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It’s no wonder that more 16-18 year olds die in cars each year than any other group. Combine hubris, peer pressure, hand-me-down cars with bald tires and all too often alcohol and it’s a minor miracle each time your child’s head hits their pillow and not their airbag. You’d want your children to have mace or martial arts training if they lived in a high crime area, so why not give give them the skills they need to keep their cars under control – something that is sadly NOT taught or required by our government before a license is issued.

I cant urge parents enough to consider a program such as this one. (There is a school in the St. Louis area on May 20th but with only 30 available slots don’t delay).

They will learn to look far enough ahead to anticipate unwise actions of other drivers… They will learn how their cars feel and sound just before and as they exceed the limits of tire adhesion in a controlled situation, helping them to avoid accidents in actual everyday driving situations where they might experience problems… They will experience each exercise element several times, in order to learn from their mistakes and to improve their skills.

(Anecdotally I used to consider myself a great driver who just happened to get into the occasional accident. Then at age 20 my parents paid for my first advanced driver training. Within 20 minutes I realized how little control I really had – I haven’t exceeded limits and lost control since).

If nothing else, $60 is a lot less than an insurance deductible…

That’s what you’ll get if you read this piece by Andrew Frankel comparing SUVs vs. wagons on 4car.

Here’s an excerpt:

The traditional car classes are collapsing and spaces between them are being filled with an ever increasing array of crossover product. We have [minivans] that don’t carry any more people than hatchbacks and [wagons] that are useless at carrying loads. We have supercars that are never driven fast and convertibles that are at their best with the roof up. It’s hardly a wonder we have no problem accepting as normal the concept of an off-roader that can’t be used off-road.

There’s an old saying about the danger of half knowledge, so I’m always looking for the flipside to a claim, the engineering compromise. When I see a car advertised as having “5star safety” I immediately check how it does in offset collision and side impact tests done by the Insurance Institute for Highway Safety then cross reference real-world death rates, while taking into account vehicle weight, handling/braking and rollover propensity as well. It’s inexact, but far more useful than blindly following one test, especially as a car that does well in one test (and is advertised as such) often does poorly in the rest. (Full frontal collisions favor cars with long snouts, offset and side impact tests are a better test of structural soundness).

On the tour for his latest book, Blink, Malcolm Gladwell pointed out that humans don’t have the ability to weight information. You can write a formula or computer program to place more significance on one thing than another but when you make decsions on a day-to-day basis the mind functions more like a ball on a roulette wheel – you hop around from factor to factor until you get tired of the process, lose momentum and settle on whatever’s easiest. (I see this a lot when helping people – they tend to buy whatever’s in front of them the moment they get fed up of car shopping, not what they want the most).

Now retired mechanical engineer Michael Dulberger has weighted the crash data according to its statistical significance (43% of deaths occur in front impacts, 26 in side imacts, etc.) and shared the results here.

(Thanks him for that, and to Motor Trend’s Frank Markus for the lead…)

carcounsel was founded on the principle that there is too much information for the consumer to process effectively. In an age of falso advertising, sales and marketing claims we’ve adopted a ‘less is more’ and ‘quality over quantity’ approach that resonates with each of our clients.

According to two pieces we came across recently, a similar approach is needed when it comes to road signs. First there’s this piece from What Car?.

motorists can only expect to cope with between three and seven pieces of information at a time, and instinctively recognise this because they turn down radios when they need to concentrate.

Next up is this piece from Wired

Hans Monderman is a traffic engineer who hates traffic signs. Oh, he can put up with the well-placed speed limit placard or a dangerous curve warning on a major highway, but Monderman considers most signs to be not only annoying but downright dangerous… The approach is radically counterintuitive: Build roads that seem dangerous, and they’ll be safer… The common thread in the new approach to traffic engineering is a recognition that the way you build a road affects far more than the movement of vehicles. It determines how drivers behave on it, whether pedestrians feel safe to walk alongside it, what kinds of businesses and housing spring up along it. “A wide road with a lot of signs is telling a story,” Monderman says. “It’s saying, go ahead, don’t worry, go as fast as you want, there’s no need to pay attention to your surroundings. And that’s a very dangerous message.”

Another sign that causes accidents? Believe it or not speed limit signs. You see studies have shown that it’s not speed itself that kills but speed differentials – if some cars are doing 60 and others 80 there are more lane changes and accidents. If everyone is doing 75 traffic flows more smoothly and safely from exit to exit. Proof: when the national limit of 55mph was dropped the death toll went down more sharply than ever before.

And that’s a fact.

Early airbags were criticised for – in some cases – causing deaths rather than preventing them. As this graph shows, the death toll was very real. And yet it pales in relation to the number of lives saved by airbags: about 18,913 to date.

And now more good news:

Death by airbag is nearly a thing of the past. No adults and two children died from airbag-induced injuries in the United States in 2005, according to the latest National Highway Traffic Safety Administration crash statistics. source: Automotive News

Read this and you might reconsider carpooling…

There’s a saying among those who take driving seriously that makes a lot of sense once the laughter dies down: “The most important nut is the one behind the wheel.”

It makes even more sense when you have a look around this site…

Can be found in this interview Slate.com’s shopping guru did with me a few years back.

(Note that the tires I suggested then have since been surpassed… aside from that the ‘best’ tire varies based on the car, driver, conditions, etc.)

It’s exceedingly rare I see something on MSN autos that’s worth looking at and in fact they’ve printed at least one article that’s about as misinformed as journalism gets (e.g. an article claiming ‘bigger tires are better!’ citing sales numbers and interviews with tire company spokepeople as supporting evidence! In fact, there are more reasons to avoid larger wheels than desire them.)

This explanation of all wheel drive systems however has little to fault.

(The only things I’d like to add point out are 1) unless your 4WD/AWD vehicle has a limited slip rear differential or traction control, you essentially have 2 wheel drive and 2) I’ve found full time all wheel drive with a rear biased torque split the most satisfying to drive and that seems to be the way the whole industry is moving).

The new Passat’s crash test results are in…