Festive Time Round the Corner
The automobile industry is gearing up for a flurry of new car launches, and this will continue until Deepavali, the Festival of Lights. We have already seen a couple of new cars being launched. Besides those, there are quite a few already lined up, with manufacturers blocking dates up to the end of October. Last month, Tata Motors unveiled its new brand identity: Tata.Cars and Tata.EV.
The saga of ethanol-blended fuel continues with more and more people complaining about the issues adversely affecting their cars. The most germinal among these is that more than 70 per cent of the cars plying on the road today are not even E10-compliant, and the petroleum ministry keeps talking about E30 and E85 flex fuel cars. What would happen to all the existing cars on the road?
The problem does not end here. Fuel contamination is a bigger problem, and this will continue to be so even if your car is E85-compliant. Once moisture finds its way into the storage tank of a petrol pump, 20 per cent of the fuel turns into water, and this causes the cars to stall instantaneously. This phenomenon damages the fuel pump and fuel injectors, which then need to be changed to get the car back on the road. During the recent heavy downpour, several petrol pumps had to be shut down, and thousands of litres of petrol had to be discarded, thus causing considerable loss to those petrol pump owners.
As has already been reiterated in these columns, the malaise of driving on the wrong side of the road needs to be eradicated once and for all. Today we see people drive down the wrong way as if it is their birthright. If one tries to reason with them, they tend to become belligerent and abusive, violent even. Needless to say, such miscreants cause accidents because, while trying to avoid a moron coming head-on towards you on the wrong side of the road, you are compelled to take evasive action, which has the potential to end up in a mishap.
EDITOR – ASPI BHATHENA
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