The car Bibles product review page, covering in-depth reviews of motoring accessories from pressure gauges and pumps to fuel economy devices, traffic light changers and much more.
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Welcome
This page is where I am collecting product reviews for all manner of motoring accessories from fuel economy devices to footpumps. The products are reviewed in date order and cover all aspects of motoring and motorcycling. If you have a motoring accessory you'd like me to review, contact me at the Email me page and we'll talk.
'Wearable' action / sports camcorders
There's a new breed of camcorder coming to the market - self-contained flash memory camcorders. Two of them tout their product as 'sports' or 'action' camcorders. The idea is simple enough - a compact, self-contained unit with a lens, CCD, microphone, memory card slot, some batteries and a set of rudimentary controls. I review the two contenders here.
GoPro Hero Digital Sports Camcorder
Tested January 2008 
Website: www.goprocamera.com
Billed as a waterproof digital camera for sport, the Digital Hero was launched at the SEMA show in Vegas last in 2007. It comes in three flavours - wrist camera, helmet camera and motorsports camera. The three units are actually all the same - the difference is in the mounting kits that they come with. The wrist camera comes with a velcro wrist strap. The helmet cam comes with various helmet mounting options and the motorsports cam comes with a bunch of stick-on mounts and a suction cup mount. What differentiates the GoPro from the ATC-2K is the form factor (it looks like a mini digital camera) and the fact that it comes in a shockproof, bombproof, waterproof housing. To test it, I went skiing with it, and then used the suction cup mount to video footage from my motorbike. You can see samples of the bike test later in the review.
Higher resolution, more fps. One of the things I noted about the ATC-2K below is that the sensor is a 320x240 sensor that upscales to 640x480 for the video. The GoPro runs a 512x384 panel at 30fps so you get about 50% more resolution and double the framerate. Because of this, a 2Gb SD card will hold about 55 minutes of video with the GoPro compared to over an hour with the ATC-2K.
Playback, menus and transferring the data. The GoPro comes with a hybrid connection cable with an ultra mini proprietary plug on one end and a USB, audio and video connector on the other end. Plug it in to a PC and it shows up as a removable disk drive full of AVI and JPG files. It's USB 1.0 so transferring the data takes a while. Plug it into an AV input on your TV and you get to see the results played back instantly. The on-screen menu is a little cumbersome, as with the ATC-2K below, but it does a reasonable job given the camera only has two buttons.
The buttons are located on the front and the top of the camera. The front one is on/off and mode selection. The top one is shutter and mode entry. So to flip through the menu options on the built-in LCD screen, click the button on the front. To select an option, click the button on the top and so on. The LCD is actually upside down, which is a bit odd, but the camera was originally designed to be wrist-mounted, and once you understand that, it sort of makes sense. The various menu options allow you to output video at 50 or 60hz, NTSC or PAL, and to set up things like auto power off, remember previous shooting mode, and upside down mode. In upside down mode, you can mount the camera upside down and the video will be flipped so it's the right way up. Neat.
Mounting options and that case. There are a bazillion mounting options for the GoPro depending on the kit you buy. They also offer accessory kits for around $40 a piece which give you even more options. The Motorsports version I review here comes with a grab-bag of flat and curved mounting plates (for flat surfaces, or slightly curved surfaces like a helmet), thumbscrew connectors to join the various mounting arms together and a suction cup mount for window and car or bike bodywork. One thing to note. The supplied mounting plates come with double-sided 3M VHB tape. VHB means Very High Bond. Do not - I repeat do not stick one of these somewhere where you might regret it - like on to a painted surface. It will not come off without destroying the mounting surface. VHB tape is bloody strong and it's an inspired choice for a camera mount. For the trivia buff, VHB tape is 10 times stronger than rivets in a like-for-like bonding strength test. (Discovery channel clip about testing VHB tape). The clear plastic case that you fit the camera into looks quite well constructed too, with a lever-action clasp on top to hold the back plate shut, compressing a sealing o-ring to keep water and dirt out.
Stills, video and sound. The GoPro takes 3MP still photos - pretty reasonable ones - and it can be set to do single-shot, three-in-a-row, or time-lapse one shot every 5 seconds. Obviously it also shoots video with sound. There is a menu option on the camera to set the audio sensitivity of the microphone to high or low. In low mode, it's tuned to engine sounds. In high mode, it's less muffled and designed for less noisy environments. In my test, I forgot to set it to high mode when skiing, which made the sound very muffled. On the motorbike, in low mode, it picks up the sound of the engine beautifully. It's only marred by the fact that on my bike it also picked up a lot of electrical interference from the alternator or one of the spark plugs. It manifests itself as a constant buzzing on the soundtrack. Bummer. When the weather warms up, I'll try it again mounted with a little RF screen around the camera to try to isolate it from the electrical noise to see if I can get better results.
The video does suffer the same vertical 'wah wah' type effect as the ATC-2K below, but it's nowhere near as pronounced and it takes a good sized bump in the road to make it noticable. I think the extra framerate helps this out, plus the resulting video does give more of a sense of speed. This example shows some clips from my road test. The black thing on the left of the video is my GPS mount which was in the way.
Heed the battery warning! One of the slips of paper that comes with the GoPro, there's quite a strong recommendation that you don't use alkaline batteries in it. The current drain of the GoPro is a lot more than the ATC-2K below, because the CCD is larger, and in cold weather, alkaline batteries just don't cut it. I tested the GoPro with alkaline and the recommended Lithium batteries. On a 4°C (40°F) day in January, attached to my motorbike, the alkaline batteries died in 7 minutes. They went from 1.65v new, to 1.37v after 7 minutes. That's below the power threshold for the GoPro and it just shut down. Doing the same test with Lithium batteries revealed a voltage drop from 1.75v new to 1.66v after 50 minutes of filming. With the lithium batteries, 30 minutes of filming was done skiing in -3°C (28°F) temperatures. Okay so that's down there in terms of filming temperatures, but the GoPro is billed as a sports camcorder and it does lay claim to being useful for skiing and snowboarding. So my recommendation : Lithium batteries, or rechargeable NiMh (nickel metal hydride) batteries are what you want.
A couple of items missing from the manual. There are a couple of details missing from the instruction sheet which are worth knowing with the GoPro.
(1) Even if the camera is set to 'remember' the previous mode it was in, if you connect it to a PC via USB to pull the videos and photos off, the next time you turn the camera on it defaults to single image photo mode again. If you use this camera, you need to double-check the shooting mode after a USB connection.
(2) To connect via USB, plug the USB into the camera when it's turned on, then connect it to the PC. If you plug it in first and then turn it on, you'll get a generic device failure message and the camera won't be properly recognised.
These are minor irritations but nothing to cry about. Once you've come across these issues once, you tend to remember next time.
Conclusion : A worthy contender
In a like-for-like test, I'd have to go with the GoPro over the ATC-2K. I found it easier to use and a lot easier to line up when using a helmet mounting option. The video seems clearer, the sound is a little better and it takes 3MP stills too which is a bonus. The video still has distortion when used on a vibrating surface, like a motorbike, but I think that's an inherent issue with this type of device. Short of a vibration-isolating platform, or in-camera vibration cancelling, I'm not sure there's anything you can do about it. But compared to the ATC-2K, I found the effect much less pronounced in the GoPro.
ATC-2K / ATC2000 ActionCam
Tested October 2007 
Website: www.oregonscientific.com
Second up is the ATC-2K; a followon to the ATC1000 - also a 'wearable' sports camcorder. Unlike the GoPro, the ATC-2K has a tube form factor with the lens at the front and the batteries and connectors at the back, with the LCD and buttons on the top. To test it, I attached it to a friend's motorbike handlebars using the supplied mounting kit, and got him to shoot some video of me during a motorcycle trip in late 2007. You can see the video later in the review. Like the GoPro, the ATC-2K has a small amount of memory built-in, but it's so small you'll want the 2Gb SD card again. The camera comes with a rubber helmet strap, a quick-release bracket, a handlebar clamp, a USB cable and an A/V cable. The helmet strap allows a lot of wobble once the camera is mounted, because there's no permanent mount like there is with the GoPro. Plus the camera is quite hefty so once it's perched in it's quick release bracket, there's a lot of mass to wobble about and stress the rubber strap. The controls are pretty simple again - on/off and record/stop. The rear cap is a waterproof, o-ring sealed affair that you screw off to get at the batteries, SD card slot, USB and A/V connectors. The spec for this camera is video at 640x480 but the results look like they're 320x240 upscaled in the camera. An examination of the resulting video files shows they're running at 15 frames per second which is OK, but not stellar. The lower sized LCD panel and lower framerate do mean you can get more video on to a 2Gb card than the GoPro though.
Playback and connectivity. The easiest way to get the videos out of the ATC-2K is to attach it to a PC using the supplied USB cable. Once connected, it shows up as a removable disk drive and you can just copy the videos over to the PC and play them back. Unlike the GoPro, it doesn't seem as sensitive to the connection and power on/off order. There is an option to use an A/V cable to connect it to a TV for direct playback. This works reasonably well but the on-screen navigation is again a little cumbersome and basic. But then again, the camera only has three buttons on it so there's a limit to how much functionality you can achieve with those limits.
No viewfinder. As with the GoPro, there is no screen to preview what the camera is looking at. The real problem here is that there's not even a viewfinder to give you some idea. This leads to a certain amount of guesswork when mounting the camera because you're never entirely sure what it's looking at. For a motorbike or car, it's not so difficult - point it level and straight and you're pretty much set. For using it on a helmet though, the results are considerably harder to predict. I did shoot some skiing footage in January 2008 but after three attempts, each time I ended up shooting the sky or the tip of one of my skis because I just couldn't get the alignment right. So that's a definite drawback for the ATC-2K.
Recessed lens - hard to keep clean. In the ATC-2K, the lens is recessed quite noticably into the unit itself. When skiing, this recess filled with snow very quickly, but I didn't realise until I got home and played back an hour of fog. When using it on the motorbike, we got dead bugs stuck in the recess frequently and because of the design, it's bloody difficult to get them out and to clean the lens cover.
Can you shout that again? I have a real issue with the audio on the ATC-2K - it's almost none-existant. The example video here has a nice engine and wind sound to it, but when you take the ATC-2K in to a quiet environment, like skiing, or filming from inside a vehicle, the audio is imperceptible on playback. I tried videoing a narrated commute home one day, and all I got was the rattling panel in the front of my dashboard. My entire narration was there, but I had to crank the volume up to 11 to hear it, by which point, the rattling panel sound was like Concorde crashing into my house. Unlike the GoPro, there is no audio sensitivity option so it's loud, or nothing. On the plus side, the ATC-2K doesn't seem to be as sensitive to electrical interference noise, so my noisy alternator might not be a problem with this camera.
Video distortion. Finally, and perhaps most annoyingly, he ATC-2K has no vibration or shockproofing. When used on the motorbike which had high frequency vibration coming through the handlebars, the ATC-2K suffered from a terrible vertical 'wah wah' picture distortion. You can see it in the example video. The picture constantly stretches and squashes vertically, and it seems to lose framerate too. You'd never know it from the video, but we were doing well over 80mph on that road yet on the video, with the missing frames and picture distortion, it looks like we were out for a 30mph afternoon ride. The GoPro has the same issue but it's markedly less apparent. This is the sample ATC-2K video:
Better battery performance. One area the ATC-2K does win out over the GoPro is battery performance. Because the power requirements for the smaller LCD panel are less, it does better in cold weather shooting. In my test, with alkaline batteries, the ATC-2K got about 18 minutes of shooting to the GoPro's 7 minutes. The voltage drop was about the same: 1.65v down to 1.35v in 4°C (40°F) weather. Again, once replaced with lithium batteries, you'd probably run out of memory card space before battery life became an issue.
Conclusion - the not-so-action cam.
I've given this product two to three stars because if you use it for basic videography, it's not bad. However, if you use it for what it's advertised for - sports and action videography, it's not really up to snuff. The image distortion in motorsports is really irritating and the recessed lens design is just plain bad. The audio pickup is dodgy unless you're shouting or videoing something suitably noisy. I suspect these wrinkles will be ironed out in due course with later designs, but for now, I'd give this a miss.
Comparison
| GoPro Hero | ATC-2K | |
|---|---|---|
| Video resolution | 512x384 native 30fps native | 320x240 upscaled to 640x480 15fps with frame-doubling to 30fps |
| Form factor | Rectangular mini cam | Tubular 'bullet' |
| Memory card | Up to 2Gb SD card | Up to 2Gb SD card |
| Video in minutes | 56 mins / 2Gb | 70 mins / 2Gb |
| Waterproof | 30m / 100ft | 3m / 10ft |
| Shockproof? | Yes | Yes |
| Batteries | 2 x AAA | 2 x AA |
| Price when tested | US$139 / US$169 / US$179 depending on version | US$129 with free 2Gb SD card |
FFT Fuel Treatment
Tested July 17th 2007 to October 19th 2007 
Website: www.fftfuelsaver.com and futurefueltechnologies.com
With the ever-rising price of petrol, I've been getting a lot of email asking me to look into another of the miracle fuel additives that claims to increase your gas mileage. The basic claim from FFT is that adding 30ml (1oz) of their product to every 38 litres (10 gallons) of petrol will give you a 10-20% increase in fuel economy and a drop in CO2 and NOx emissions. I will be testing the mileage claims. The emission claims are a little curious given that the material safety data sheet (MSDS) for this product lists CO2 as one of the main byproducts of its combustion.
In order to do this test, I collected a year's worth of gas-mileage information for my Honda Element. I've been collating the results at greenhybrid.com which allows me to enter the number of gallons per fill-up vs. the recorded mileage on the odometer. I've been careful to use the same pump at the same gas station in order to eliminate differences in the sensitivity of the pumping and cutoff systems. Each fill-up has been to the point where the pump automatically shuts off. A fully annotated record of my gas mileage is available at the greenhybrid.com website by following this link: Honda Element gas mileage. By hovering over any of the [more] links on that page, you can see comments relating to that particular fill-up.
The product
The product comes in a dispensing bottle and looks like a medium-strong tea. It has a slight lemon smell to it. According to the MSDS, the main hazardous (read: useful) ingredients in FFT are as follows:
- t-butyl perbenzoate (t-BP) - An explosive oxidising agent. (t-butyl perbenzoate data sheet)
- Lupersol DDM-9 - Methyl ethyl ketone peroxide - an explosive oxidising agent that undergoes self-accelerating decomposition, exploding at 230°F. This one is sensitive to sunlight and is incompatible with natural and synthetic rubbers and chemical accelerators. At 200ppm this would appear to be the main component. (DDM-9 data sheet)
- d-limonene - a highly flammable and combustible peroxide compound. Also sensitive to light and can oxidise in air. Interestingly this is listed as being incompatible with other strong oxidising agents. It's what gives FFT the slight lemon smell. (d-limonene data sheet)
Essentially then, FFT Gasoline Additive would appear to be an oxidising agent or an oxygenating reagent. These are substances that, while not essentially combustible on their own, may, by yielding oxygen, cause, or contribute to, the combustion of another material. In other words, this stuff ought to make regular petrol burn better by adding oxygen to it during the combustion process.
Conclusion : don't waste your money
At the beginning of this test, the overall gas-mileage for my Element was 19.8mpg after 8,213 miles. You can see variations in the graph above based on weather and trip types but the mean average is normally just below that 20mpg line. That's a one-year cycle of everyday driving including road trips, short in-town commuting, and mountain driving during the ski season. The first tank with FFT is the first arrow on the above graph - you can see it dropped off from 18.9mpg to 16.4mpg instantly. The test ended at the second arrow on the above graph, at which point you can see the consistency of readings appears to come back.
After a three month road test, in all driving conditions, following the instructions to the letter on the FFT product packaging, my fuel economy dropped from an average 19.8mpg down to 19.0mpg. The previously reasonably steady mpg readings went all over the map from very high to very low - all the consistency went away. That's a real car, in real everyday use, commuting to and from work in traffic, with road trips, shopping trips, one, two and four people in the car - essentially what you and I do everyday to our cars.
BrightCar mileage tracking software
Tested March 2007
Website: www.brightcar.com
Hot on the heels of GasDandy (below) I was sent a copy of BrightCar for review. This is another vehicle mileage tracker, but it has more complexity to it than GasDandy. BrightCar should be considered more of a car maintenance tracker than just a simple mileage tracker. The major difference between it and GasDandy is that BrightCar has an available online database of over 10,000 vehicle service plans. So how does it work?
Setup is pretty simple and only takes a few minutes. Once the software is installed it prompts you for your vehicle information, year first, then make, then model and options. An initial quirk I noticed straight away is that on first starting, BrightCar expands to full screen. On a 2560x1600 monitor that's quite a smack in the face especially as most of the intial screen is whitespace while you set up the first vehicle. But once you make your selection, it connects to the BrightCar servers and downloads a vehicle service plan specific to your car (you can check on their website first to make sure they have one) then you can resize the window however you like and it's persistent between sessions. The service plans that get downloads are quite, quite comprehensive. When you dig into the details, it gives you everything from the timing of simple oil changes right down to when the track-rod ends need greasing and the window tracks need a lube. Because of this, BrightCar is not so much for the casual mileage tracker - more for the driver who's serious about keeping their car in tip top condition.
The interface is nice to use with the main 'home' page showing a user-definable graph as well as any services due. Entering petrol stops is fairly straightforward and you can put all the usual stuff in there - odometer reading or trip-meter reading, petrol station, price etc. On the home page there's a print function that prints out some basic info on your vehicle. A separate print icon prints out the mileage graph.
One of the plus points about BrightCar is that they seem to be very receptive of customer feedback. The initial version I was sent for review had a couple of ridiculous bugs in it and a particularly annoying mpg graph that stuffed everything close together and overlaid the whole graph with mpg figures. It made it near impossible to read. I mentioned this to their customer support and in the service release that came out a couple of weeks later, they'd modified the mpg graph to have a more laid-back appeal to it, with the mpg figures appearing for any given point when you hover the mouse over it. In this day and age of get-it-done-now-and-bugger-the-customer, it's nice to come across a company who still takes the time to listen to its customers.
Summary
BrightCar or GasDandy? I'd say if you're a casual driver who'd like to keep track of basic cost and gas mileage, either would do - probably GasDandy simply on price though - BrightCar is $39.95. That being said, if you're serious about tracking full vehicle maintenance and all the other miscellaneous expenses to boot, then BrightCar might be more the piece of software for you. It costs more but then it's more feature-rich. QED. Fortunately, both offer trials from their site so you can try before you buy. One last thing with BrightCar - it worked perfectly at home on my DSL connection but at my office where we have firewalls and proxy servers, it had a bit of a panic attack trying to reach the BrightCar servers. I think it was our proxy server that was messing it up.
Special offer
If you're interested in a license for BrightCar, carbibles.com has negotiated a 20%-off deal. Click on the coupon on the right to get the deal. When you click through to their "buy now" page, you'll see the discount applied to the total cost.
GasDandy mileage tracking software
Tested February 2007
Website: www.gasdandy.com
If you've read my fuel & engine bible, you'll know I use an online mileage-tracking service from GreenHybrid.com. When I was looking around for a way to track my mileage, there were a few bits of software here and there but none of them quite did what I wanted. In February 2007 I discovered GasDandy. The idea is really simple: track your mileage and fuel costs and have the software generate small reports for you. The software is free to try (available from the GasDandy website) and the trial version allows 5 sets of data to be entered. The full piece of software is $14.95.
In use, GasDandy is pretty easy. You set it up with a couple of named data items - typically your car(s) and/or motorbike(s). Then, each time you start it, you can choose one of your vehicles and enter in some basic information from your most recent fill up. This includes how much the petrol cost you, the mileage (total odometer reading) and the number of gallons of petrol used. Note that there is a metric version available from the website too if you want to work in litres and kilometres. My only bone of contention here is that it insists you enter the total odometer reading. A lot of car nuts track their mileage using the trip meter. It would have been nice for GasDandy to allow total odometer or most recent trip meter reading. Because of that I took one star off my review rating.
Because GasDandy is tracking your mileage, you can enter in oil-change intervals and tyre rotation dates and it will remind you when its time to get an oil change or a tyre rotation, which is a neat feature. It also allows you to keep track of any mileage driven for business along with notes to remind yourself about the what, where and why of the business trips.
Finally, GasDandy allows you to print out basic reports and generate graphs. The graphing function is a nice touch as it shows the overall average mpg for your vehicle and colour-codes the graph nodes green or red depending on whether that tank was above or below average, respectively.
Summary.
GasDandy is a simple (ie. not bloated), inexpensive piece of software that will help you keep track of mileage. The interface could do with some eye-candy - it has a distinct 90's feel to it - and like I said, it would be nice to be able to put trip-mileage as well as total mileage, but apart from that, I like it. The screenshots below show the main mileage interface, and the graph screen.
Signal Sorcerer traffic light changer
Tested September 2006 
Website: www.signalsorcerer.com
There are plenty of devices and gizmos out there designed to entice the impatient driver with the allure of forcing traffic lights to be green in their favour. They fall into two categories. In the first and illegal category, there are devices like infra red blasters and emergency vehicle transmitters. These both work on the same principle - either an infrared or a radio signal is sent out from the vehicle. Traffic lights at the next junction will receive the signal and force the current cycle to drop into emergency mode where all the lights are changed to red except for those for the approaching vehicle. System designers assume these vehicles to be emergency vehicles, and facilitating their progress by stopping all traffic at a junction is A Good Thing. But not all devices are on emergency vehicles; they've started to find their way into the consumer world. They're expensive, they're illegal and expect to go to jail if you're caught with one.
Fortunately for all of us, the Signal Sorcerer falls into the second, legal category of traffic-light changers. To understand how the Signal Sorcerer works, you need to understand how traffic lights work. Generally speaking, they are either controlled from a central control centre, or more often, local control boxes (the little grey box at every junction). Depending on the time of day, the lights will operate in a fixed pattern designed to allow the maximum flow of traffic. For the less-used paths through the junction, inductive loops are buried in the road. These are loops with a weak electric current in them which generate a magnetic field. When a car passes over them, the field is disturbed and the traffic lights "know" a vehicle is now waiting in that lane. Typically, this is a left-turn lane, or if you're in England, a right-turn lane. When the traffic lights detect the presence of a vehicle, the cycle changes to allow a green light for that lane, thus allowing you, the hapless driver, to turn across the junction. The principle is sound, and it works really well. Sort of. To paraphrase George Orwell, "All vehicles are created equal but some are more equal than others". You see the problem is that inductive loops work exceptionally well when hulking great chunks of steel drive over them. Like cars built in the 80's, trucks, buses and so on. Even today, the buzzing, noisy lump of pollution in the front of a car (the engine) has enough steel in it for these inductive loops to work. The problem is motorbikes and ultra-modern sports cars, and to some extent, newer sedans. There's a lot of aluminium in these things now and less and less steel. This is especially true on motorbikes - essentially a collection of plastic, carbon fibre and aluminium. This presents a problem. The traffic light's inductive loop often doesn't pick up motorbikes. I ride a motorbike, I know. There are some junctions around where I live that never detect my bike. I have to sit there like an idiot staring at a red light waiting for a car to come along behind me and trip the cycle of lights. Worse, if it's late and there is no other traffic around, I have to shoot a red light, or do a bizarre series of right turns and u-turns to get where I want to be. It's bloody ridiculous, and anyone who rides a motorbike will bear me out on these experiences.
So it was with keen interest that I received a Signal Sorcerer for review. Their website is flashy and has tantalising claims about all your greenlight dreams coming true for $20. I read up on the device and the theory seemed sound enough so I decided to give it a go. Basically, the Signal Sorcerer is a really strong magnet housed in a weatherproof plastic case. The idea is simple. If you attach it to the bottom of your vehicle - in my case my motorbike - and drive over an inductive loop, the strong magnetic field is enough to disrupt the inductive loop into registering your presence. Sort of like Darth Vader and the old "sensing Luke" trick, only with magnets. The idea, then, is that it gives you the presence that your bike is missing, and so rather than sitting there waiting at the endless red light, you'll trip the system and a green light will be forthcoming in due course. And on you go.
The packaging is pretty simple - a plastic tube with a paper instructional insert, the magnet, two alcohol swabs and a zip-tie. The instructions are straightforward; clean the area where you're going to put the Signal Sorcerer with the alcohol swabs, peel off the protective backing from the sticky stuff and stick it in place. The zip-tie is there for added security to back up the sticky stuff. The idea is sound, and on most motorbikes I can imagine it works well. The ideal place to stick this thing is on a lower frame rail, as close to the road as possible. My problem was that my bike has skidplates on the bottom - aluminium ones at that. The magnet had nothing to stick to so I was reliant on the sticky stuff to hold it in place. No matter, I cleaned off the only place I had available - the bottom of the centrestand - peeled off the protective backing and stuck the unit in place. I secured it with two zip-ties just to be sure. You can see it nestled under my centrestand, stuck to the skidplate in this photo:
The road test
At the risk of boring you stupid, I'll mention one junction that's my favourite for staring at a red light. This will mean nothing to you unless you live in Salt Lake City and own a motorbike, but westbound Bangerter Highway turning left on to southbound Redwood road. I have gone through that left turn light on red more times than I can remember. Without fail, it never sees my bike. Seemed to me to be the best place to give the Signal Sorcerer its first test. I cruised to a stop at the front of the line with no traffic behind me and waited to s.....what the? A green arrow? Fumble the clutch, crunch, stall the bike. It was so unexpected I muffed it. One quick recovery later and I was off. Well that was an excellent start. I looped around and back and did it again. Again, a green arrow as the cycle came up. Wow! The rest of my roadtest was basically much the same. I found all the lights that never normally see me, and they all tripped their cycles and gave me a green light in due course. I was duly impressed. I did my road test more of less in the dead of night to ensure I was the only vehicle around. That way I wasn't ever in a situation where a car came up behind me and tripped the light sequence.
What Signal Sorcerer won't do. If you buy one of these expecting to cruise up to a red light and have it magically turn green, you'll be disappointed. That's not what it does. It merely ensures your vehicle is seen by the traffic light inductive loop, so that the signal order will be tripped to include your lane in the next cycle.
Where Signal Sorcerer won't work. Not all traffic lights use inductive loops to detect traffic. Some work on reflected light detection and others are simply run off timers with no way of influencing them. You'll know if you've found a timer-driven light. You'll be sitting at a totally empty junction in the dead of night for 5 minutes at a red light with no other traffic. The picture on the right shows a typical inductive loop setup - they're buried in the road surface and the cuts are filled in with hot tar giving a tell-tale rectangle or circle 'drawn' on the road on the runup to the lights.
Conclusion - it works.
If you've had problems with your motorbike or lightweight sports car, or even your sedan not being detected by inductive loop traffic light systems, this certainly seems to do the trick. Don't buy one expecting miracles, but go in with the knowledge that you'll stand a far better chance of being an 'equal' at the traffic light grand prix next time.
FFI mpg caps magic fuel pill
Tested September 2006
A work colleague of mine is a believer in the oil industry conspiracy theory, i.e. they keep anything from going to mass market that would dramatically save oil and give us, the consumers, better fuel economy in our vehicles. Since he was going to purchase a package of the magic FFI fuel pills, I volunteered to split the cost with him on the understanding that we could use his car as the guineau pig and that we could document the results for my site. I suspected I'd just wasted some lunch money but for the sake of adding more value to my site, I figured it was worth it.
My colleague's commuting car is a 1995 Volvo 850 Turbo, automatic with 257,000 miles on the clock. It has an on board average fuel consumption display in mpg that can be reset to zero to begin an averaging run. The engine was at operating temperature before each trial.
We first did a base line run between his house and our office - about 16 miles each way - with cruise control set to either 70mph or 75mph. The route has an HOV lane on the freeway so maintaining these speeds is easy for the sake of testing. The results are tabulated below.
| mpg | Distance in miles | Cruise setting in mph |
|---|---|---|
| 33.6 | 32 | 75 |
| 29.4 | 16 | 75 |
| 30.6 | 16 | 70 |
| 31.4 | 16 | 70 |
| 30.6 | 16 | 70 |
| 29.4 | 16 | 75 |
| 33.6 | 16 | 75 |
| 30.6 | 16 | 70 |
| 30.6 | 64 | 70 |
| 31.4 | 16 | 70 |
| Running avg mpg = 31.12 | ||
Next we did the same sequence of drives, but with the FFI fuel pill in the tank.
| mpg | Distance in miles | Cruise setting in mph |
|---|---|---|
| 28.3 | 32 | 75 |
| 29.0 | 32 | 70 |
| 30.5 | 32 | 70 |
| 27.3 | 32 | 75 |
| 29.0 | 64 | 75 |
| 29.0 | 32 | 70 |
| 27.3 | 16 | 70 |
| 28.0 | 16 | 70 |
| 29.4 | 32 | 75 |
| 28.6 | 32 | 75 |
| Running avg mpg = 28.64 | ||
If we group the results by speed, into 70mph and 75mph groupings, this is what it looks like.
- For the pre pill 70mph speed the average is 30.86mpg
- For the post pill 70mph speed the average is 28.76mpg
- For the pre pill 75mph speed the average is 31.5mpg
- For the post pill 75mph speed the average is 28.52mpg
Conclusion. On average, with the pill in the tank, we saw a drop in fuel economy by about 2mpg. There was no perceivable increase in acceleration or the ability to perform at-speed overtaking maneuvers. This pill is another scam. Don't bother with it.
The raging debate.
As well as a response from FFI (see below), my review has garnered comments from other people who've tried this product out. Out of the many emails I've had, this is one of the most interesting:
I just want to comment on the MPG Caps from Fuel Freedom International. I tested the caps for 5 months in 4 vehicles, 2 Camrys a 2002 & 2004, a Toyota Tundra 2005 truck & a 1973 VW Beetle. I saw a decrease in mpg in all vehicles and gave up after testing over 20,000 miles total. Some people claim that it works, but you cannot prove it by me. In addition, I gave out pills to others who found either no improvement or also lost mpg. I was a distributor for them but obviously I am no longer...I do not want to promote something that only works for a few.
Followup - calling their bluff?
A couple of weeks after posting my review, I was contacted by an FFI representative who didn't think I'd been fair by trying their product out in an older car. He suggested I re-performed the test at their expense in a newer vehicle. I offered up my (at the time) 2000 mile Honda Element and gave them an address to send the product to for testing. Thanks to a natty little 'count up' javascript, I can tell you that it's now been days since then and I've yet to see anything. The original order for the product for the original test took only three days to get here. Have I called their bluff?
TomTom Go 510 GPS Navigator
Tested August 2006
By 2006, GPS navigation devices have come a long way since their earliest incarnation, and I decided to research the available models. I settled on a TomTom Go 510 device, despite some of the published problems people have been having with it. More on those later though.
The TTG510 is the lower-spec version of the TTG910. In Europe, the model is known as the TTG710 simply because it comes with a different map set. Whereas the TTG910 has an 20Gb internal hard drive and can display pictures, play MP3s and speak the actual road names, the TTG510 is a base model without the frills that stores its maps on SD cards. The operation of the 510, 710 and 910 versions is identical in their user interface. In America, the TTG510 is supplied with a 1Gb SD card with all of America, Canada, and oddly, Guam on it. My test was during a business trip to Nebraska which was a good test for two reasons. Firstly, I'd never been to Nebraska before so had no idea of any locations. Secondly, in the summer, when I went, the temperature was a hot 35°C outside but more importantly, the humidity was at about 85%. Going between this environment and air-conditioned cars and buildings was a great test of the durability of the TTG unit and it didn't once suffer from humidity or condensation-related problems.
So what about the unit itself? Well it's a nifty little widescreen device with a touch-screen interface. It comes well-packed with a charger/docking station for your computer, a 12v adapter and suction cup mount for the car and a little carrying pouch. The pouch is nicely designed because it has a stiffened side where the screen goes to further protect the screen from sharp objects poking through the pouch itself. One design flaw of the TTG becomes apparent as soon as you use the pouch though - the position and design of the power switch is exactly where you'd hold the device to put it in and out of the pouch. Three times I've accidentally turned it on as I've put it away only to find it warm and with dead batteries next time I've come to use it. D'oh! For a $599 GPS navigator, you'd think they'd have done a better job!
The computer charger/docking station works just fine and if you buy one of these, I recommend using the included backup software. TomTom do not provide source maps for the TTG510 on a CD or DVD - the only place they exist is on the SD card. Because TomTom maps need to be activated on the device they're being used on, if you end up with a corrupted card or worse, you won't have any way to re-install the maps or activate them at the TomTom website. You've been warned.
In-use, the device is simplicity itself. It has a SiRFStar III GPS receiver in it which locks on quickly once it's done it once. For example once it's located you, if you turn the unit off and then turn it on again the next day near the same place, it locks on within about 20 seconds. If you fly somewhere else and then turn it on, it's last "known" set of satellite locations is wrong so it takes longer to relocate itself. The GPS receiver is pretty good and worked remarkably well indoors - previously a no-no for GPS receivers. Entering a destination is a breeze, either by giving it a street address, a point of interest (POI) or a street intersection. It calculates the route very quickly and you're ready to go. (You have the choice when planning the route of fastest, shortest distance, avoid motorways etc - plenty of options.) You can navigate through a traditional 2D map, but the 3D display is by far and away the best way to do it.
It gives a display which is far more intuitive to read because it resembles the road layout you can see through your windscreen. The LCD screen on the TTG510 is brighter than that of the older models and is covered with a glare-resistant coating which makes it totally useable in bright sunlight - something of a novelty for an LCD device. One point to note : the TomTom screen is also readable through polarised glasses - something I've had problems with on the Garmin units before.
As you drive, a user-selectable voice (in plenty of different languages and variations) tells you where to go. Some of the nomenclature takes a little while to get used to, for example "Ahead, turn left" doesn't mean "take the next left", but rather "be prepared to turn left somewhere up ahead". When you get to the actual turn, the instruction is simply "In 100 metres, turn left" followed by "Turn left". (It's worth noting that the TTG910 - the high-end version - has text-to-speech ability built-in so it will attempt to pronounce the name of the road too. For example "Turn left into Acacia Avenue".). Whilst en-route, the TTG will recalculate almost instantly if you take a wrong turn or miss a turn, and you also have the ability to tell it to avoid certain parts of the route entirely, for example if a road is undergoing construction.
The menu system of the TTG is really easy to use and has a nice up-to-date feel to it. There are two modes - basic and extremely verbose. In basic mode, a lot of the less well-used options are simply hidden away from you but when you activate the "show all options" option, you end up with screen after screen after screen of things to twiddle, tweak, poke and tune. Some seem a bit odd when you first look at them, but after using the device for a while, you'll begin to understand why there are so many options. One of the best ones is the ability to change the mapping colours. If you don't like the ones shipped as default, there is a choice of five or six alternatives, plus three or four alternative "night mode" mapping colours. The night mode is a neat feature in itself - the TTG510 has a light sensor on it and when it gets dark, the maps all switch to low-intensity, low-contrast maps so as not to blind you when driving at night. A neat touch.
The Point Of Interest (POI) capability is neat - basically shops, restaurants, cash machines etc all reside in the POI database. This is where the TTG loses a little of its shine because being a European company (Dutch, actually), the POI database for America is a little out-of-date. The major items are all there, but for example, the hotel we were driving to from the airport had its old name in the TTG POI database. You can download POIs from the internet from all manner of things from fishing spots and speed camera locations up to user-created databases of all the locations of a particular hotel chain. You can also input your own POI using the TTG510 either from where you are right now, or by browsing the map in 'offline' mode.
Something else which has been moaned about on various internet forums is the mapping database for America. A lot of people have complained that it's massively out of date. For new developments and roads, it might be. TomTom use the TeleAtlas database which is better at European mapping but in my tests I was using long-established routes and roads and it didn't miss a beat. (Garmin use the Navteq maps which are great in America but suffer the same mapping complaints in Europe as TeleAtlas do in America)
And so to the suction cup mount. Well what can I say that hasn't been said a thousand times on a thousand forums all over the internet. Actually, for the most part, I've not had a problem with it. My stock factory item holds my TTG510 well enough and has yet to fall off the windscreen or suffer the droop problem so many people have complained about. So from my experience, it's not so bad, but that's just me. To be safe, I've taken TomTom up on their current offer of free replacement mounts for those with the older mount in the box. The new one has a better ball-and-socket joint to attempt to counter the droop problem, and a little nubbin on the back to help prevent the rocking / power disconnection problem some people have reported. I'll not go into it in depth here, just simply give you a Google link to check out. Google search for 'TomTom 910 windshield mount'
So why did I give this little unit only 4 out of 5 stars. Well I took off 1 star for a combination of the following - the reported mount problems, the dated POI database, and the power button location and design. Apart from that, I love the thing. It got us everywhere we needed to be, on time and without getting lost, in a city I've never driven in before.
PressurePro TPMS
Tested August 2006 
I had a chance to get 'hands on' with the PressurePro system in August 2006. The system is composed of two parts - the sensors themselves and the in-vehicle reporting unit. The sensors retail for arouns $50 each and the reporting unit runs about $200 so for a regular passenger car you'd be looking at a $400 shell-out. PressurePro sell mainly to the trucking and RV markets right now, and the unit I had to test was, as you can see from the photos, an RV unit. PressurePro have struck deals with a couple of RV manufacturers who are equipping their vehicles with the PressurePro system and connecting it to the RV central display / monitoring device via RS232 connections.
The sensors themselves are quite large and weigh in at about 14 grams. If you were going to fit these to your vehicle, I'd recommend you get your wheels and tyres balanced afterwards just to be safe. With the system powered on, the display initially reads "No Sensor" for each position on the vehicle. In my test, the unit was an RV system and capable of monitoring 16 tyres. I set it up so the front two sensors were set as the front two wheels on the RV, and the rear two were set up as the trailing tyres on the towed vehicle. Using the up and down arrow keys, you select the appropriate position for the sensor you're going to install, and screw the sensor on to the valve stem. After about 4 seconds, the display changes from "No sensor" to a numerical display of the tyre pressure. That becomes the baseline pressure for that sensor. It will trip warning when the pressure drops 12.5% below the baseline, and again at 25% below the baseline. Setting up the sensors and the in-car unit was a snap and for the test, my vehicle was a rental car. As it happened, within 6 miles of leaving the rental counter, the PressurePro system beeped and the right-front LED started flashing on the display unit. It turns out the rubber in the valve stem had perished and was leaking and the sensor detected the drop in tyre pressure and alerted me, exactly as it should. Frankly it was a far better test than I'd been planning. My idea had been to drive around for a while, the stop and unscrew a sensor, thus giving it a zero reading. I did this anyway, and it took around 4 second from unscrewing the sensor to the in-car unit alerting me to a problem and flashing "00" on the display. That seems like a long time in a static test, but in reality, it's no time at all if you're driving.
The car version of the display unit looks similar to the RV version I had to test only it doesn't have the RV graphic on it, and the F/B button is missing. On the RV versions, that button can be used to temporarily disable the readings from either the front or back vehicle. For example if you were to unhitch the towed vehicle, you'd only want the unit to look for readings from the front vehicle. If you didn't, when you got more than a couple of metres away, all four readings from the towed vehicle would error with zero readings because they'd be out of range.
Speaking of 'out of range', the little aerial on the top of the display unit can be removed and replaced with a 35ft coax extension with another aerial at the far end. For particularly long RVs or trailers, this allows you to place the receiver antenna further back along the vehicle to ensure a strong signal from all sensors.
So what do I make of this system? Well from model year 2007 onwards, all SUV and truck class vehicles in America must have a tyre pressure alerting system. These systems must alert the driver when any tyre drops 25% below its target pressure. The systems can be as simple as a flashing "there's something wrong" light up to elaborate systems like the PressurePro which show the tyre in question and give you a pressure reading. So my take on it is this; if you're buying a new vehicle and it comes with one of these systems, you can probably pass. But if you've already got a vehicle and you want an aftermarket system, this seems as good as any. The nice thing is it requires no technical knowledge or electrical or bodywork modifications to fit. It ultimately comes down to two things : relative cost, and percieved safety. $400 for a system like this on a passenger vehicle might seem expensive compared to the cost of fitting out a $100,000 RV with the same system. But as Ford proved with the exploding tyres problem on their Explorer, your perceived safety will evaporate very quickly when a tyre blows out at speed. As a plus, because of the design of the PressurePro, it is 100% portable - you can take it from vehicle to vehicle so it could easily be a one-time expense that you can take with you as you go through your vehicles.
Is it worth $400 to you to fit a system like this before you get into trouble? Or do you want to take it in the bank account in the event of an accident? The PressurePro system, like all TPMS systems, is ultimately like car insurance. It's a pain in the arse to pay for it up front because you might never need it. But if you have an accident and don't have insurance, then $400 seems really cheap in comparison. If you're strict with yourself and check your pressures regularly, then you probably don't really need a TPMS system. But as with so many products, here they're catering for human frailty, because in reality, how many drivers (who aren't car nuts) ever check their tyre pressures?
Michelin Digital Tyre Pressure Gauge
Tested July 2006
This is part of Michelin's new line of automotive products which came out in 2006. Given that they've been in the business of selling tyres for ages, it seems like the question surrounding their new product line is "What took you so long?". This review goes hand-in-hand with the new digital tyre inflator below. At the time of writing, this new pressure gauge cost $19.99 from motoring parts stores. It comes in a vacuum-wrap plastic display box with a small window in it for people to 'check out' the display by pushing the button. My first piece of advice - get one from the back of the rack. The front one will likely have been hammered by ham-fisted patrons for weeks if not months before you get to it. The gauge itself is nicely built and quite weighty. It's made of what feels like billet aluminium with rubber inserts for grip. The inserts are a particularly sticky compound so if you put it down on the garage floor, it will come up covered in muck. It comes with an expanding neoprene pouch that contains the instructions, and an adapter for certain types of bicycle valve. The adapter is a small brass unit which has no place to store it in the pouch other than loose, and when you do, it can scratch the silver finish on the pressure gauge. The instructions are pretty simple and once you've used the unit once, you'll likely not need them again. It comes with three batteries pre-installed and has an error of +/- 1psi up to 50psi.
It's really easy to use. Click the button and the LCD display lights up blue with black digits, and the collar around the nozzle lights up a similar blue - a nice feature if you're in a dark corner. Click the button to cycle through three pressure units - PSI, Bar and kPa. Slot the nozzle on to your tyre valve for a couple of seconds, pull it off and take a reading. Simple. The nozzle itself has a snug collar in it so it's easy to locate on the valve stem, and helps prevent you from accidentally letting air out of your tyres whilst taking a measurement. After 90 seconds of inactivity, the unit shuts off. Apart from the lack of place to put the brass adapter and the super sticky rubber inserts, it's a nice gauge to use. I removed half a star from my rating for the lack of storage for the brass adapter and the over-sticky rubber inserts, and another half because it's nearly impossible to use this gauge on motorbike tyres due to its design. The shape of the handle is great for testing car tyres but the angle it needs to attach to the valve stem means it interferes with spokes or brake discs on motorbikes.
I tested it against the digital inflator, as well as an old stick-type pressure gauge and a quality analogue gauge which I have calibrated every 6 months. At 40psi, the stick gauge reads 39psi and Michelin's digital pressure gauge reads 40.5psi so its well within tolerance, and it matches the inflator tested below.
Michelin Digital Tyre Inflator
Tested July 2006 
This is also part of Michelin's new line of automotive products which came out in 2006. I tested this in conjunction with their new pressure gauge, above. At the time of writing, this inflator cost $29.99 from motoring parts stores. It comes in a medium quality cardboard box and will likely have been opened and looked over a few times before you get to it. It has a long power lead with a 12v adaptor on the end which stores neatly underneath the unit, and a good-quality rubber hose with a clip-on style valve adapter on the end of it. The hose wraps around the outside of the unit when not in use. Underneath there are recesses containing a couple of adapters for footballs and bicycle tyres. The instructions are a 4-page booklet. The instructions themselves take up about 2 line inches and are reproduced on a label on the bottom of the inflator. The rest of the booklet is consumed with (basically unnecessary) warnings and notices. The top of the unit has an on/off rocker switch at the bottom, and three buttons at the top surrounding a digital display. The top button has an 'R' on it. This is the reset button - hold it down for three seconds and it resets the device to zero. It doesn't mention this in the booklet and if you do this whilst the inflator is connected to your tyre, it will recalibrate the gauge to believe the current tyre pressure is zero. Be warned! The other two buttons are a '+' and '-'. In use, you plug the unit in to a 12v supply and the display lights up blue with black LCD figures. Press the 'R' button to cycle through the pressure units, same as the gauge reviewed above. Use the '+' and '-' buttons to set the desired pressure, starting at 30psi and working up, and once you're done, the display resets to zero. Attach the clip-on nozzle to your valve stem and the display reads your current tyre pressure. If its below the pressure you tapped in to the inflator, when you turn the inflator on, it will start pumping up the tyre until it reaches your desired pressure, then cut off. The first unit I had didn't cut off though - it must have been a dud because it just kept on going. The second unit worked just fine. Don't be alarmed if you're watching the display and it goes up to 1psi above your chosen pressure; once the pump cuts off, it will read correctly. I think the pulsing of the pump causes the reading to be too high whilst it's running. This doesn't seem to affect the cutoff feature though. The noise when the unit is inflating is pretty loud. I guess they're using an RS540 electric motor attached to a meaty one-way valve, and if you leave it on the floor, it will vibrate around and 'walk' off to the extend of the rubber hose if you let it.
Something weird happens with this unit though - both my test units had the same issue so I think it's a design 'feature'. Once it gets hot, the unit can over-read by as much as 10psi. This means that if you leave it to inflate something, it will underinflate it by up to 10psi. I noticed this first when I took the nozzle off the fourth test tyre and connected to nothing, it read 2psi. I reset the unit and it zero'd out and after a moment, went back up to 2psi. Then 5psi. I let it cool off for 5 minutes or so, and it read zero again. There is a warning in the booklet about letting it cool off for 10 minutes after any 'inflation activity' and I guess this is why. You need to be careful then - if you do all four tyres in one go, by the time you get to the last one, you could be off by as much as 10psi. For that reason I took half a star off my rating, with another half removed for the inability to deflate overpressurised tyres. You have to do that by hand then re-check the pressure. I finally took another half a star off for the initial dud unit. In this day and age, it ought to be possible to buy something like this that works first time.
I tested it against the digital pressure gauge, as well as an old stick-type pressure gauge and a quality analogue gauge which I have calibrated every 6 months. At 40psi, the stick gauge reads 39psi and Michelin's digital inflator reads 40.5psi so its well within tolerance, and it matches the pressure gauge tested above.
The Tornado Fuel Saver
Tested March 2006
The Tornado is in a class of device marketed through scare tactics and confusion. It is marketed under many names including Vortec Cyclone, Vortex, HiClone and Tornado.. With climbing gas prices, the manufacturers of such devices will attempt to lure you in with promises of better fuel economy, more power, less engine wear and so on and so forth. The Tornado comes in a pretty shabby cardboard box along with an instruction / installation sheet. The Tornado itself is made of fairly lightweight pressed steel or aluminium and has some sharp edges on it. Fitting it was pretty easy; unclip the cold-air intake, pop in the Tornado, clip it back together and away you go. The test vehicle was a completely stock 2001 Subaru Impreza RS. The vehicle regularly returns 25.9mpg on the freeway. I tested the Tornado on a trip to Vegas and back - a 900 mile round-trip, as well as week's worth of testing around town on the daily commute. I filled up the vehicle at the usual gas stops from the usual pumps. We do the Vegas trip a couple of times a year so I have a good set of data points for how the Subaru performs. I calculated our fuel efficiency based on reported mileage on the odometer vs. reported gallons in the tank (from the pumps) which is the same technique I use every time I do this. On the way down to Vegas, our gas mileage dropped to 22mpg and on the way back it was about 21.5mpg. The average for this trip was 21.75mpg, down from the usual 25.9mpg. Around town, the Subaru normally manages 21.9mpg. After a week's use with the Tornado, my average gas mileage was 21.8mpg - near enough the same.
Conclusion? On long motorway hauls, the Tornado absolutely does not help. In my test it actually made the gas mileage worse, which in the days of $3/gallon petrol is nothing to be laughed at. Around town it made a negligible difference. I'd say Don't was your money on this thing except I managed to flog mine on e-bay so evidently people are still buying them.
Note: I was so underwhelmed by the results that I didn't bother dyno testing the vehicle to see if the claims of improved power were true or not.