Dom Swanson

@russkrispies What about oop, or variations thereof (ooop, oooooop, oooOOOoop)?

Anyone that says ahhhh and ohhhh and aha on msg is generally bad vibes

@boycalledhorse Yeah nah

Nope x

@sniffpetrol There's definitely some industrial experimentation happening in China that has potential to shake up the industry. It'll be interesting to see which ideas migrate over to European OEMs

@sniffpetrol Colleague of mine went on a sneaky tour recently around a leading Chinese OEM, where they found that they don't torque bolts as they go, they wait til the car is built and torque them all in one station. I wouldn't like to work under a car where the subframe is fingertight...

Strangest spot of Easter Monday; a camo-wrapped test car in traffic, heading west near Cardiff. I think it was one of these, an Xpeng X9. A Smith and Sniff listener also spotted one near Chieveley. Chinese car makers clearly optimising bank holiday performance in the M4 corridor.

@boycalledhorse Melt

I'm sorry but £9.25 for a pint of Madri in Birmingham arena can fuck off

“I have two versions of outlook and neither of them are working” is actually a generational NASA quote now. Not quite One Small Step but every generation lives in a different world

Imagine being prompted to sign in with Authenticator from here

BREAKING: Donald Trump expected to name Saul Goodman as new Attorney General

@ATwinspark The scale of it is weird. Freelander was the entry level, small SUV. Now it's the size of a disco 4, 3-row 7 seater. Wish they'd sort their product strategy out.

Yeah that’s fully a Freelander, if you don’t put the badge on that that’s so obviously a Freelander you’d see it in a heartbeat. Not a perfect design but I think that’s honestly a pretty good job of it

@adrianfclarke He may get chance yet to implement some of his designs...

I don’t know Ian Callum. I was way below his pay grade and anyway at the time the Jaguar and Land Rover studios were still separate. However it’s clear on the run up to launch of the Type 00 he’s doing the media rounds bemoaning ‘what could have been’ - i.e. his next round of cars that were cancelled, and doing a bit of history rewriting. I saw all those proposals and it was all more of the same - there was nothing new (if you Google you can find images of the cancelled EV XJ). There was only one ‘new’ model proposal that was truly, truly stunning - and that never stood a chance. Say what you will about the Callum Jaguars (personally I think the X351 XJ of 2010 was incredible) but the bottom line is those cars were not selling. In their best of sales, 2018 Jaguar sold about 180k cars. That year BMW sold over 2 million.

Pour one out for Chuck Norris, I loved his performance as both Walker and Texas Ranger. He was an actor with incredible range. I bet he's currently battering anybody that looks at him the wrong way in heaven.

@AutoExpress Wonder what this means for all the money they've invested in Crewe. Tons of prep for electrification under their Beyond100 scheme. Slightly awkward.

Bentley has killed off a number of future EV models due to lack of demand...>> buff.ly/NcXOHA0

In 2000 years, after culture’s long slowdown, when the pre-AI-slop era gets mythologized as the last “real” golden age, people will be quoting Top Gear the way we quote the Romans today.

@russkrispies @EtihadHelp Uhh you should probably not go, did you see the news

There may have been a few miscalculations on The Lobster’s part.

The Slug & Lettuce.

Bet it'd annoy the design boffs at JLR but can't help thinking that with the new Jag being built at Solihull, it's a bit of a spiritual successor to the Rover SD1...

@CIOJoy @sniffpetrol Nowadays we run loggers which would give tons of vehicle data, easily. No idea if that's what they used when they were developing the disco. Part of that process is working out an airbag calibration tbf, so also depends what level of maturity those test vehicles are at.

@KxtchenBxtch @sniffpetrol Surely you wouldn’t need actual airbags for testing. You just need to know the crash sensor data, no?

This video is doing the rounds on Insta, billed as showing durability testing for the Discovery 3. [Insert predictable reliability joke here.] But I think some of it is actually testing to make sure the airbags don't go off when they shouldn't. Can any car engineers confirm?

@sniffpetrol Looking forward to seeing the Ps5 release. Hell of a car. Dwarfed my Alfa.

@sniffpetrol I think if we were doing this kind of testing, we'd run with the airbags off for egress and trust the cage & helmet to keep us safe. For the PS5, we had a test schedule of 200 kerb strikes - for each side of the car. We'd have got nowhere if the airbags were going off constantly