"Self driving cars are coming" "Self driving cars might not be coming" "Self driving cars will solve everything" "Self driving cars will solve nothing" Those are pretty much the headlines from articles concerning autonomous driving. It depends on where you look; tech- and science publications seem to have more optimistic attitude towards them, while the more conservative and reserved automotive media has its concerns. But that's obvious. What does a self-proclaimed "car guy" think about this? Well, to me its more of a humorous approach to the whole idea. First of all, the word "autonomous" to me referrers to something that is capable of its own decisions, without any external input. The external input - in this case, human - will define the rules and boundaries, sure, but to me autonomous is something that is capable of performing the task it was programmed to perform - within the preset boundaries - withou...

There will be a full video on our YouTube channel about the biggest new car show in 2018 in Finland quite aptly named "Auto 2018". But where it will be concentrated more on the new models, their features and... Well... Sleep-deprived rant about fake exhaust tips, I thought I should say something about modern cars in general. This was our first "Auto" in our "journalistic career", and it really gave us a lot of perspective on our automotive future. We left Jyväskylä at 11am, after Jerry had slept for five hours and my alarm going after just two. We had no plan, no script, nothing... A bunch of GoPro's, my usual "Mauno Ahonen" equipment, and a cameraman waiting for us at the location. The only preconception we had going in was the normal Finnish car culture image one gets of being a keen driver in our beloved motherland; bunch of diesel Skoda's and Nissan Qashqai's alongside its distant Renault or Dacia relatives. But - as it turned...

Tony Soprano once said that reminiscing is the lowest form of conversation. And before recently driving my mom’s 1.6 petrol VW Bora, I’ve always kind of agreed with him. Particularly about the people who reminisce how things used to be so great “back in the day”. I’ve always viewed them as the conversational scum of the earth. Words like “nykyään” or “ennen” used to boil my blood. But for a tiny moment a Volkswagen Bora changed the way how I feel about reminiscing. Not enough to make me a “reminisceur” as such, but - for a while - enough to make me feel all warm and misty-eyed towards our recent past. At a quick glance, the Bora isn’t a car to have that kind of an effect in a normally stubborn mind of mine. Or any kind of effect in anyone for that matter. It’s a one point blah petrol blah connected to a manual bluhhh from two-thousand and blaahh. It has a rear fog-blah and the interior color matches the exterior color choice of none. The clutch, the gearshift and the brakes can ...

I’ve been to Oslo quite a lot in 2018 for uninteresting reasons. For a dedicated car-guy the whole place is... Well, let’s say that it’s unamusing car-wise. Fascinating and beautiful in a lot of ways, but not for cars. You arrive at the clean and “green” airport of Oslo-Gardemoen and straight away You’re greeted with three choices for transportation towards the Oslo city: You have the bus, the train and a different train. No cars in sight. I don’t really know why You’d take the bus other than You like travelling slowly and stopping every 30 seconds or that you simply enjoy the smell of rotten bananas. The train it is then. But which one, you ask? Well to be honest they’re both the same but the other one is a bit more expensive. So it’s up to you. I usually take the cheaper one. But before you go, take a gander at the infrastructure surrounding Gardemoen. Notice how there are normal multiple-lane airport roads, but no one seems to be driving on them. Notice how there are vast parking ga...

I assume many other car people have owned those two types of cars that I have; the ones that were boring or otherwise generic, and the ones that had something interesting about them. It could just be a life-changing story that happened with the car, or it could be a 10-year build with all your money and spare-time put into it. Or it could be that the car was simply interesting straight from the factory. I’ve actually owned only two of these generic cars; first one was a Mk4 Golf 1.4 that was an utter pile of crap. I tried bonding with it on a human level by 3-step polishing its sun-ripened red paint and giving it a good service, but it responded to me with a multitude of mechanical problems and pissed its coolant on the garage floor. I decided to sell it quite quickly and ended up never quite getting to know the car or bonding with it in any way. The other one was a pretty generic e39 530d Touring which was a completely different story. It had relatively good equipment, bu...