Your risk of dying from your Toyota’s unintended acceleration (UA) is so low as to be all but nil next to the more general risk of dying in an automobile, according to an “Opinionator” column in the New York Times, by journalist Robert Wright.
Wright calculates that your chance of dying from unintended acceleration in a Toyota is 2.8 in a million. Meanwhile, the average American’s chance of dying in a car accident over the next to years is one in 5,244, writes Wright. “So driving one of these suspect Toyotas raises your chances of dying in a car crash over the next two years from .01907 percent (that’s 19 one-thousandths of one percent, when rounded off) to .01935 percent (also 19 one-thousandths of one percent). (Methodology described in the article.)

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Oregonians hold onto your Astons! Your state senate has passed a bill, SB 1059, that seeks to reduce ground transportation-related GHG emissions 75% relative to 1990, by 2050, in the state’s six major (by Oregon standards) metro areas.

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I live near Boston, but on February first, I drove down to Northern Virginia, outside of DC, to my sister’s, to get out of the cold and the snow for the month. Don’t laugh. As I write, the second big snow is in progress, and the driving has been interesting–and fun.

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State Farm, the US’ largest automotive insurance company, began warning federal regulators in 2007 about unintended acceleration in Toyotas, the
Washington Post reports. Yet the National Highway Traffic Safety did not begin to act for more than a year after State Farm’s initial alerts. This
revelation follows by more than a decade the insurer’s warnings about Ford Explorer rollovers, which the Post reports led to a congressional
investigation, and legislation that “created an “early warning” system for auto safety.” But NHTSA apparently hasn’t been paying attention to the information it has collected. Randy Whitfield, a Maryland consultant, using data from NHTSA, two years ago determined that the 2007 Toyota Camry and Lexus ES 350 had excess injuries due to unexpected acceleration. State Farm insures more than 40 million customers.

First President Obama said the Senate may forego passing cap-and-trade, by far the most critical piece of the energy legislation that’s brewing on Capitol Hill. And now, the Environmental Protection Agency is suddenly pushing snake-oil, uh, corn-based ethanol in the latest iteration of the renewable fuel standard [proposed rule PDF], claiming that its substitution for gasoline will reduce greenhouse gas emissions. This contradicts an earlier renewable fuel standard iteration, and most studies of the matter, including a 2008 study in Science, which found that “corn-based ethanol, instead of producing a 20% savings [as per typical life-cycle studies], nearly doubles greenhouse emissions over 30 years and increases greenhouse gases for 167 years.” [Ed: for more on the corn ethanol sham check out TTAC’s E85BOTD archives]

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In Cambridge Massachusetts and its affluent outlying suburbs, these days cars are second class citizens. Peds think nothing of jay walking, and motorists almost always give them right of way when they do. Sometimes, peds get aggressive about it, charging across the street en mass just as the light turns green, with looks of entitlement upon their faces. Across from Harvard Yard, peds parade in front of cars turning onto or off of Massachusetts Avenue, oblivious to how many cars they are forcing to wait for minutes on end. Amazingly, I haven’t seen road rage arise from this behavior. The motorists seem to turn the other cheek, or tire, as the case may be.
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For politicians, the sphere of the personal shrinks as that of the political swells, until for some, the personal all but disappears. Then, even the choice of car becomes political. During the recent elections, one car loomed so large in the fleets of presidential aspirants that the manufacturer actually touted it as “The Candidates’ Choice” in advertisements that ran in Capitol Hill publications, such as Roll Call. Even more tellingly, the particular vehicle was unique to the left side of the aisle, and all were 2007 models, purchased after election season had begun.

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I am that oddball of pistonhedonism who has never lusted for speed. In fact, caution genes run in my family. To wit: my parents installed seatbelts in the ‘57 Chevy in 1960, eight years before they became mandatory in new cars. Our ‘65 404 was probably the first Peugeot station wagon in all of France to have rear shoulder belts. My father, an academic economist, showed the men at the factory how to install them. I didn’t get tagged for speeding until I was just shy of 40, and that for doing all of 35 in Rock Creek Park. (Gail Wilensky, the Porsche driving head of Medicare under George H.W. Bush, was hitching a ride downtown with me in my then 16 year old Toyota Corolla with the busted window from a smash & grab, but that’s another story.)

It’s not that people are unpredictable. They are predictable. But they frequently behave counterintuitively, a phenomenon that has given rise to the field of behavioral economics. Like economists, engineers have traditionally ignored psychology. Traffic: Why We Drive the Way We Do (and What It Says About Us), is a 300-odd page romp into what scientists are learning about how traffic really works now that they are accounting for the human element. Take “passive safety.” It’s long been the philosophy behind efforts to make driving safer. Reduce driver demands by simplifying the driving environment, and protect people from getting hurt in crashes—rather than teaching skillful driving. After all, it’s easier to engineer safety than change behavior. But too much safety lulls the driver into complacency.

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All images courtesy David Holzman, motorlegends.com. Thanks [again] to Marc Feinstein, German Performance Service, Cambridge, MA and Robert Fitzgerald, Robert’s Porsche-Mercedes Service, Wellfleet MA for access to the vehicles.

Guess the cars (full images tomorrow). All photos courtesy David Holzman. Thanks to Marc Feinstein, German Performance Service, Cambridge, MA and Robert Fitzgerald, Robert’s Porsche-Mercedes Service, Wellfleet MA for access to the vehicles.

Corn-based ethanol took another blow from the scientific literature this week. University of Minnesota scientists published an article revealing that corn into E85 could require three times as much water as previously estimated. The bottom line: it takes more than 2,100 gallons of water to produce a single gallon of ethanol. That’s bad news for corn-etoh’s partisans; water supplies in the US are not exactly ample (as the NYT Mag pointed out a couple of years ago in its article, “The Future Is Drying Up“). Ethanol has also been bashed for competing with food, and for raising carbon emissions over a period of decades, rather than reducing them. The researchers, led by Sangwon Suh, note that the water needs vary widely depending on irrigation practices. In a dozen Corn Belt states, production of a gallon of E85 requires less than 100 gallons of water. I still wouldn’t buy any stock . . .

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It was our first drive on the French autoroute. The highway, heretofore flat, began to climb, all but imperceptibly. Imperceptibly that is, except to the drivers of the Deux Chevaux, cars that look like old Beetles made of corrugated barn roofing. Suddenly, the Deux Chevaux were moving en mass into the far right lane, putt-putting ever more loudly as they struggled vainly to maintain momentum. “Ooooh!” exclaimed Miriam, my two and a half year old sister. “Dudebos fall out!”