Luke Judge

gearstick & Handbrake Customn ford focus handbrake problems

At present I am using the car for commuting to and from the academic institutions where I teach and so I have not yet taken the car on a long drive, or on a circuit.

The clutch is reasonably light, far lighter then the Supra’s, and the gear ratios are more evenly spaced than those for the Supra (where 6th gear was a kind of overdrive top). So, when you are in Normal driving mode, a triangular sign on the lefthand side of the dials advises you when to change up or down and you are expected to go right up to 6th gear even in quite slow-moving traffic. In the Japanese catalogue, Honda praises this as a step forward in ‘shift timing’, but I kept changing up and down far too early, probably because I felt the car would begin to stall. As with the Civic, for a driver at all concerned with fuel economy, the CR-Z requires a specific kind of driving technique, or so Honda would have us believe.

Changing to Sport mode brings instant and dramatic changes. There is quite a lot of power and closest feeling is to the Mazda Roadster or the Mini Cooper. It does not quite have the wallop of the Supra, but you can use the full range of gears to advantage. I test drove a CR-Z with CVT, but I prefer the manual transmission car.

I have mentioned the Hill-Start Assist in another thread and this is part of the VSA, together with the auto-engine stop. So, when you want to stop, you can either change down and help the battery by engine braking, or select neutral and the car will glide to a halt–a silent halt, when the speed drops below a certain level. This is a rather eerie feeling at first. If you stop on a gradient and engage neutral, while still engaging the foot brake, the engine will stop. As soon as you fully depress the clutch and engage first gear, the engine will start and the car will remain stationary while you move your left foot from the brake pedal to the accelerator. I refused to believe this at first, so I took the car into the hills around Hiroshima and tested it. The Hill-Start Assist will not work, however, if you use the handbrake.

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Australian executives and entrepreneurs are back in the mood for growth, according to the latest business expectations survey from Dun & Bradstreet.

Expectations of sales, profits and capital investment all reached their highest point in over five years, with managers in the wholesale sector the most buoyant.

However, the familiar problems with a growing economy – namely wages growth and higher interest rates – are starting to weigh on the minds of executives, with 39% saying wage growth would negatively impact their business and 31% saying higher rates would prove something of a handbrake.

D&B chief executive Christine Christian says the results of the survey shows that business believes the recovery has finally taken hold.

“There had clearly been a great deal of caution shown by Australian executives in the second half of last year, largely due to the wind down of the Government stimulus package. However much of this caution seems to have dissipated over the past quarter,” she says.

“The return in confidence in the majority of key indices such as sales, profits and employment and an improvement in long-term indicators such as capital investment and inventory demonstrates that businesses believe that this improvement will not just be short-term”

As well as the sharp improvements in sales, profit and investment expectations, employment expectations also moved higher and inventory expectations also improved.

Executives are also clearly hoping to recover profits that may have been lost when they were forced to discount during the GFC. Just over 25% of companies expect to raise selling prices in the June quarter, with just 7% set to drop their prices.

However, Christian is quick to note there are some capacity constraints building in the economy, including slow business-to-business payments, ongoing problems with accessing credit (just under 20% of respondents said this was an issue) and wage growth, created in part by a lack of skilled labour.

Concerns about some of these issues may be reflected in companies’ cautious attitude to debt, with 26% of firms planning to cut business debt levels in the next three months, compared with 17% expecting to increase debt.

Read more on:

• Business confidence
• Dun & Bradstreet
• Finance
• Economy
• Financial services and insurance

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