Transportation Secretary Ray LaHood may not be able to bring the automakers on board his anti-distracted driving campaign, but it has managed to get Consumer Reports onto the bandwagon as the campaign nibbles around the edges of the real problem. The partnership has produced a brochure on the dangers of cell phone use in cars [PDF here] which encourages schools and parents to discuss the issue of distracted driving, but comes up short of establishing a firm line between acceptable and unacceptable distractions. Though panelists at the joint DOT-Consumer Reports press conference point out that hands-free cell phone systems are no more safe than using a hand-held cell phone, the PDF makes no such distinction. And though a police officer on the panel notes that police need to lead by example, no initiative reflecting this fact seems to have emerged from this latest battle against Distracted Driving.
In other words, LaHood’s latest effort is focused entirely on the old chestnut of “raising awareness” while continuing to avoid making the tough policy choices that would seem likely to follow the tough “epidemic” rhetoric that continues to come out of DOT. Sooner or later, raising awareness won’t be enough, and real lines will have to be drawn between safe and unsafe distractions. Unfortunately, today is not that day. The half-hearted “war” on distraction continues apace…
I’ve become quite familiar with the burning-coolant/oil/misery-combo smell of a blown head gasket/cracked head, what with the scent being such a frequent olfactory treat at LeMons races, and so I knew what was happening on I-25 in downtown Denver once I got within nose distance of this scene. (Read More…)
From the front lines of the safety wars comes Bloomberg‘s report that NHTSA has dropped a proposed rule requiring automatic reverse systems on obstructed windows. Auto safety advocate group Kids and Cars had pushed for the systems to be put on all power windows, at a cost of $6-$8 per window. But Mr Safety himself, Ray LaHood isn’t convinced, telling Senator Jay Rockefeller in a letter
There is considerable uncertainty about benefits estimates, particularly with respect to preventing or mitigating the less serious, mostly minor, injuries involving a power window closing on a person’s finger or hand
Automakers had opposed the rule, which would have covered only “one touch” power windows, on the grounds of costs and “unintended consequences with regard to security.” Kids and Cars cites [PDF] a 2007 NHTSA estimate that 2,000 emergency visits each year are caused by power window injuries. NHTSA said in 2009 that the proposed rule would save two lives and help prevent 850 injuries a year. The safety dilemma marches on…
The Ford case focuses not on seat belts but on the type of glass the company chose to install in its 1997 F-150 pickup. The plaintiff alleged Ford was liable in the death of a passenger in an F-150 who was ejected during a 2002 accident in which the truck veered off the road and rolled over several times.
The victim wasn’t wearing a seat belt, and his mother alleged he would not have been ejected had Ford installed laminated side windows on the truck instead of using tempered glass. Federal safety regulations gave Ford a choice in which type of windows to install.
The case now goes back to the South Carolina Supreme Court, which ruled last year that the lawsuit was preempted by the federal regulations.
It’s not clear at this point if other OEMs will be vulnerable to re-opened lawsuits based on the Mazda ruling, but don’t be surprised if the Supreme Court’s decision continues to cause legal headaches for automakers.
The public comment period on this safety proposal only recently closed, and NHTSA will be asking Congress for additional time to analyze public comments, complete the rulemaking process and issue a final rule
But don’t expect NHTSA to drop the proposed rule. An analyst watching the regulatory process tells AN that
he expects the rule to be tweaked to include testing for illumination at night and the time it takes the picture to appear on the display. Overall, though, he said there shouldn’t be any major changes that would cause the ruling to be enacted later than September.
The agency says the cheapest option is to connect the camera to a vehicle’s existing video screen at a cost of $58 to $88. Equipping a vehicle that doesn’t already have a screen would cost $159 to $203
At an industry-wide cost of $1.9b-$2.7b, that comes to some $20m per life saved (assuming cameras will actually prevent back-up “accidents”). Want to guess what most of those 200 comments have to say about the proposal? Seriously, though, we can only find one…
NHTSA understands that there is presently a petition before the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) seeking to prohibit at least one rental car company from renting vehicles on which safety recall campaign remedies remain outstanding.
Because only vehicles made by the Detroit Three are under investigation, they are the only firms who have been asked to disclose how long it takes rental fleets to repair their vehicles. And, according to the Detroit News
GM and Chrysler told NHTSA this week that 30 days after a recall — 10 to 30 percent of vehicles sold to rental car companies had been repaired.
By 90 days, it had improved to about 30 percent and within a year, the number had improved to 50 percent or higher.
Ford did not make its data public, citing the fact that the release of the information could damage it is relationship with rental car companies and result in “decreased sales of motor vehicles to rental car fleets.”
Rental car companies are not legally required to complete recalls before they rent the cars to customers.
Think using your cell phone or other in-car distractions don’t affect your driving? Don’t try to prove it on the road (jackass), put your reaction-time skills to the test at the NYT’s multitasking reaction-time game. While using your keyboard to navigate gates, a cell phone will distract you with New Yorkian requests which you will have to answer while continuing to navigate through randomly-opening gates. The Times team that came up with the game explains
We weren’t trying to be an exact simulation of driving down the highway or the road — it’s not realistic to have all those gates and people often text in shortened words. It is a game to give you a sense of how a distraction can decrease your ability to react quickly
When you finish, the game will tell you how much multitasking impaired your ability to navigate. Let us know how you did, and if the game changed your opinion about distracted driving.
Having been exonerated of any mysterious electronic causes of unintended acceleration, Toyota puts the issue behind it with a final recall of over 2m vehicles for issues related to gas pedal entrapment. At the same time, the NHTSA closes its investigation. According to an official release, Toyota
will conduct a voluntary safety recall of approximately 20,000 2006 and early 2007 Model Year GS 300 and GS 350 All-Wheel Drive vehicles to modify the shape of the plastic pad embedded in the driver’s side floor carpet. In the event that the floor carpet around the accelerator pedal is not properly replaced in the correct position after a service operation, there is a possibility that the plastic pad embedded into the floor carpet may interfere with the operation of the accelerator pedal. If this occurs, the accelerator pedal may become temporarily stuck in a partially depressed position rather than returning to the idle position.
In what may be one of the most important Supreme Court rulings for the car industry in some time [full opinion in PDF here], the highest court in the land has found that compliance with minimum federal safety standards is not a defense against personal injury or wrongful death suits brought in state courts. The case in question involved a 2002 accident in which Than Williamson was killed when a Jeep Wrangler hit her family’s 1993 Mazda MPV. The Williamson MPV had only lap belts because shoulder belts weren’t required by federal law until 2007. A California court has already barred the lawsuit from coming forward, arguing that federal regulations supersede any local rulings, and that then-legal seatbelts should protect manufacturers from personal injury liability. But in the wake of another ruling involving pharmaceutical companies, it seemed that the court might overturn that ruling, which it now has.
Although cars are becoming more and more safe with every new generation, auto safety nuts are forever finding new ways to make cars seem scary. In some cases, the rush to create new crash test standards can create as many problems as it solves (see roof-crush standards), but in others you wonder why certain standards aren’t tested on every vehicle. One case that falls into the latter category: rear-crash tests. No government requires rear-crash testing, but in the wake of several accidents, Germany’s AutoBild magazine decided to look into what exactly happens when a car is hit from behind at 64 km/h… and the results are not encouraging.
With GM’s announcement of a new SYNC-competitor system, the issue of whether or not in-car connectivity systems are compatible with the government’s desire to reducedistracteddriving has raised its head once again. So we put the question to you, our Best and Brightest: will the government ever step in to regulate in-car electronics? Should it? After all, distraction comes in all shapes and sizes… from fast food to in-car Facebook updates. Can the government draw a line between acceptable distractions and unacceptable ones? Will any government action actually make a difference in the statistics?
While I do think that the early 1990s produced some great cars, the US government-mandated automatically-deployed shoulder belts of the era (for vehicles without then-optional airbags) were utterly maddening. When the mechanisms went bad— as they often did— you had no shoulder belt or, perhaps even worse, a belt that deployed and retracted constantly during a drive; I experienced this once in a Mazda 323 and was hoping for a quick, painless nuclear war to remove me from the planet by the end of the drive. However, the American driving public had become mostly pro-seat-belt by that time, what with the debunking of the “you want to be thrown clear from the wreck” myth, and public outcry over automatic belts was limited to some minor grumbling. This was most definitely not in 1974, when all new cars and light trucks sold in the United States featured DOT-mandated interlocks that prevented engine starting unless driver and front-passenger belts were fastened; widespread outrage blowtorched the ears off of every congressman in the country, and the House killed the starter-interlock requirement late in the year. (Read More…)
The South Dakota House of Representatives voted 43 to 24 on Tuesday to prohibit the use of red light cameras and speed cameras in the state. A bipartisan group of lawmakers led by state Representative Peggy Gibson (D-Huron) took aim at the controversial automated ticketing machine set up in Sioux Falls, describing the due process denied innocent motorists ticketed by the system.
“My constituent not only did not own the car that was photographed, but she was not even in Sioux Falls at the time,” Gibson said Tuesday. “In other words, she was presumed guilty of a traffic violation she did not commit in a car she did not own, but she had to go to great lengths to prove her innocence.”
It has been consistently found that the higher a vehicleʼs travel speed (even when driving at or under the legal limit), the greater the focus of the driver on their surroundings. The increased perception of danger triggers an increased endocrine reaction within the brain. This, in turn, forces the individual to play closer attention to objects in motion around the vehicle. Even relatively small changes in vehicle speed can result in substantial increases in spatial acuity and response time.
On the surface the report seems to be trading in truisms: after all, who would argue that higher speeds don’t trigger faster stimulus responses in drivers? But how does that apply to the real world of highway safety legislation and speed limits?
The automated enforcement industry has suffered significant setbacks in the past several months. In November, voters in America’s fourth largest city, Houston, Texas, used the referendum process to outlaw automated ticketing machines. A number of California cities have been dropping red light camera programs after experiencing mediocre safety results. Now one of the key industry players, the Insurance Institute for Highway Safety (IIHS), is fighting back with a report released today claiming that with more red light cameras “a total of 815 deaths could have been avoided.” The IIHS report, however, did not actually consider a single red light camera accident.
Recent Comments