That really is simply astonishing.

Good lord.

To many folk it sells on its attributes not on its branding

I genuinely think you’d be horrified at how small a minority of people in our western, consumerist culture actually buy based purely on the attributes of the product.

If more people did, we wouldn’t live in the consumer driven world we do.

one you cannot admit to as to do so devalues your entire trade. Once agiain yoiu confuse the attruibutes of siomething with its branding.

No, I don’t. I’ve done exactly the opposite.

Did you read my post?

That Aevon trailer is lush, where to buy in the UK?

Looks like a decent bit of kit doesn’t it. The website says if you’re outside Benelux, Germany or France you need to contact them directly. So I guess no dealers over here.

Love the Ute by the way. Really nice.

You are assuming, from a position of arrogance, that the firm with the best logo is the best firm.

No. We’re assuming, from paying attention to the world around us, that the most successful companies take branding seriously, and that there is a valid reason for this.

Emperors new clothes is being overused on this thread. The problem is those arguing against the effectiveness of branding are doing it from a position of ignorance. And the problem with pointing that out is that it’ll just get me called arrogant.

The branding industry isn’t knocking on the doors of big business, convincing them to buy snake oil. Big business realised all on its own that a striking, recognisable brand was a valuable asset, and an industry then developed around providing that service. Just as industries develop around providing any service, from window cleaning to beef burgers.

A brand, to put it simply, is the much like the clothes a company/organisation wears.

You can go to an interview in a suit, or you can go to an interview in a shell suit. One is appropriate, one isn’t. They may well both be practical, they both hide your modesty and provide shelter, but they both say something about you. Very different things. The practicalities behind the clothing, the skills you might have will be tainted when you dress inappropriately, and can be fortified if you dress appropriately. You could be the most perfect potential employee in the world, but you’re not going to get the job if you can’t convince anyone of that fact.

A branding specialist helps you dress your organisation appropriately. For better or worse, we live in a world where the visual is very important.

There’s more to a brand than simply the aesthetic, much more. But for the purposes of this thread I’ll leave it there.

I feel like I should quote this again:

You are assuming, from a position of arrogance, that the firm with the best logo is the best firm.

The real proof of the power of branding is actually that that’s definitely not the case. Nobody says the better branded company is better at its job than the rest. It’ll just likely be the most successful one. Which is, I admit, quite depressing.

Like I said earlier, find a successful brand that doesn’t have a developed and considered brand. You have five minutes. There’s some right crap out there on the market that people buy because it’s been branded well, and likewise they’ll no doubt be countless really good products that fail to sell because they’re branded badly.

Detractors of branding rarely realise how much they’re influenced by it. Rarely do they actually fully understand what branding is. They might not directly make purchases based on branding, they might not be directly affected by it. But the world around them certainly is. And in a world where big business is unfortunately king, and the pound in our pocket we spend every day is of far greater democratic value than the vote we get to cast every half a decade, branding plays a huge part in the lives of all who inhabit it.

Case study. A modern day mid-range Mercedes is no better, in the real world, in any way that matters, than a similarly specced Ford Mondeo. Yet people happily pay a premium for that three pointed star on the nose. That’s branding. That brand speaks to people, and it extracts money from their pocket. Whether good or bad (and I happen to think it sucks, to be honest) it is what it is. It happens every day, day in day out. Our society is built on such things.

Pointing that out isn’t arrogant. I don’t feel superior for knowing about branding, or saying it. It’s what I do for a living, yes, so I feel I should try to explain, to those who are doubting it, what I categorically know to be true.

However I don’t feel the need to justify it. I’ve never had to sell my services. People come to me for help, and they go away happy. If it was snake oil sales I couldn’t make a living out of it, as I’m a crap bullshitter.

stumpy – but if the logo was simply the name of the company then you would know 100% of the names. So having fancy logos reduces recognition

Press the big reset right now that instantly reduces every single company’s brand to plain black Arial, then watch as they immediately and expensively rush to rebuild the very carefully managed brand images they’ve maintained for years. They wouldn’t spend that money for no reason.

Branding works. You might not think it does, you might not like that it does. But it does. You might be rubbed up the wrong way by those you perceive as arty farty superior design types. You might liken it to snake oil sales. You yourself might be bizarrely enlightened enough to be completely impervious to branding.

But on the whole, branding works. On a multinational scale and a small local scale, for evil mega corps and friendly local charity.

A poor brand image can harm a company/organisation just as much as a good brand image can benefit it. Just try to find a successful company that doesn’t take its branding very seriously.

all it needs to do is tell you what the company is.

I suppose logos aren’t needed then, really. We could just write the names in black Arial and be done.

Blimey, that’s the first bike I’ve ever seen that looks better with mudguards.

Looks nice without them too, but something about the ‘old school lines’ just seem to lend itself to ‘guards.

Nice bike, you’ll enjoy it. And if you’re anything like me, you’ll probably ride it a lot more than you think you’re going to.

Did you look for them properly though? Or did you just have a ‘man-look’?

Bloody hell, I though we made that phrase up!

There also isn’t a word (that I’m aware of) for that thing where a man and a lady share a bath, and the man farts and the lady has to try and bite the bubbles.

Deserved quoting.

Too late for an edit.

Looking at the video page it seems the electric motor on the Aevon has already been done.

Like the look of that.

Agreed – good piece.

A potential alternative to having a dedicated cargo bike could be an Aevon trailer.

[/url]
Aevon-Orange-Hope 3[/url] by Aevon[/url], on Flickr

Wonder what would be the potential for fitting an electric assist hub to that rear wheel.

That way you’d have a helping hand when laden, and a normal bike for the rest of the time (except for the ‘throttle’ control on the handlebar).

Might be a bit awkward to lock up outside the shops I suppose, but then proper cargo bikes aren’t exactly tiny. And this would fold/come in half.

AEC Militant. Nice!

Nice idea with the brakes MTG.

Is the Scooby engine a common mod with the radiator where you have it?

I’ve seen those new build ones with the dummy spare on the nose and I’m not keen. Nice to see it’s possible to run a water cooled unit without the unsightly rad.

Body untampered enough to keep tax exemption?

I don’t find your posts enlightening, or life improving. We’re all different.

I do. Reading my posts enhances the lives of people like yourself. I look upon it as a valuable social service, to bring happiness and joy to people’s lives. Enlightenment, if you will.

Your life has been improved by my intervention. For this, I make no charge, for my reward is the satisfaction of knowing I have done Good.

Then by your own logic, destruction in the name of entertainment is as valid a use for old caravans as housing the homeless.

Elfinsafety
Well they could still be utilised to help keep homeless people drier and warmer in winter, coon’t they?

Everything could something. It seldom does.

You could dedicate the time you spend posting on here to something more productive and socially valuable, for instance. You don’t.

Where’s the radiator?

People starting threads, posts, emails or any conversation with “So.”

Opinions are subjective

Yep.

The brakes are on.

So does that mean if an air braked vehicle loses pressure the brakes default to on? Or is that just for the parking brake?

I’ve seen bus drivers get a warning bong from the dash and start revving the engine at lights to make it stop. I always assumed this was something to do with building up air pressure – is that so?

The tyre is strapped but what stops the axle rotating?

Best thread ever.

Self levelling Citroens have their sensors reading suspension compression. IIRC the rear sensor is on the anti roll bar, the front is taken from the “shocks”. But I could have got that wrong.

Look at the back of TD5 LR Discovery. Some of these have self levelling air on the back end. No idea if they go on the angle of the car or suspension compression, but being a LR of that age it’ll probably be fairly agricultural.

A friend of mine used to own a prototype Range Rover that was an old shape Classic used as a development mule for the technology that went into the middle shape (P38). That had air all round, and under the drivers seat were a cluster of Schrader valves that could be used to add or remove air manually.

No idea how it ended up on the market, that car. Interesting bit of kit.

Vehicle hire places are crap.

Burnt Tree were fun to deal with when we last hired a van. Merc Sprinter with digital fuel gauge like a battery indicator on a phone. Brimmed tank before returning as per contract, but couldn’t get last bar on fuel gauge to light up.

Returned van telling them this, was told we’d get hit for a fuel surcharge regardless, as it wasn’t full.

Took keys back off desk. Drove van back down road to petrol station, filled up to brim again with 24p of fuel. Gauge still reading 1 bar short.

Rang them and said I wasn’t starting engine and using any fuel again until they accepted it was full, and that fuel gauge must be faulty. If they didn’t believe me they needed to come and look for themselves. “Okay, bring it back, we believe you”.

Upon return they tried saying because we’d used the tail lift a lot we’d used more fuel, and as it wasn’t full we were going to get hit by surcharge. After failing to get them to understand that fuel usage was not the issue, I pulled out fuel receipt for 24p plus mobile phone photos – 1 of brimmed filler neck, two pulled back far enough to see van + registration plate.

Only then did they shut up.

Never dealt with such an unpleasant company. Horrible.

Towing a 1500kg caravan is hard work with a bike also.

Pah!

That’s interesting. It seems to suggest (anecdotally, and based on a sample of one TJ..!) that wihout a car, you measure the worth of one in distance covered, whereas as jack put it, with a car, we measure their value in time.

This is certainly the case for me. At my last job, when asked how far I lived from work, my answer changed from “twenty, twenty five minutes” when I used to drive in, to “6 miles hilly, 8 flat” when I started cycling in.

The actual distance was irrelevant to me when I had a diesel engine doing the work. It was all about how long I had to sit at the wheel. Under my own steam I got some context.

What I found more telling was always the astonishment of colleagues upon hearing I cycled 12 miles a day. They’d look at me as if I was some epic endurance athlete, simply because they had no concept of how far a mile actually is.

Something else that sticks in my mind was my dad a few years ago, who once decided to use his work’s car park during the weekend to save paying for parking in the town centre. His work was ‘about two minutes’ out of town.

He’d failed to realise that’s by car, along a 40mph dual carriageway. He got demoralised about 20 minutes into his ‘two minute’ walk when he realised he was still nowhere near town, so called a taxi to take him back to his car.

He’d clearly lost all concept of real distances, despite not getting a driving licence until he was approaching 40. It shows you how worryingly quickly we get used to driving everywhere, and then fail to see how life could ever be lived without doing so.

Mine usually walk to and from school, up to the shop and all that but the car is still needed for their lifestyle. Don’t think this has changed from when we were young, bands always needed some bloke with a van. In fact, having a van got you in a band when you were crap.

You’re problably right though, I say begrudgingly, our society is much more car orientated.

I think this is the biggest hurdle to overcome.Though not quite as bad as America, we’ve built our modern world around the presumption that we all have cars. Our friends, for instance, aren’t those who live across the street but those who live across town. Our jobs can be miles away and that’s fine, even though such a distance would have been unworkable a few years ago. Our shops aren’t down the road, they’re miles out of town and they have huge car parks.

It’s fairly easy to cope without a car, but you do have to adapt your lifestyle. It’s a mindset as much as anything, and unfortunately even with a positive desire to be car free, the current world makes it hard.

I live in a place without much public transport provision, which was okay when I moved here as I had a car so I never considered it. Now it seems less viable and I wish I was nearer town. I’ve painted myself into a bit of a corner without really realising. Another step to car dependency without being aware of it.

In the future I do hope cars become a bit less a part of all our lives, as now I’m without it I’m not sure they’re quite as liberating as I once thought they were.

People tend to say they’d die without a car, but it’s a bit of a self fulfilling prophecy. If everybody has cars, we all need cars. If we all got rid, things might make a bit more sense out there.

[bit of a tangent]

There’s an interesting book, called Traffic, which looks at modern transport issues. He makes a good point that we humans don’t think of distances in terms of length, but in terms of time.

Work therefore isn’t 17.6 miles away, it’s half an hours drive. The shop isn’t a mile away, it’s a minute’s drive away, or a ten minute walk away.

It’s apparently why making more roads doesn’t solve traffic issues the way we think it should. If they made the M1 between Sheffield and Leeds twice as wide, technically it should be half as busy. But because it would take less time to commute between the cities, more people would see it as a viable commute and expand their job/home searches accordingly. And before you know it, it’s as busy as it was before.

I don’t mean to sound all evangelistic about going car free by the way – I’m the biggest petrol head I know by some margin. That’s why I find it an interesting subject.

[/tangent]

How are fully loaded Yuba Mondos on the hills (or any similar SUB)? I love the idea of an SUB but in Sheffield…I dunno. Maybe just MTFU

I’m in Sheffield, and have been wondering the same to be honest. If I went Yuba (having recently gone car free) I’d probably get an electric assist hub on the front to help take the strain a bit.

Not seen a Yuba in Sheffield yet. Seen a Big Dummy once or twice, owned by the folks at JRA[/url] I believe. Might nip down and ask them how they get on. I have a few quid burning a hole in my pocket having sold the car and freed myself of all the ongoing costs.

Yuba Mundo FTW![/url]

Lol at Hathersage, yet I fully agree.

2.4 Advantages come up really quite mahoosive, if that makes a difference.

Edit: fine for front, as you’re planning on. Can be a bit of a squeeze in the back end (ooh-err).

My pet hate is that extra little brace between the top tube and the seat tube that seem to be sprouting up on more and more bikes these days.

The Shield

Recent season of House has been exceptional.

But still, The Shield.

I take it you’re talking about Wharny here CM?

All fairly gentle, flowing stuff at Dalby, nothing heavy duty on the red loop. Good ride, and surprisingly knackering.

Havn’t ridden Stainburn so can’t include that in my opinion, but I can agree with above suggestions: Wharny or Cut Gate. Neither are trail centres but (or rather ‘so’) the riding is great.

Either or really, not much in the journey times – parking spots for either are only 5 minutes drive from one another. Take an OS map if you do Cut Gate & Derwent, take a local if you do Wharncliffe.

The wharncliffe xc trails are sadly on the slide by the last account I heard, downhill stuff is still ace though

Was there this a.m. Still loads to go at, although granted mostly pretty hard to find for none regulars like the OP.

I tend to think with suspension that if you can have lots of travel without the drawbacks, you might as well have it. But I agree with what you’re saying here.

It’s a bit like the Range Rover. When you look at the original model, you’re left wondering what the hell happened during the last few decades.

He probably means that when an oil well is ’empty’ and is then left alone oil seeps in from nearby oil fields to ‘refill’ it.

If you have a milkshake, and I have a milkshake, and I have a straw…