Tired of walking? Future Movers is our roundup of the week’s biggest news in powered transport. Whether it’s a car, a bike, a plane or something in between, you’ll find the Aussie angle on it right here.
Hertz Australia Is Adding The Ford Mustang To Its Rental Fleet
Want to get yourself into a new Ford Mustang, but don’t want to wait in the thousands-long Aussie production queue? As part of the 2000 extra Mustangs brought over this year, Ford has delivered a small number into the hands of Hertz, and the cars will be making their way into the company’s Adrenaline Collection.
Hertz has a long love affair with the Mustang in the US, starting with the 1966 GT350H rent-a-racer, and now that Australia finally has the new Mustang it only makes sense that Hertz would get on board here as well. In Hertz’s airport locations in Sydney and Melbourne, you’re now able to secure a rental in a 2016 Ford Mustang GT Fastback, albeit only an automatic rather than a manual.
Tesla’s Third Australian Store Will Be In Sydney’s Martin Place
With Tesla Motors starting its ramp up to the launch of the Model 3 electric car, the company needs more stores and showrooms around the world to deal with an influx of new and returning customers. The third store location for Australia has just been unveiled — and it’s in the heart of Sydney’s CBD.
The store, at 20 Martin Place, will be a two-level showroom that will house all of Tesla’s cars — both the Model S and likely the Model X by the time the store is opened, and eventually the Model 3. The store will open in the third quarter of this year.
This Month In Dashcams: Um, It’s A Red Light
Put them in charge of a couple of tons of metal, plastic and petrol, and people do some stupid things. Dash Cam Owners Australia has put together another compilation of Australians being morons on our roads — and this month, we have for you a delightful fusion of red lights, crashes, and driving on the wrong side of the road.
By the way, I’m loving the trend of reading out the number plates of idiots that can’t drive properly — keep it up, name and shame. As usual, there’s a bit of a warning for some strong language on this video.
Look, A Bugatti Chiron Out In The Wild
First the Geneva Motor Show, now the rarefied air of Monaco: the first couple of places that the new Bugatti Chiron has popped up have been entirely unsurprising. This particular car drew its fair share of onlookers as it was dropped off at a luxury showroom in the world’s most exclusive city.
Bugatti has decided to produce significantly fewer Chirons than its Veyron predecessor, which probably goes some way to explaining why this black-on-black example was sharing a car carrier with a Veyron Super Sport Vitesse — itself a quad-turbo 8.0-litre W16 miracle of engineering.
Watch Aston Martin’s Vulcan Supercar Tear Up Highlands Raceway In New Zealand
The extremely limited 24-car production run of the Aston Martin Vulcan meant that we probably wouldn’t ever see one in Australia. If you want to take a quick trip across the ditch, though, you can. There’s one that lives at Highlands Motorsport Park in New Zealand, though, and it’s pretty quick around the 4.1km track.
The man behind Highlands Motorsport Park is Tony Quinn, who made his name on the VIP Petfoods brand of fresh cat and dog food. He was lucky enough to secure the only Aston Martin Vulcan to be delivered to the Southern Hemisphere, and in the video above it’s unleashed upon his own personal race track.
Survey Finds Australian Drivers Basically Hate Every Other Driver On The Road
A survey, run by GPS and dashcam maker Navman on 15,561 of its Australian customers, is pretty bleak if you’re a regular user of Australian roads. Almost every single respondent was annoyed by other drivers not indicating, driving too slowly or being lost. And statistics say that you’re probably not a perfect driver, either.
Maybe we should all just take a moment to relax, or maybe we should stay off the roads completely. Let’s be honest, though: the Navman survey confirms everything we already knew — every driver on the road (that isn’t you) is doing something wrong.
Learn How A Car’s Differential Works
How does your car go around corners without screeching tyres? That’s the magic of the differential, a seemingly complex meshing of various gears and splines that delivers separate power to each driven wheel. This pre-World War II video produced by General Motors is actually an incredibly straightforward and informative look at what goes on underneath your car to make it move.
This video, narrated by one of the smoothest voices you’ll ever hear, quickly and simply demonstrates how a differential works. Instead of a single, live axle driving both wheels at identical speeds, a meshed differential lets each wheel move independently according to the friction it experiences from the road surface, all the while delivering constant power from the engine attached to the drive shaft.