A Toyota saved my wife's life.

Given all the bad press Toyota have had recently, I thought a positive note would help out. My wife drove a Yaris - a reasonable sized car in Europe but considered to be "too small" in the US. And by "too small" people equate that to "not safe". Fact: they're perfectly safe. Unfortunately my wife found that out the hard way. An early 90's Ford Explorer ran into her in an intersection last week. You know the ones - chunky, boxy, with I-beams for bumpers. My wife was able to get out and walk away because the Toyota did its job and protected her. We found out this morning that it was a total loss. So next time you have concerns about "small" cars in crashes with SUVs, look at this photo and remind yourself that the only injuries to my wife were seatbelt and airbag burns.

Get rid of Daytime Running Lights

Daytime running lights - DRLs. One of my pet peeves. Why? Well I ride a motorcycle and motorcycles are, whichever way you look at it, more vulnerable on the roads and less likely to be seen by idiot car drivers. The solution was to ride with our lights on to make ourselves more visible to everyone else - to draw attention to ourselves. Sadly, in recent years, car manufacturers the world over have started wiring headlights on cars to be always-on, calling them "Daytime Running Lights". Now, motorcyclists are lost in a sea of car headlights. And why? Because misguided politicians quoting non-existant safety reports have convinced the world that we all need our headlights on all time time.
Eeesh.
Well at least on some cars you can prevent this - see my post from a while back ("Hack Your Car") where I disabled the DRLs on my VW. Frankly I think we should all be able to prevent this and apparently I'm not the only one. An increasingly vocal group calling themselves Drivers Against Daytime Running Lights (DaDRL) are also getting alarmingly agitated about this same issue. DaDRL is a worldwide voluntary group of experienced motorists including Scientists, Engineers, Mathematicians, Lawyers and Ophthalmological experts who are supported by the leading Pedestrian, Cyclist and Motorcyclist organisations committed to improving road safety by reducing glare and distraction.
If you're interested, their various sites are listed below. Take the time to read over some of the studies that have been actually carried out as opposed to manufactured by politicians. It makes interesting reading. Then turn your bloody headlights off in the daytime!

DaDRL UK

DaDRL USA (LightsOut)

DaDRL Bulgaria

DaDRL Poland

DaDRL Lithuania

Unintended acceleration update.

The longer the NHTSA investigation into Toyota's unintended acceleration woes goes on, the more it turns out to be what we suspected all along - there's not a problem with the cars. There's a problem with the drivers. So far the NHTS has investigated over 3,000 reports of unintended acceleration in Toyotas using various techniques including EDRs - Electronic Data Recorders - the automotive 'black box' that definitively tells you what was going on before a crash. Out of the 3000 or so cases investigated so far, all but two of them have turned out to be 'pedal misapplication'. Read: the driver mashed the accelerator, not the brake. This is eerily similar to the case built against Audi between 1978 and 1986 which eventually turned out to be the exact same thing - idiot drivers.

Still - facts be damned, people are still trying to solve a problem that is entirely human operator error. The latest is an interesting pedal redesign from Masuyuki Naruse a Japanese inventor. Essentially, there is only one pedal in his design - the brake. To accelerate, you slide your foot sideways against a lever instead. It's an interesting idea - if you want to brake, you push on the pedal. To accelerate, you pivot your foot sideways. The only issue I see with this is the phantom brake light problem. If the weight of your foot is on the pedal all the time, even pivoted to the side, then your brake lights will always be on. I'm sure there's some adjustment could be made to the sensitivity of the brake light switch, but I'm not sure the single pedal idea is a good one, because once you introduce human stupidity into the equation, someone will find a way to defeat it and still manage to accelerate when they 'thought' they were braking.
Picture credit : NYT.

The right tool for the right job

You know the saying about having the right tool for the right job? It's true. This weekend whilst investigating an issue under the hood of a car, I dropped a small plastic clip. It bounced off the intake manifold and rolled down between the manifold and cylinder head to come to rest between a couple of coolant pipes. Nice one. The hole it fell down wasn't big enough to get a couple of fingers in, let alone a hand. One quick trip to insert-your-favourite-car-parts-store-here and for $6 I had a retriever, also known as a pick-up tool. Or in tech-speak, a doodad for getting stuff out of tight places. It's a spring-loaded claw on the end of a flexible tube. I had someone hold a torch (flashlight if you're American) and carefully poked said tool down into the gap and was able to retrieve the plastic clip.
If I'd have gone poking around with a screwdriver, it would have ended up falling on to a timing belt or something, inevitably ending up further out of reach. The right tool did the job properly and quickly.

The joys of bluetooth

My VW has a built-in handsfree cellphone kit. The mic is built into the headliner, and everything is integrated with the dash, steering wheel controls and radio. It's wonderful. I can leave my phone on bluetooth now, and when I get into the car, the car becomes the handset.
Now I hate people who use cellphones in cars - weaving, slowing down, leaning towards the centre of the car like some they all have some weird disfigurement. Until I had this car, I would never make or take a call when driving. I was derided and made fun of on occasion for pulling into a parking lot to take a call. But now I have an interesting option. Because I don't need to fuss with the phone, I can make a call using the steering wheel controls. Better yet, if someone phones me, I have the option to ignore the call and send it to voicemail.
I'm not sure this is any safer than actually using the phone physically - I find myself distracted a bit when using the handsfree - more so than just talking to someone in the car with me. But it's nice to have the option.
It seems I might be softening in my stance on useless crap in modern cars. This is the first piece of gadgetry I've found a use for.

Hack your car

In the good old days, modifying your car was a physical affair. Messing with needle jets. Bolting on goodies. Tweaking stuff here and there. Whilst a lot of this is still true, more and more you'll find people modifying their cars with a cable and a laptop. Essentially, it's now possible to hack your car. Anything from minor functional changes to full-on engine remaps are all possible, but for the DIY-er, it's generally best to stick to the less risky end of things. I'll give you an example. My new VW Tiguan came with a lot of nanny features - things that were put there to appease the lawyers but have no real purpose. With the right piece of kit, I've been able to modify my car to suit my tastes. In this case I've used a Ross-Tech MicroCan. It's a package with a piece of software for my laptop, and a USB cable with an OBD2 connector on the other end. Using their software, I've been able to turn off the seatbelt warning chime, turn off the daytime running lights, make it so that I can have high beams and fog lights on together, alter the behaviour of the trunk release (so it now opens, instead of just unlocking) and a bevvy of other minor tweaks and mods. The interesting thing with VW in particular is that a lot of options for their European models are available, but simply disabled in the onboard system for the US. Using the software, I've been able to re-enable those features.
The other nice thing about this particular piece of kit is that it allows me to see DTC and error codes - the things that turn on check engine lights - and clear them if I want. I can even reprogram my own TPMS monitors when switching from summer to winter wheels and back.
It's the brave new world of car modifying - try it - you'll like it.