Posts Tagged audi
Which Audi or Merc would I drive?
I have never made a secret of the fact that I am a BMW driver, and a big BMW fan. Yes, I know that these cars are usually driven by idiots. Funnily enough, I usually use my indicators, I only switch on my fog lights in the fog, and I don’t drive on the bumper of the car in front of me. That may be because I didn’t buy a BMW for the looks. I do like how they look, but what I love more is how they drive.
Being a die-hard BMW fan, I naturally despise anything from its rivals – Audi and Mercedes Benz. I just can’t stand all Audi’s looking exactly the same, and I feel a Merc is an old person’s car. However, being German they are technically very good. So if I had to drive either a new Audi or a new Merc, which would I choose?
Audi R8
OK this is pretty obvious. Everyone loves the R8. It is simply awesome, Tony Stark drives one and it has one of the best V8 engines in the business.
Audi RS5
This one hasn’t been released yet, but I would love to own one. It should have a much more aggressive RS8-esque front bumper, making it look distinctly different from the rest of the hum-drum Audi range. Plus it’ll be quattro, and have the same V8 engine as the R8. I guess it’s sacrilegious for a BMW fan to love a competitor to the M6, but this car will be brilliant.
Mercedes SLS
The modern interpretation of the classic gullwing will be very good. From the spy pics, it’s clear that the proportions of the old car have been maintained. In other words, it’s beautiful. There will be an AMG edition, so its go should match its show.
Mercedes AMG Black editions
These cars are bonkers. That’s why I love them. The insane bulging wheelarches shouts that it’s not an old person’s car. Actually, they shout that it’s a hooligan’s car. Which makes sense, as Jeremy Clarkson owns one.
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Google similar images - new 20% project from Google
Posted by Johann in Internet, Technology on April 22nd, 2009
Google similar images has just launched, and it looks pretty impressive. Basically, you can search for images using normal Google image search, but now you can click on “Similar images” below each result and see, well, similar images. How does this work? Google already has huge amounts of meta data associated with each image, and that combined with their Google image tag game means it can easilt figure out what is similar. Also, Google does some more processing on the images to find even more accurate matches.
So, a quick test. I searched for “Audi R8″, and got the following results:
I clicked on one of the results, and got this:
This very cheezy Google vid explains it a bit more:
Why I don’t like Audi
First of all, for the sake of this argument I’ll be ignoring the beautiful Audi R8, as well as the TT. This post is about how utterly boring Audi’s passenger cars are. It’s like all innovation at Audi has stopped, and they decided that all that’s needed to freshen up their cars are a couple of LED’s in the headlamps. Let me illustrate with a picture:
Audi front end design - design by copy and paste
As can be seen from the image above, all Audi’s look the same. From what I can tell from the images above, they have different LED’s, and on some models the headlights slant a little bit more towards the middle of the car. There’s also some slight variations in bumper designs. Also, while searching for images, I was looking for different coloured Audi’s but it seems that even their colours are boring - I could only find silver Audi’s using google image search.
You may say that it’s tradition, or “if it’s not broken don’t fix it”, or some other silly excuse. But why would you then buy an A8, if it looks exactly the same as an A3 and costs one third the price (or even less)? For that price you really want to have something at least slightly different from the budget model.
BMW knows how to keep with tradition, while still varying the design enough to make their cars unique.
BMW front end design - they all look different!
Now although some BMW designs over the past couple of years were fugly (especially the old 7 series), you will not confuse one with the other. Sure, all have kidney grills and lights and stuff, but they are different enough to be uniquely distinguishable. That’s why I will stick with my BMW - although Audi’s are brilliantly engineered cars, they are boring.
Also, being a motoring fanatic, I like to be able to recognise the exact model of a car with a single glance. With Audi that’s impossible, and it annoys the hell out of me.
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