For someone that grew up in the era of Cortina GT’s, Pirana louvres and glitter paint, the technological advances in the motor industry are becoming hard to keep up with.

Gone are the days when we got excited by electric windows, fuel injection and speed control.

I have seen various TV ads showing vehicles equipped with 4G wireless connectivity. Thinking that this is for the youth to connect to YouTube while driving and how dangerous this could be, I decided to do get myself up to speed on Wi-Fi in motor vehicles.

4G connectivity allows cars to act as Wi-Fi hotspots that can connect with up to seven devices at a time. They are, literally, their own rolling mobile devices. General Motors have more than 2 million 4G-equipped vehicles on the road in Europe, Asia and North America. By 2020, they expect more than 75 percent of our global volume to be actively connected.

Connectivity gets more exciting when vehicles are connected with other vehicles and even the highways they travel. V2V, or vehicle-to-vehicle communication, allows cars to communicate with each other over a dedicated Wi-Fi band and share information about vehicle speed, direction of travel, traffic flow, as well as road and weather conditions.

If a car makes a sudden stop or is in danger of colliding with another vehicle, every car around it will know this within a fraction of a second. V2V can detect vehicles that are around corners, over hills or otherwise hidden from a driver’s view. Some systems will even take partial control of the brakes or steering to help a driver avoid a collision.

Worlds apart from sitting in your Cortina at the roadhouse listening to Springbok Radio top 20 on your Rally Radio and drinking a strawberry milkshake…

August 2017 Sales in a nutshell

We share the best used car sellers (only IDA dealers on the Signio platform)

The top 5 used passenger vehicle sales per manufacturer

VOLKSWAGEN
FORD
TOYOTA
BMW
NISSAN

The top three used commercial vehicle sales per manufacturer (bakkies)

RANGER 2.2TDCi XL P/U D/C
UTILITY 1.4 A/C P/U S/C
NP200 1.6 P/U S/C

Top 10 derivatives used car sales

FIGO 1.4 AMBIENTE
POLO 1.4 COMFORTLINE 5DR
POLO VIVO GP 1.4 TRENDLINE 5DR
POLO GP 1.2 TSI TRENDLINE (66KW)
POLO GP 1.2 TSI COMFORTLINE (66KW)
RANGER 2.2TDCi XL P/U D/C
POLO VIVO GP 1.4 CONCEPTLINE 5DR
UTILITY 1.4 A/C P/U S/C
NP200 1.6 P/U S/C
COROLLA QUEST 1.6

The average age of used vehicles sold in August was 3.95 years.