The Volvo B7R that I was traveling in from Chandigarh to Delhi stalled very close to Delhi after a 300 minutes nonstop run. The driver started fiddling with the dash and out of curiosity I looked at the dash to see what he was doing and man was I surprised... I had a fair idea of the Volvo B7R dash as in my earlier travels, I used to check the speedo to see how fast these buses go (and trust me, these mean machines have a nice top speed)
This one had a lot more controls crammed into the Dash with a neat LCD screen in the center. A red triangle with "Stop" was flashing continuously and the LCD screen indicated "____ belt wear predicted". And as predicted, when the driver opened the engine boot, one of the belt's had slipped.
I believe the new buses have an integrated Engine management system (EMS2) which take data from several sensors on the engine with scope for diagnosis and fault tracing which was what I saw. Now, if only the semi literate Indian drivers knew how to read the these dash messages!
I also started noticing new multi-axle Volvos on the Mumbai roads...
...and road travel has just got a little better.
12:30 in the night, new city, you take a cab, tell a destination and start feeling the driver is taking a lot of time to reach the destination. You suspect that he is taking you around with an aim to fleece you. What do you do? iPhone to the rescue.
A route map, distance and average time taken with a rough idea of where you are. Its just what you want in such a situation.
I was planning a tour of Punjab to visit the Bharti Wal*Mart stores, an account which I now handle for my company, to get to know the ground realities. Was going to do a road trip - Chandigarh > Amritsar > Kapurthala > Jalandhar > Ludhiana > Patiala/Karnal > Ambala. Accordingly, was on my way to Amritsar last night. And at 7:30 PM as soon as I reached Phagwara bypass I saw a few people blocking the highway and setting a few tires on fire on the road to block the traffic. What I thought to be a small protest on the road is now a full blown sectarian clash. Here are the
news results on the incident.
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