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Chapter 1: What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
I'm Richard Porter. I'm Johnny Smith. And this is On the Other Side of Things, the Smith & Sniff spin-off in which we answer your questions. Here we are again. It's a Friday. We're answering listeners' questions. You probably knew that by now. It's a half-hour, second show. I'm just going to dive straight in because... That's what my cat just did.
It just dived straight onto me with very wet feet.
bedraggled is the word i'm looking for bedraggled i am going to start with a message from a listener calling themselves alex twin spark now alex has a bit of previous here because he is the listener who sent us the recent story of swanathan oh dickhead swan that terrorizes his parents house
yes alex says hello you pair of e10 rifles um i see what he's done there i have long suffered with an affliction that causes me to feel a primal urge to check the condition of cars around me and desperately wants to alert drivers to issues with their cars be it tires that are flat blown bulbs or parts hanging off
I'm desperately fighting the urge to warn them of things as nerdy as your indicator bulbs are now too discoloured and will fail an MOT, or turn your wipers off, it's not raining, you fuckwit.
Yeah, what's that about?
What's that about? Yeah, it drives me mad as well.
my doctor diagnosed this as autism but personally i think it's just that i'm inherently a better motorist than the average person i have actively chased cars down on a few occasions to warn them of a flat tire and my poor fiance has had to sit next to me as i've become filled with rage at the car in front of us having their wipers on unnecessarily fast and not being able to do anything about it oh that's yeah that's so not full speed wipers when it's just drizzle i know
She also has to deal with me getting progressively more annoyed as our Freelander 2 and its lack of intermittent wiper setting, meaning you have to rely on the dim-witted auto wipers to get the correct speed, and it's usually doing it wrong and wiping far too aggressively.
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Chapter 2: What are common car issues that drivers might overlook?
two settings two intermittent settings as well a slower and a faster intermittent and then on and fast so I forgive it because they are usually just where I go but yeah it's one of the things I used to like about like older Jags with auto wipers had intermittent I think it still had variable intermittent yeah as well And that's just good. Anyway, sorry.
Alex's question is, do you also feel the urge to alert someone to an issue on their car? And if so, what level do you get to and have to ignore because you know the other driver wouldn't understand anyway? What was the weirdest thing you actually did to alert another driver? And what was the reaction? Keep up the great work. Love the pod.
All the best from us and Swanathan, who is still a complete dick.
So one of them, yeah, got quite a few replies. So on the motorway, you can do the slow overtake of a car and you can try and get their attention. And this has happened to me with things like trailers that are dancing around all over the place, or most recently, a jockey wheel that has fallen down and is sparking. Oh, yeah. And they can't see the jockey wheel and they can't hear it, obviously.
Yeah. um and it's and you know that when they get to the other end it's going to be completely wanked so i just feel like i and i've tried to communicate with the person and sometimes it's met with instant aggression like they think you're starting on them for being yes annoying i don't know for driving too fast or slow or whatever it might be it's a british thing i feel like
The default setting is anger. And it escalates almost instantaneously, which I think is a real shame. So I... Yes. Yeah, that's happened to me a few times. But I have actually, yeah, I have gone out of my way before to follow somebody a bit further to just say, look, you really need to stop because I worry that your car... Is going to either crash or catch fire. That's bad.
I've seen a car with flames underneath it and I did drive. I did do a sort of police style pull up alongside them quite aggressively and risked myself and gone. Basically, I was doing that.
it's on fire fire and did the sort of fire thing with my hands and they didn't really they ignored me for the first two attempts because i think they thought it was road rage and they're like don't make eye contact it's easier that way so yeah yeah that's i generally don't
try and point out false people's cars anymore because of exactly what you've said that either they think you're a nutter and try and sort of get away from you or they get gnarky and think you're spoiling for a fight when you're only trying to be helpful yeah and but i suppose it depends because i sort of go also flat tires people running around on visibly soft tires oh gosh yeah
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Chapter 3: How do drivers react when alerted about car problems?
He says, hello, you pair of yang wangs. I recall growing up, being able to list full car brand ranges in my youth. They were logically defined and arranged. Take Audi. You want small, it's an A1 or A2. Want big, it's an A8. Chuck in some Qs, fine, but it made sense. Yeah. Even brands with named cars were consistent over time. You knew where you stood. That brings me to the BYD range.
So there's a Dolphin, a Dolphin Surf, and a Dolphin G. Then a Seal, a Seal U, a Seal 6, why the switch to a letter and number separately, an Atto 2 and Atto 3, Sea Lion, a Sea Lion 5, which is a hybrid, and a Sea Lion 7 that's electric, and a soon-to-be-released TI7. How is the consumer supposed to make any sense of that marine-based alphabetic spaghetti? Yeah.
Or does it only matter to the closeted cardboard? I questioned this as well because I thought that the BYD range was particularly inexplicable. And somebody, not from BYD, just somebody who'd already bothered to work this out, said that it's because... In China, BYD has lots of sort of brands and sub-brands.
And so I guess all the dolphins are part of like some dolphin range, and it makes more sense. They're sort of sold as that, and likewise the seals and things, and the Atos. The Ato is a sort of sub-brand or whatever. And over here, everything is lumped together under the BYD umbrella, which makes it sort of extra confusing. Right. But apparently in China, it's less confusing.
Although I take James's point that the fives and the sevens and the letters are a bit weird.
To me, Atto sounds like a sort of out-of-date home help robot prototype. Never quite worked when it was demonstrated. Yes. That's what it's giving me images of, anyway, where it just throws hot soup on the lap of an old person with like a blank expression on its face. LAUGHTER
It's like, what did I watch from, I don't know, like the tech show last year, I think. One of the big tech companies have brought this robot that can fold tea towels. It was doing such a shit slow job. Is this where we're up to? I'm sure that in robotics terms, it was very impressive, but it looked tarsal.
Nobody wants a tea towel folding robot, do they? That's not what they need robots for.
No, no, it's like, when will technology finally take care of this enormous pile of tea towels in my kitchen? I don't know. I think it's, I presume that folding a towel is something that's quite challenging for a robot. But I tell you for whom it is an easy task and that's human fucking being. So just leave us to do it. It's fine.
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