In recent years, there has been a noticeable trend in the automotive industry towards simplifying car features and technologies, leading many to wonder why cars seem to be getting "dumber." This shift is not about a decrease in intelligence but rather a strategic move by automakers to meet evolving consumer preferences, improve reliability, and enhance overall user experience. Let’s delve into why this trend is happening and what it means for the future of driving.
Showing posts with label Cars. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Cars. Show all posts
700 Pedestrians Die Every Day Wordwide
We talk a great deal about how cars congest our cities and pollute the atmosphere. We talk less about how they keep killing and injuring people simply trying to get from A to B on two feet.
Lately, our auto industry conversation about road safety has been dominated by visions, sold by Silicon Valley, of vehicles that minimize or even eliminate the need for input from a fallible human driver. Every year, more cars come armed with “pedestrian detection and avoidance” systems; soon, these systems will likely be standard issue. And not long after that, we are promised, sensors and self-improving algorithms will take over the driving process altogether, eliminating human error from roads and ushering in a new golden age of safety for all their users, whether or not they’re cocooned by a car’s steel frame. Since 2017, General Motors, the US’s largest car manufacturer, has claimed that it is developing self-driving vehicles in the service of a “triple-zero” world: zero crashes, zero emissions and zero congestion.
Car companies swear they are here to help – by selling us products that hardly ever hit anyone or anything. But the truth is that this promise is, at best, a distraction. In fact, much of our discourse around cars, self-driving or otherwise, is less about transforming the status quo than maintaining it, obscuring paths to progress exactly when we need them most, and leaving pedestrians right in the line of fire.
Ask a room full of road safety experts what is causing pedestrian fatalities to increase and most will admit that, well, they are not exactly sure. Every time a car hits a pedestrian, it represents the intersection of a vast number of variables. At the level of those involved, there is the question of who is distracted, reckless, drunk. Zooming out, there are factors such as the design and condition of the road, the quality (or absence) of a marked pedestrian crossing, the speed limit, the local lighting, the weight and height of the car involved. In a crash, all these variables and more converge at high speed in real-world, non-laboratory conditions that make it hard to isolate the influence of each variable.
Ask that same room of road safety experts a slightly different question – not exactly why US pedestrians fatalities have risen lately, but instead why the US has more of them than any other wealthy country – and the answers will come flooding out. In recent months, after conversations with more than a dozen such experts, I became familiar with a particular tone of voice: deep frustration at how obvious it all is, but wrapped in a package of professional cheeriness.
Here is what the frustrated safety experts will tell you: Americans are driving more than ever, more than residents of any other country. More of them than ever are living in cities and out in urban sprawl; a growing number of pedestrian fatalities occur on the fringes of cities, where high-volume, high-speed roads exist in close proximity to the places where people live, work, and shop.
Speed limits have increased across the country over the past 20 years, despite robust evidence that even slight increases in speed dramatically increase the likelihood of killing pedestrians (car passengers, too – but the increase is not as steep, thanks to improvements in the design of car frames, airbags and seatbelts). American road engineers tend to assume people will speed, and so design roads to accommodate speeding; this, in turn, facilitates more speeding, which soon enough makes higher speed limits feel reasonable. And more Americans than ever are zipping around in SUVs and pickup trucks, which, thanks to their height, weight and shape are between two and three times more likely to kill people they hit.
More fundamentally, the US is the country in the world most shaped, physically and culturally, by the presumption that the uninterrupted flow of car traffic is an obvious public good, one that deserves to trump all others in the road planning process. Many of its younger cities are designed almost entirely around planning paradigms in which pedestrians were either ignored or factored only as nuisances.
There is no greater symptom of this worldview than the recurring focus on mobile phones, especially smartphones and their tendency to monopolise our limited attention. Road signs warning against phone use while driving are so commonplace that they almost blend into the landscape. Parents make their kids promise they won’t use their phones while driving. Kids nod and promise they won’t. Phone-tracking studies indicate that most of them do it anyway and that their parents do, too.
In recent years, America’s fear of the distracted driver expanded to include the distracted walker. This is a replay of an old phenomenon: it was the US that invented the concept of the “jaywalker”, a “jay” being an unsophisticated person from the country who did not even know how to walk correctly. In the US, much like anywhere that cars have taken hold, drivers screaming at pedestrians (and cyclists) that they are doing it wrong is a fixture of national life. More recently, numerous states and cities, including San Francisco and New York, have launched public campaigns against inattentive walking, as has the US National Safety Council. Some jurisdictions have passed, or sought to pass, bills that would make using a smartphone while crossing the road an offence punishable by fine. On Twitter, the US National Highway Traffic Safety Administration has weighed in on the pedestrian safety crisis primarily by coaching pedestrians on how to protect themselves. “When you are walking, be predictable”, advises @NHTSAgov.
Safety experts are not terribly excited about pedestrian avoidance technology. It wasn’t that they doubted it might save some pedestrian lives. Instead, their recurring concern was that it reflects an ongoing focus on individual shortcomings – on flawed drivers and walkers – and a neglect of flaws built in to the roads they are forced to use.
“Pedestrian detection will probably help a bit,” says Dan Albert, author of Are We There Yet?, a history of American car culture. “But at the same time, it’s pretty clear that these problems can be addressed without hi-tech solutions. And so what are the car companies up to? It’s not just about some altruistic desire for safety, or they would be including these systems on all of their cars, which very few companies are doing. It’s more about creating a range of products that allows them to maximise profit.”
Of course, people can learn to understand new tools. More troubling is the fact that very little robust evidence has been available as to pedestrian avoidance systems’ real-world benefits. The organisations rating these systems do so based on tests conducted in laboratories and on test tracks, but it has not yet been reliably established how well these tests predict performance on actual roads, with real live pedestrians instead of crash test dummies (not to mention variable light and rain conditions).
The self-driving car “space” is flooded in loose cash. This is why pedestrian avoidance systems are becoming ubiquitous. Investment dollars have both improved the required parts and programmes and pushed down their cost. Otherwise, they would not be affordable enough to sell to any but the richest car-buyers. Meanwhile, the race continues. The tech companies keep saying they are almost there (they know they said they were almost there before, but this time is different, they promise). Almost every major car company has partnered with a lab developing self-driving car technology, either because they think it might become a requirement to stay in business, or because enough of their shareholders think so that they need to make a show of playing along.
One night in March 2018, a 49-year-old woman named Elaine Herzberg was pushing a bicycle laden with grocery bags across a four-lane road in Tempe, Arizona when she was struck and killed by a Volvo X90 operating under the control of Uber’s self-driving software. As is standard practice, a backup safety driver, employed by Uber, was sitting in the car, the idea being that she would take over in the case of error. 1.3 seconds before impact, Uber’s software calculated that emergency braking was called for. According to Uber, self-braking had been turned off to reduce jerky and unpredictable behaviour. With less than a second to go, the safety driver tried––and failed––to swerve away. (The post-crash investigation indicated that she had probably been watching the singing contest The Voice on her phone.) News outlets around the world covered Herzberg’s death in obsessive detail, asking whether it indicated that autonomous vehicles were less “ready” than we had been led to believe.
But, just as the original quest for autonomous vehicles had nothing to do with pedestrian safety, concern over Herzberg’s death often felt curiously divorced from concern for pedestrians in general. Herzberg was killed in March 2018. Between January and June of that year, 124 pedestrians were killed in Arizona, more than all but four other states in absolute terms, and more than all but one on a per capita basis. It goes without saying that none of these pedestrians’ names are known around the world, or that any of them generated a slurry of commentary about whether the American transportation environment is “safe enough” or “as safe as it should be”.
In the US, meanwhile, it remains the case that pedestrian advocates have failed to engineer the cultural process that transforms a scattered mass of dead and injured bodies into a widely recognized problem. They have not come close. When two Boeing 737s went down, killing 346 people, it triggered multiple government investigations. Crash reconstruction and analysis experts showed up. Corporate spokespeople apologized, began handing out checks to victims’ families and swore to do better. Journalists searched for explanations. But cars kill a 737’s worth of American pedestrians every couple of weeks. Internationally, it is more than three 737s per day. And the news cycle barely stutters.
In 2017, for the first time, each US state was required to submit road fatality reduction targets to the federal government. Most states set extremely limited goals: Wisconsin, for example, aimed to have 342 pedestrian fatalities, instead of 361. Several set a rather fatalistic goal of no reduction at all. Eighteen states went a step further, setting as their target an increase in their pedestrian death count. It is not that they want more pedestrians to die. But they know that people are likely to be driving more, they know what their roads are like and they know the laws of physics. Unlike the unending stream of hype coming from the autonomous car sector, these dour projections received no coverage outside of traffic reform circles. Unfortunately, they are more likely to contain the truth.
Read the full article here.
10 Essential Pieces of Equipment for Your Garage
We
all want to stay safe on the roads, and one of the best ways to ensure this is
by driving around in a well-maintained car. But who wants to take their motor
to their local mechanic every time they sense the slightest niggle? The answer
is ‘not many people’.
So
how can you come up with a solution that keeps you safe without spending all of
your cash on it? A cleverly equipped garage could offer you the answer you’ve
been seeking, so here are 10 essential pieces of equipment if you want to give
yours an upgrade…
#1:
A Workbench
The
right workbench is often considered to be the most essential part of a garage
outside of the walls and roof themselves. The place where the majority of your
mending, repairs, replacements, and upgrades will take place, it will help you
to keep everything organized and your tools within easy reach.
#2:
Lots of Light
Dimly
lit garages are the worst, as everyone who has ever tried to work around the
shadows will know. Get some good lighting installed to chase away the darkness
and illuminate your projects, leaving no danger of mistakes going
unnoticed.
#3:
A Fire Extinguisher
We’re
sure you’re tired of people harping on about health and safety, but a fire
extinguisher is another essential. At the end of the day, you’re in an enclosed
space with an explosive liquid (fuel), a powerful electrical energy source
(your car battery), and plenty of flammable materials in the form of rags. Is
it really worth taking the risk?
#4:
A First-Aid Kit
Also
on that note, be sure to stock a first aid kit. Although you might be just fine
sucking on your skinned knuckles, burns, and bigger injuries will be much better
served by bandages, antiseptic wipes, or the instant application of a cold
pack.
#5:
A Bench Vise
Now
back to the exciting stuff – tools – and a bench vise just has to be on this
list. Whether you need to hold something in place or apply a significant amount
of force, it’s perfectly suited to plenty of tasks.
#6:
Torque Wrench
Need
to perform a precision job when it comes to tightening up those nuts and bolts?
Then a torque wrench is your new best friend. Buy yours today.
#7:
Air Compressor
A the good air compressor will make so many things easier for you. Whether you want
to inflate tires or blow-clean and –dry parts, you’ll be so very glad that you
bought one.
#8:
Jack Stands
Most
of the important stuff on a car is underneath, so make it easier for yourself
to lift it up with a good solid jack stand. This is one investment you won’t
regret.
#9:
A Laptop and Wi-Fi
Why
would you need one of these in your garage? The answer is simple: if ever you
want to watch a repair video offering advice that just isn’t in the manual, it
will let you watch it as you work so that you don’t lose track of what you’re
doing whilst running backward and forwards between your house and garage.
#10:
Storage
Last
but most certainly not least, get your hands on some good quality storage, like
one of these tool chests from SGS.
Perfect for keeping the colossal amount of equipment you’ll amass neatly
organized and easy to find, it will prove invaluable if ever you want to locate
something at a glance.
What
do you need to add to your garage?
How to Choose a Truly Safe Car: Four Things to Look Out For
We
would all like to stay safe on the roads, even those of us prone to the odd boy
racer moment, so when we’re looking for a vehicle to buy, one of the first
things we should assess is its safety credentials. This applies to every make
and model; whether you’re buying new from a top-of-the-range showroom in London
or looking for a bog-standard used car in
Nottingham, the rules are still the same.
So
what, exactly, should you be keeping an eye out for? Here are four essentials
that you must always check are present…
#1:
Strong Frontal Crash Test Results
The most common type of collision is a head-on one, and this means that good
frontal crash test results are essential. There is absolutely no need for you
to leave your safety to chance, for this information has been fully compiled
for you in advance of the vehicle ever being released, and the outcomes can be
easily found online for
anyone who wants to take a look at them. Remember, the higher the score, the
less likely you are to be seriously injured or killed in an accident.
#2:
Side Crashworthiness
Side-on
collisions are the second most common type of accident, and the most likely to
be fatal, which is why any vehicle you choose should also have good side-on
crash test results, plus side airbags to protect you from head injuries. Pick
one of the models ranked as ‘good’ in these trials, and you’re 70 percent less
likely to die in such a crash than you would be in a vehicle rated as ‘poor’.
#3:
A Strong Roof
You
also ought to keep an eye out for cars that have been rated highly with regards
to the strength of their roofs. The reason for this is simple: you want a
vehicle that will hold up in the event of a rollover crash. This type of rating
is only available for models released after 2008, but even with older cars, you
can probably gain some idea of how they would rank by doing a little bit of
research online.
#4:
Head Restraints
Additionally,
you really should pick a model that is noted to have a ‘good’ seat/head
restraint score, as this will significantly lessen the likelihood of a whiplash
injuries if your car is hit from behind. Those who own vehicles with such a
rating is shown to be 15 percent less likely to make an insurance claim for
neck injuries, which says all that needs to be said.
Stay
safe on the roads today: follow our four top tips above to reduce your risks,
and lessen the likelihood of you being injured in an accident.