What is that car? Some of you will figure it out immediately, while the rest will want to sneak a peek at the end of this article. Regardless of the make and model, here’s what it is: it’s a race car that competes in an entry-level ARCA series. No longer street legal. Not even close. Since it’s a race car, it uses (some) racing safety equipment. That’s all well and good. There’s a problem, however. In the past couple of years, I’ve seen more and more drivers incorporating “harness bars”, four-or-five-point belts, and other racing-style accessories in their street/trackday cars. Those people are risking their lives, and if you’re one of them, you should keep reading.
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Around the world, drunk driving is a deadly problem without an easy solution. After all, the link between driving under the influence and generally screwing up your life (and the lives of others) has been conclusively proven, and yet the problem continues. What to do? Volvo’s answer: buy a Volvo and spend €850  (plus up to €90 for installation) on “Alcoguard,” a dealer-installed optional breathalyzer ignition interlock. With this system in place, drivers must blow into an interlock, proving that they are beneath the legal blood-alcohol-content limit before the vehicle will start.

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A federal jury ruled Thursday against a traffic camera company that had sought to impose a $20 million fine on its nearest rival. The panel of eight spent an hour-and-a-half to arrive at the verdict denying American Traffic Solutions (ATS) payment for contract revenue lost in twelve cities after the Australian firm Redflex Traffic Systems snuck uncertified equipment into the country in violation of Federal Communications Commission regulations.

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With the autoblogosphere abuzz over Peter Cheney’s “unintended acceleration event,” Jill McIntosh has made a fascinating connection between one auto-journo’s son’s voyage of manual transmission discovery, and a former Ontario Attorney General’s killing of a cyclist back in September. Linking to a Toronto Star report on the trial of Michael Bryant, who killed cyclist Darcy Allan Shephard, McIntosh notes a strange similarity between that fatal incident and Cheney Junior’s garage door tango:

According to a statement read in court, reprinted in the Toronto Star today: Bryant hits the brakes. His vehicle stalls. Bryant tries to start his car, but it stalls again, lurching forward … Bryant tries to start the car again. He’s concentrating on the Saab’s sensitive clutch with his head down. He succeeds at restarting the engine and the Saab accelerates into Sheppard, who lands on the hood.

Obviously, two incidents do not a crisis make, but this is hardly the only evidence suggesting that manual gear-swapping is fast becoming a lost art. But do we really want to further stigmatize manual transmissions by mandating special licenses for manual-equipped cars, as McIntosh suggests?

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Toyota announces a gut-wrenching innovation: Crash test dummies with intestines. I remember the unappetizing times when crash tests were performed with (dead) pigs, or, even more gross, with human corpses (not for public consumption.) The crash test dummy changed all this. No species developed faster than the anthropomorphic test device, a.k.a. the crash test dummy. Now, it made a big leap forward. (Read More…)

The House Energy And Commerce Committee has passed an amended version of the Motor Vehicle Safety Act that was previously approved by its Subcommittee on Commerce, Trade and Consumer Protection. True to our prediction, longtime auto industry ally Rep John Dingell (D-MI) was able to maintain caps on NHTSA’s fining power at $200m per automaker per defect recall (up from the current cap of $16.4m) and $5m per auto executive per defect, and require that NHTSA inform automakers and allow for an appeal before invoking the “imminent hazard” powers authorized by the bill. Dingell tells Automotive News [sub] that

The bill is going to be a hard one for the industry to accept, but I believe it’s in the public interest and is good overall.

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The Orange County, California Superior Court is making it difficult for Santa Ana to turn a profit on its red light camera program. From November 2009 to February 2010, the city lost a total of $145,414 on automated ticketing, meaning the city’s Australian camera operator, Redflex Traffic Systems, is walking away with $400,000 in general taxpayer money every year. The nearby city of Anaheim, which has nearly the same population, made a profit of $41,584 from red light running tickets over the same period. Anaheim not only has no red light cameras, a public referendum has been set to ban them for good in November.

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Yesterday’s Toyota hearing at the U.S. House of Representatives Energy and Commerce Committee was a desperate attempt to keep the Toyota issue in the headlines, and to provide flanking support for Waxman’s proposed Motor Vehicle Safety Act. The ghosts in the machine are still at large … (Read More…)

Rep Henry Waxman’s version of the Motor Vehicle Safety Act passed the House Subcommittee on Commerce, Trade and Consumer Protection today, and will go before the full Committee On Energy And Congress. The subcommittee markup [in PDF format here] includes a number of provisions that the industry and others had argued against, such as a $9 fee on each new vehicle sale, and mandatory event data recorders (EDRs) which would “continuously record vehicle operational data” and store all data from 60 seconds before, and 15 seconds after a crash. According to Automotive News [sub], Rep John Dingell is in negotiations with committee chairman Waxman to mitigate two key proposals: the removal of a cap on NHTSA fines, and the granting of so-called “imminent hazard” authority.

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Yesterday’s Senate Committee On Commerce, Science and Transportation hearing on the proposed Motor Vehicle Safety Act [full text of proposed Senate version S.3302 in PDF format here] was a surprisingly low-key affair. Discussion didn’t seem to move much beyond the battle lines drawn at House hearings two weeks ago. NHTSA Administrator David Strickland continued to argue passionately in favor of so-called “imminent hazard” powers, which are included in Henry Waxman’s House version of the bill, but not the Jay Rockefeller-sponsored Senate version. Meanwhile, debates over nearly every proposal in the legislation rage on, as the industry seeks to mitigate what it considers the bill’s most onerous and intrusive measures. But Strickland framed NHTSA’s mission in zero-tolerance terms: if one American dies on the road, he argued, NHTSA should be doing more to prevent it. This philosophy is underlined by the presence of hard-core safety advocates Joan Claybrook and Clarence Ditlow at nearly every DC hearing on auto safety since the Toyota recall. The flip side to this position is the argument that cars have literally never been safer, and that deaths per vehicle mile traveled are at all time lows. This yawning divide in perspectives towards automotive safety is begging for discussion, so let’s have it. Are cars safe enough? Which new regulations make sense, and which are more onerous than they’re worth? Where should the government define an acceptable number of roadway deaths? And are cars the problem, or are people?

Because this is a political topic, please make the extra effort to make your comment constructive. Complete prepared testimony from yesterday’s hearing can be found here.

Police can pull over a car that has committed no traffic violation based solely on vague accusations made in a 911 call, the Utah Supreme Court ruled Friday. The court considered the case of Jose Baltarcar Roybal whose live-in girlfriend, Annalee McCaine, called 911 after the pair had a fight August 8, 2005.

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Most car enthusiasts bemoan the rise of electronic systems in automobiles because they create a layer of interference between ourselves and the direct, mechanical control of our cars. Sure, electronic controls are cheaper, lighter and allow for easier diagnostics, but they rob automobiles of the elemental simplicity which is so often fundamental to their appeal. And, as a study by researchers from the Universities of Washington and San Diego [in PDF format here, via ArsTechnica] shows, the various electronic systems in your car actually makes it vulnerable to hackers who could disable key systems remotely. Titled Experimental Security Analysis of a Modern Automobile, the study explains that the electronic complexity of modern cars actually leaves them extremely vulnerable to all kinds of attack, raising serious concerns about how safe we really are in our cars (especially if we happen to have an enemy or two).
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The national 55 MPH speed limit may have been repealed in 1995, but the Oregon Department of Transportation (ODOT) has refused to raise the limits on most freeways beyond 65. That makes Oregon the slowest state west of the Mississippi. Ted Carlin, 61, wants to call attention to this situation by making a 456-mile walk across the state — at a 3 MPH walking pace.
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A surprisingly vigorous effort is being made to urge Florida Governor Charlie Crist to veto the red light camera authorization bill passed by the legislature last month (view bill). The normally pro-camera group AAA launched a nine-page assault on the legislation in a letter to Crist last week. The group was joined yesterday by Crist’s former regional campaign chairman, state Representative Tom Grady (R-Naples). Crist has until May 14 to sign or veto the red light camera bill which would devote more money to the Wall Street giant Goldman Sachs than it would to public safety.

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The Las Cruces, New Mexico city council voted Monday to partially obey a New Mexico Department of Transportation (NMDOT) to remove red light cameras and speed cameras from the state right-of-way by May 18. State officials are concerned with the negative impact that the devices have on safety, but Las Cruces officials emphasized the need to “work around” the state in expanding the red light camera program even though the city has seen an increase in accidents where photo enforcement has been installed.
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