...

We live in an age where there are cameras everywhere. Just look at Google maps and you’ll realise that there are literally camera vans on every street. We have surveillance cameras on most street corners, in shops, outside homes. And one of the things that people are often told is that surveillance keeps you safe....

Parking can be stressful enough, but reversing out of a packed car park can be a real nightmare. Even if you managed to get into a spot fine, people can park super close to you before you return to your vehicle, making it all but impossible to safely get out of the spot you were...

When you’re driving around sunrise or sunset, glare from the sun can be a serious safety hazard. And even though it’s still Daylight Savings Time, we’re now past the halfway point to the equinox which means that sunset is getting closer and closer to rush hour. This means that you can be driving a long...

I know that I sometimes might seem to harp on about bad turning circles, but I’ve driven a car that has trouble doing a u-turn even on fairly wide roads, and having a turning circle like that is no picnic when it comes to reversing or parallel parking. Try having people angrily honk at you...