Category: Automobiles
She’s a beauty
Taken at Fort Yates, North Dakota, Sunday, August 30th, 2009.
Another redux post of the day
This one was posted here in a slightly different form six years ago today. Even more applicable now I’d say. It’s from a 2001 New Yorker article by Malcolm Gladwell on the evolution of air bags and the continuing importance of seat belts.
Daniel Simons, a professor of psychology at Harvard, has done a more dramatic set of experiments, following on the same idea. He and a colleague, Christopher Chabris, recently made a video of two teams of basketball players, one team in white shirts and the other in black, each player in constant motion as two basketballs are passed back and forth. Observers were asked to count the number of passes completed by the members of the white team. After about forty-five seconds of passes, a woman in a gorilla suit walks into the middle of the group, stands in front of the camera, beats her chest vigorously, and then walks away. “Fifty per cent of the people missed the gorilla,” Simons says. “We got the most striking reactions. We’d ask people, ‘Did you see anyone walking across the screen?’ They’d say no. Anything at all? No. Eventually, we’d ask them, ‘Did you notice the gorilla?’ And they’d say, ‘The what?’…Talking on a cell phone and trying to drive, for instance, is not unlike trying to count passes in a basketball game and simultaneously keep track of wandering animals.”
It’s Electric!
Tad Friend test drives the Tesla:
But you don’t buy a hundred-and-nine-thousand-dollar electric car for its glove compartment. The first difference I noticed was the engine’s catlike purr: when I tooled through the Stanford University campus, cyclists and runners did double takes as I coasted past more softly than the wind. Then I realized that I was unusually elated, filled with an odd combination of moral increase (I’m saving the planet!) and of consumerist glee (I’m faster than a hungry cheetah!).
Zero to 60 in 3.9.
Speaking of NM license plates
Adopt just the new plate, or keep the old plate as an option?
Take the License Plate Survey.
The new turquoise plate will be available in January. The 10-year-old balloon plate is ending its run.
Best line of the day
“General Motors Corp. said today its Chevrolet Volt rechargeable electric car should get 230 miles per gallon of gasoline in city driving …”
Two hundred and thirty. Of course, lets remember, electricity (you plug the car in) is not free.
Thanks to Marlita H. for the link.
Advice on Car Repairs, Auto Mechanics, Car Reviews and Values
On DriverSide, users register the type of car they drive. The most popular feature on the site, Mr. Traina said, is a tool that tells you what parts and labor should cost for repairs, based on the type of car and location, and includes reviews of local mechanics. It comes up with estimates based on data it collects from 35 sources, including car companies and repair shop receipts that other users have uploaded.
Z goodness
Z isn’t talking to me because she noticed me eyeing a Ferrari parked on the street in Aspen. Before that though, she was eager that I share that she got 33.6 mpg on the 425 mile trip up from Albuquerque (via Leadville).
Road trip
The Z is taking me to Aspen for the weekend. We’ve talked it over and decided to leave the computers at home with a sitter.
See ya’ Monday or Tuesday.
Important Safety News
According to information at The New Yorker Blog, it’s 34 times riskier to drive while playing the accordion.
At least he wasn’t texting
The last time police arrested Waldo Baca for drunken driving, an officer found him passed out cold in his truck by the side of Interstate 25 near Santa Fe.
It took the officer several minutes to rouse him, but even then Baca was too intoxicated to speak, according to a state police report. The officer found a mostly empty bottle of whiskey, an empty whiskey bottle and an empty beer can inside Baca’s truck, the report says. Later, after refusing to take sobriety and breath-alcohol tests, Baca told a nurse who was drawing his blood at the hospital that alcohol, marijuana and cocaine would be found in his blood, the report states.
His blood-alcohol level at the time was later determined to have been .24 — three times the legal driving limit, according to a spokeswoman for the Department of Health, which oversees the blood testing.
The arrest — which occurred about 6:30 p.m. June 26 — marked the ninth time in the last 17 years Baca, 40, has been taken into custody by police officers from Santa Fe to Los Lunas for drunken driving, according to court records and statistics kept by the DWI Resource Center in Albuquerque.
The New Mexican has more on how Mr. Baca has skirted the system.
Someone just like him may be alongside of you the next time you take the kids to soccer.
Click if only for the mug shot.
Scariest line of the day
“The new study … found that when the drivers texted, their collision risk was 23 times greater than when not texting.”
Damn!
The driver, her daughter and three girl cousins were killed in this formerly red minivan. The driver’s son is in critical condition. Three people were killed in other car. The minivan was going the wrong way on the Taconic State Parkway north of New York City.
Excuse me if I fail to see God’s plan in this.
Photo from the New York Times (cropped).
Four bad things about my new car
Tires for the BMW Z4 get about 18,000 miles. The front pair are a different size from the rear pair, so you can’t rotate them.
New set of four, about $1500.
The tires are run flat. There is no spare.
World’s first automobile road trip
Today’s redux post of the day (first posted two years ago):
If it sounds as if it would take an expert machinist to operate it, well, Benz might have thought so too, until his wife borrowed the family car without telling him. On a summer morning in August 1888, Bertha Benz got up early, loaded her sons Eugen and Richard on board and set out in the Motorwagen for her mother’s house in Pforzheim, a journey of some 50 miles. Karl Benz awoke to find a note his wife had left saying she was going to visit Grandma. He must have been panicked. The Motorwagen had never been tested for more than a few miles.
That evening, Bertha wired Karl to say they had arrived safely. But not, as it turned out, without incident. Bertha was obliged to clean out a clogged fuel line with her hatpin and mend an ignition wire with one of her garters. When the brake shoe started to give way, she stopped at a farrier’s in Bauschlott for a block of leather to replace it. In Wiesloch, she stopped at an apothecary to fill up on benzene (this pharmacy still bills itself as the world’s first filling station). And so it happened that the world’s first motorist was, in fact, a woman.
Karl Benz patented the very first gasoline-powered vehicle in January 1886. “Everything in the modern car is in there. Benz just nailed it.”
Neil’s article about the first car is excellent.
Line of the day (and every day)
“Research shows that motorists talking on a phone are four times as likely to crash as other drivers, and are as likely to cause an accident as someone with a .08 blood alcohol content.”
Driven to Distraction – NYTimes.com
And the research also shows that it’s the conversation, not the phone, that takes a driver’s mind off the road.
Distracted Driving Game
“New studies show that drivers overestimate their ability to multitask behind the wheel. This game measures how your reaction time is affected by external distractions. Regardless of your results, experts say, you should not attempt to text when driving.”
10 little things I like
… about my new car. None of you care, I’m sure, but the excitement is still there for me.
It plays my iPod through the radio with controls on the steering wheel; and volume increases in pre-set stages as speed increases (because a roadster can get noisy).
Rain sensitive wipers.
The gas filler and the console lock when the car is locked. They unlock when the car is unlocked.
My iPhone works through the radio. The microphone is on the steering wheel. If the phone is in the car, it all works.
Oh, and my phone directory automatically syncs so I can pick the person to call by scanning the radio readout (using the steering wheel control). Or see who it is (caller ID in a car).
I got 25 miles per gallon on the first 100 miles — mostly around town.
You can make the top go down with the key remote.
The cool BMW logo lights on each side (turn signals).
Oil changes every 15,000 miles.
The speedometer goes up to 160 mph.
Quandry
I bought a BMW yesterday, so now I have a German car and a Japanese car (a Lexus).
That leaves me with a problem though.
I can’t decide which one to drive to the conference I’m attending on who won World War II.
It’s really better if you wait for the train to pass
Omigod!
Watch the video by clicking on the right-facing triangle. Then quickly enlarge it to full screen (click on the far right button). 30 seconds. Just watch.
Five kids were in the black Ford, ages 14-21 and driven by a 19-year-old who’s license was suspended the day before for poor driving.
All five were killed — this near Detroit on Thursday.
What was that thing about stringing them up at the side of the road?
Jill says she’s in — and sent along this news story.
A woman with a long history of driving violations had a blood alcohol level more than twice the legal limit when she plowed into the back of a pickup truck on the Capital Beltway, sending the pickup over a guardrail and hurtling down a 60-foot embankment onto its roof in Montgomery County, authorities said yesterday.
The two men in the Nissan pickup, who were driving home to Virginia from a construction job site, were killed.
What’s going on in your car while it’s being serviced?
The first two times Jason brought his truck in to his local Toyota dealership for service, he noticed that someone had taken quarters from his change compartment. He complained both times, but was ignored. So the third time he brought his truck in, he placed a video camera on the passenger side. The dealership didn’t ignore him this time.
Consumerist has the story and some of the video. It’s much more than a few quarters.
Tragedy follow up
Sheriff Greg Solano and District Attorney Spence Pacheco are releasing the blood test results from the June 28th crash involving Scott Owens age 28, and five teenagers one of which remains hospitalized in Albuquerque NM. After Sheriff’s Deputies received a Search warrant tests on The Blood Alcohol content on Scott Owens was found to be 0.16 which is twice the legal limit of .08. A search warrant was obtained for the blood of Avree Koffman, age 16, driver of the vehicle in which 4 teens were killed and those results came back as .00 revealing no alcohol in the blood. Only Alcohol content was revealed in the initial tests. Tests for drugs are not included in these results.
Milestone
My 2001 Lexus is beginning to show its age.