Free Republic

What? You expected us not to make a juvenile joke in the headline of this story? Listen, most of us around here are still amused by bodily functions, so this shouldn’t be unexpected. What was unexpected for a Halton Police officer earlier this week was a contractor who failed to tightly secure the trailer hitch ball on their truck’s drawbar. According to a video posted to Twitter by the attending officer, the truck and trailer in question were bounding along Dundas Street when the gendarmes spotted something amiss at the hitching point. Closer inspection revealed the ball on which the...

On a summer morning last year, Fred Schaub drove his Toyota RAV4 into the garage attached to his Florida home and went into the house with the wireless key fob, evidently believing the car was shut off. Twenty-nine hours later, he was found dead, overcome with carbon monoxide that flooded his home while he slept. “After 75 years of driving, my father thought that when he took the key with him when he left the car, the car would be off,” said Mr. Schaub’s son Doug. Mr. Schaub is among more than two dozen people killed by carbon monoxide nationwide...

As interest in self-driving cars accelerates, so have questions about their safety and reliability. The idea is that self-driving cars will be safer because they will make far fewer mistakes. But can people trust computer algorithms to guide them safely through incredibly complex and ever-changing road conditions?

The chances of dying in a crash in a late-model vehicle have fallen by more than a third in three years, the latest IIHS calculations of driver death rates show. Among 2011 models, a record nine vehicles have driver death rates of zero. However, the gap between the safest and riskiest models remains wide, and three cars have death rates exceeding 100 per million registered vehicle years... ...The list of models with the lowest death rates illustrates just how much vehicles have improved. Eight years ago, there were no models with driver death rates of zero (see Status Report special...

Link only. Bigger, gas-guzzling cars are safer.

Auto Safety: The Obama administration is pushing technology that will let cars "talk" to each other to avoid crashes. Sounds great. But do we really want the folks who built HealthCare.gov at the wheel of our automobiles? Earlier this week, the Department of Transportation announced plans to require all cars to come equipped with "vehicle to vehicle" communications technology it's now developing. Once in place, these V2V devices would transmit information about car speeds and locations, warning drivers of danger. The system might even take control of a car to prevent a crash. Administration officials call it "game-changing" technology that...

Auto Safety: As a Toyota Prius with a stuck accelerator races down a California freeway, no one mourns the victims of the fuel economy standards imposed by Congress. Forced into smaller cars, thousands have died. We can barely imagine the panic felt by James Sikes, 61, as his Toyota Prius accelerated uncontrollably while he drove down Interstate 8 in San Diego County. We can imagine the continuation of the grandstanding by the owners of "government motors" as they further browbeat a competitor of government-run GM and Chrysler. We do not minimize the safety issues here that need to be addressed,...

Auto safety made easy BY DAVE BARRY Automobiles are a mixed blessing. On the one hand, they provide us with benefits that were undreamed-of in the ''horse-and-buggy'' days. For example, any time we get hungry, we can simply hop into the car, pull up to the drive-through window of a fast-food restaurant, purchase a tasty hot meal, spill our coffee on our thighs and sue a major corporation for millions of dollars. On the other (or ''left'') hand, automobiles can be very dangerous. The modern car is a complex and powerful machine; if we do not treat it with proper...

NORTHBROOK, Ill.--(BUSINESS WIRE)--June 7, 2005--Residents of Cedar Rapids, Iowa, rank as the safest drivers in the U.S. according to the Allstate Insurance Company's (NYSE:ALL) inaugural "America's Best Drivers Report." The first-of-its kind ranking of U.S. cities with populations 100,000-plus, revealed that the average driver in the central Iowa city will experience an auto collision every 15 years, compared to the national likelihood of a crash every 10 years - making them 33.28 percent less likely to have an accident than the national average. Allstate researchers analyzed internal data to determine the likelihood drivers in America's largest 196 cities would experience...

The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) estimates that airbags installed in automobiles have saved some 10,000 lives as of January 2004. A just-released study by a statistician at the University of Georgia, however, casts doubt on that assertion. In fact, said UGA statistics professor Mary C. Meyer, a new analysis of existing data indicates that, controlling for other factors, airbags are actually associated with slightly increased probability of death in accidents. "NHTSA recorded 238 deaths due to airbags between 1990 and 2002, according to information about these deaths on their Web site,” said Meyer. “They all occurred at very...

Tucked away in the $295 billion highway bill passed by the Senate last week is a provision that could help consumers when making a big purchase of their own. The highway bill includes billions of dollars in funding for road construction and mass-transit. It also includes a rule requiring automakers to start printing crash-test data on the stickers of all new cars. The federal government spends millions of dollars a year testing new cars and trucks on their ability to withstand collisions and avoid rollovers, and rating them on a five-star scale. But the data are hard to come by...

First Technology Safety Systems These long-suffering human surrogates are lineal descendants of crash-test dummies Samuel W. Alderson began manufacturing in the early 1950's. Samuel W. Alderson, a physicist and engineer who was a pioneer in developing the long-suffering, curiously beautiful human surrogates known as automotive crash-test dummies, died Feb. 11 at his home in Los Angeles. He was 90. The cause was complications of myelofibrosis and pneumonia, his grandson Matthew Alderson said. The dummy that is the current industry standard for frontal crash testing in the United States is a lineal descendant of one Mr. Alderson began manufacturing for...

Most midsize family sedans failed a new test by the insurance industry designed to see how well the cars would stand up to a side-impact crash with a pickup or SUV. Safety experts are concerned about the side impact of a larger pickup or SUV crashes into midsize cars. Twelve of fifteen sedans failed the new test, which involves a barrier shaped like the front end of an SUV "T-boning" the side of the vehicle at a 90-degree angle going 31 miles per hour. The test by the Insurance Institute for Highway Safety comes at a time when federal regulators...

The entire functions of a radar system have been squeezed on to a single silicon chip about one fifteenth the size of a penny for the first time. The miniature system has been created by researchers at the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena, US, who managed to fabricate all the sensing and communications components out of silicon. Their chip is capable of transmitting, receiving and directing high frequency microwaves. "Until now radar has been a very expensive very large bulky item," says Ian Gresham, an automotive radar engineer at M/A-Com in Lowell, Massachusetts. Gresham says the radar chip could...

We have long resisted the trend among editorial-writers to blame sport-utility vehicle owners for every societal ill that comes down the pike. Up till now, the complaints against SUVs have struck us mostly as matters of personal freedom: How much you pay to fill your gas tank has no effect on me, so why should I care? But new federal figures suggest that whether or not SUVs are socially irresponsible, they are lethal -- and not just to the drivers of smaller cars crushed by SUVs, but to their own drivers and passengers as well. The National Highway Safety Administration...

Hollywood dispatched Bruce Willis and an arsenal of nuclear bombs, but the simplest way to save Earth from a monster asteroid may be to inflate a giant air bag and nudge the killer rock out of the way, an American scientist says. Dr. Hermann Burchard suggests an air pillow as much as a few kilometres wide, inflated in space and steered by a spacecraft, could apply enough pressure to push an asteroid or comet out of Earth's path and prevent mass death and destruction. Experts have lately been warning that a cataclysmic collision by cosmic debris, obliterating a whole continent...

Crash Test Dummies Don't Match Size of US DriversWed Jul 10, 5:07 PM ETBy Alan MozesNEW YORK (Reuters Health) - The crash test dummy driver model used in most frontal auto collision tests in the US does not represent a realistic range of body types, say researchers, raising questions about the accuracy of government and insurance car safety reports. "This dummy has been around awhile...but I don't think many people meet this standard size," said study lead author Dr. Stephen G. Moran of the University of Alabama at Birmingham. Virtually all non-manufacturer crash testing of new cars in the US...

AOL Proclaims "HEVs are Hot"! Unfortunately, the treatment of the subject matter is so superficial that it ignores facts that AOL even provides links to. Here is a quote from a government publication: "Although a few production HEVs with advanced batteries have been introduced in the market, no current battery technology has demonstrated an economical, acceptable combination of power, energy efficiency, and life cycle for high-volume production vehicles." The truth is, these are not economical, safe or environmentally sound vehicles. First, the economical aspect. If the quote in the previous paragraph doesn't convince you, the fact that the AOL FAQs...