If the case of car dealer Zwartepoort against website Miljoenhuizen.nl has been in the news before, it can only have been as the sort of easily mocked example of how some folks start lawsuits over really anything and everything, no matter how trivial and unwinnable their cases are. But now Zwartepoorte have gone and won theirs. When you searched Google for the company name, you would get amongst others a result from Miljoenhuizen.nl seemingly explaining the car dealer had gone bankrupt. You know the type:

Full name: Zwartepoorte. Specialty: BMW … This company has gone bankrupt.

These abstracts are machine generated. Google takes disparate phrases from a website and combines them into an abstract. Miljoenhuizen.nl obviously feels that the wrong people have been sued. Miljoenhuizen.nl told De Telegraaf (Dutch): “If the search result were to imply or insinuate that Zwartepoorte has gone bust, it would be Google’s responsibility, not ours.” I would take that a step further and say that nobody should have been sued in the first place.

It will be interesting to see what reasoning judge Sj. A. Rullman will come up with to explain her judgment. Meanwhile, I am waiting with trepidation to be sued by BMW car dealers, as I have my own story of the power of Google to tell. The last few weeks of December I got a constant stream of phone calls from people wishing to buy a nice shiny Beamer. My initials are B.M.W., and as it turns out I used to be the first link people would find when they googled for “BMW Amsterdam,” displayed prominently as part of Google Business with a map and a phone number. It got so bad that I stopped answering the phone, and started the message on my machine with the statement that “I am not a BMW dealer.” I must has cost some poor sod a lot of lost business that way.

Update: fixed type “Miljoenenhuizen.nl” to “Miljoenhuizen.nl.” Thanks, Nico.

Link: Iusmentis (Dutch). Photo by Gyver Chang, some rights reserved.

If it’s up to doctoral student Laurenţiu Encică, cars of the future will zoom by on electro-magnetic suspension. This system shall replace the combination of shock absorbers and springs used in today’s cars, which is cheap, but not optimal.

Encică’s reseach focused on using a combination of permanent magnets and electro-magnetic coils. The permanent magnets provide passive suspension, much like the good old mechanical suspension system. The electro-magnetic coils add an active component to the mix, allowing the system to respond to changing road conditions much faster than current systems.

Don’t expect Encică’s electro-magnetic suspension to be under your car any time soon, though. Measuring about 20 by 80 centimeters, the prototype he built is still a bit too bulky to fit under an average car and further research will be neccessary to make the design smaller and less energy consuming. Encică expects it will take another five to ten years for his system to hit the road.

(Link: TUE, Photo:Quasimondo)

A male Royal Python, a popular pet, travelled more than 3,000 kilometre in its owner’s car, hidden underneath the mudguard after having escaped from the house half a year ago. After Raymond Oosterbroek from Deventer had traded in his car, car salesman Marten van Kastel of Tonny Keijzers’ in Apeldoorn went to take photos of the Volvo S40 for their website. That’s when he discovered the snake. “At first I saw something brown, then noticed that it was a snake’s head, then suddenly I saw it move. It gave me quite a scare,” he told Telegraaf.

The python escaped half a year ago with its female mate. The female got no further than the bread basket, the male was luckier, at first. The stay underneath the car emaciated it fairly. The people from the car shop managed to drive it into a barrel, and from there into the arms of its owner.

Photo: a Royal Python by j4yx0r, some rights reserved.

You’ve seen it many times before, the dirty car or truck with ‘wash me’ written on it with someone’s finger. This time, the roles are reversed. Inspired by the trend of reverse graffiti, Pascal Boogaert of Pascal concept & copy thought up an outdoor campaign for Jordan car wash in Haarlem. Here we are plugging them too because their campaign is cool. Using a template, a sponge and probably some car shampoo, the campaign was clearly smeared onto cars, leaving clean messages about the car wash.

(Link and photo: molblog.nl)

An insurance company in Dordrecht offers an emergency help service that caters to people with high vocational education, university level education and middle and upper management personnel. The company National Academic claims it can offer prices that are lower than that of the competition, ANWB (the Dutch automobile association) and Route Mobiel.

Although the car insurance has been around for two years, the emergency help can now be offered separately from the car insurance, which is why it’s in the news. The prices are lower because apparently the target group “is more careful with their things and has regular maintenance done more often.” They are also not clear on who falls under middle and upper management, which gets sorted on a request form. If someone lies about this fact, they will served but told to look elsewhere next time.

And yet this year if I remember correctly, giving women lower car insurance rates because they have less accidents was ruled sex discrimination. Just so you know. I can imagine one good reason why the not so highly educated take care of their stuff better: money, and not intelligence.

On Friday, 16 November a group of 36 blind and sight-impaired will test drive cars at the racing circuit in Assen. Under the supervision of driving school instructors, the blind will learn all about driving cars. “Some people became blind later in life and want to have a go at driving a car. Other people believe it is a chance to fulfil a dream of having control over a car and get a feel for driving,” according to a spokesperson.

On the world famous car show Top Gear, a man called Billy Baxter, a British soldier who lost his sight after contracting a rare disease in Bosnia, sent a letter to the show and said he could drive round the track faster than this one guy with sight who wasn’t very good at it.

(Link: rtl.nl)