What to do – You are driving and hear a siren ?

This is one of the first of a series I hope to write covering some tips and tricks useful in general city traffic and driving  building in a flavour of road safety.

Situation: You hear a siren while driving a car/two wheeler. What should you do ? Click on the image below for a flowchart on how to go about this.

What to do when you hear a siren while driving

 

Key Do’s:

  • Switch off the music if playing in your vehicle and immediately determine the location of the siren.
  • Safely and quickly do what is necessary to enable speedy movement of the vehicle to its destination

Key Don’ts:

  • Block the vehicles progress
  • Chase after the vehicle after it has passed to utilize its pathway to make good time.

 

A Request:

Please provide your inputs / suggestions on similar issues / items to write about.

Please share this to your friends and lets do our bit to drive safely while fully aware of rules and regulations – hope we can be the change !

Vehicle Photos in Automotive Advertising

Mahindra Thar

It started as a one off thing but over time I have started noticing the embellishments that are done while preparing vehicles for photo shoots used for print ads and for the websites of the manufacturers selling vehicles in India. I know it’s the whole point of advertising to sell the product in their best possible light – but I feel these points should be known especially if you are in the market for a new vehicle.

  • Visuals of the cars on manufacturer websites usually are of the highest trim variant which comes with body colored bumpers, door handles, exterior body colored mirrors, alloys and in some cases wider tires.(All Manufacturers)(Best Example – even the Maruti 800 on its website is shown with Alloys. The Nano however does show wheel covers in most photos with some even without the wheel covers with just wheel caps)
  • Sometimes even the top end trim may not come with alloys – but still all photos will be with Alloys! ( Eg. Tata Grande)
  • In a lot of cases the photos are shot with wider than stock tires and with a much lower aspect ratio.(Tata Nano/ Tata CS).
  • Mudflaps are usually omitted. Especially the el-cheapo ones given for free by the dealers.(Most Marutis and Hyundais)
  • Dark tints are there on all windows including the front window- usually so dark that they could never be street legal. (Every single manufacturer does this)
  • Body Kits are usually added to boring models.(Toyota Etios Liva)
  • Boring/ugly rear ends are usually not shown – except for the 360 degree views where they have no choice.(Swift D’Zire, Toyota Etios)
  • Interiors are usually again shown of the top end trim level with steering mounted controls, tachometer, climate control(if present), music system and premium seating material. The lower trim levels without music system , speakers, parcel tray, floor mats, boot mats etc are never shown. (All Manufacturers)
  • Vehicle colors indicated and the actual color of the vehicle may have next to nothing to do with each other. Only colors like white, black and silver may look similar in real life.

Photoshop:

  • Colors are usually bumped up in contrast/saturation to pop off the page.(All Manufacturers)
  • Wheel are blurred to indicate it is in motion. (Maruti Swift usually looks like it is going to crash into something. Usually the rear wheels are not moving.)
  • The Mahindra Thar in the photo used as the cover for this post – looks absolutely pasted in ! Also note the bull bar,headlight grill,fog lamp,insect grill, alloys ,tint and the lack of driver :-).  Oh and by the way the front right tire is just a bit smaller than the left.  The weird lighting under the vehicle is very suspicious  as well.

Open Challenge:

  • List the manufacturer websites  where entry and mid trim variant photos are shown in the comments below.

2009 Vehicle Color Popularity (India & Global) from DuPont

Dupont has published their annual studies of vehicle color popularity data for 2009. Am really happy to see that for the second year in a row India has warranted its own data collection and analysis. Till 2007 India was not considered separately and the closest was Asia which had data from Japan ! Shows India has reached a stage where the data coming from it is meaningful on a global scale.

India 2008-2009 Vehicle Color Popularity
India 2008-2009 Vehicle Color Popularity

For India as indicated in the graphy above Silver still is the most popular color followed by white, red and blue. Last year White was the most popular closely followed by silver. Other colors constituted less than 6% each. Unfortunately DuPont has not released the breakup by other colors this time around.

On the global scenario silver is still the most popular color followed by black, white, gray and blue. Below is the trend of color popularity for the past 10 years.

Global Colors Popularity 2000- 2009
Global Colors Popularity 2000- 2009

The full DuPont report is here.