Video: Ouch

Horrific drag racing crash. Driver survived with broken bones.

Unusual Car Sighting: Figaro

Went to Costco to grab some stuff, came out and saw this car parked nearby. It is a Nissan Figaro, a very small retro convertible with an interesting retractable roof. There is a nice Wikipedia article on the Figaro here.

Changes In The (Autoblogging) Landscape

When I started doing this, there were a few intrepid auto bloggers, pounding away in obscurity.

Then AOL bought Autoblog, and made it into a press release firehose. Jalopnik tries hard to keep up, but does it with more flair, OfficeSpace style. Eric of AngryEngineer was seduced by the dark side ("Jedi mind tricks don't work on me, only money") and joined Autoblog, wrote some kickass how-to articles, then disappeared.

Joe over at MyFordDreams, apparently worn down by his beloved Ford's inability to gain traction, slowed down to a trickle and then stopped. Now Carpundit has thrown in the keyboard, with the mysterious sign off "I am done with this blog. Blogging is over for me; three years was enough. Bye.". Automuse, perhaps the only female autoblogger, is very slow, but might still be going.

On the bright side, we now have Mark Tapscott, who took over the Carnival of Cars duties, and who actually gets on TV every now and then. Keep it up, Mark! And Pete De Lorenzo of AutoExtremist still throws it down weekly, pulling no punches.

Blogging is actually a lot of work, if you want to say something you think is your own, and don't want to sound stupid--although I can't claim to avoid that consistently. It's easy to repackage a news story from the Detroit News or a press release from Isuzu, harder to come up with a coherent commentary on what it means.

Do you have an opinion? Why don't you try your hand? We need more real bloggers, guys who sit in their basements in furry slippers at 2:00am trying to shout some common sense at the people in the private jets.

Cheap Insurance: Gerber Seat Belt Cutter

After the Minneapolis bridge collapse, my wife asked me if we could get some seat belt cutters "just in case". She wanted some extra confidence, in case she was ever trapped in her car, or needed to help someone else out.

I did a Google search, and found a very nice tool made by Gerber, which also makes the excellent Multi Plier multi-tool (second only to the high end Leatherman tools). Amazon sells it (here) for a very reasonable $5 plus shipping.


The knife has a simple and easy to use design, with a cutting hook on one end, made from two opposed straight blades, a body made of tough black plastic, and a nylon lanyard at the other end. To use it, you hook the cutting end over a seatbelt and pull, drawing the two blades through the fabric.

Once you get one of these, another important consideration is where to keep it. If it is in your trunk, or the back of your glovebox, it won't do you much good. A better way to keep it is to use duct tape or velcro tape to affix the cutter to the underside of the driver's seat, or a similar out of the way surface, where you can grab it quickly and easily.

Will you ever need a seat belt cutter? Probably and hopefully not. But for $5, it is a cheap bit of extra insurance.

P.S. I also keep a center punch, to easily break safety glass with. $10 at any hardware store.

A Few Dream Cruise Photos

I went to the Woodward Dream Cruise late, when it was starting to rain, and didn't really see much that was all that new or exciting. There were lots and lots of 60's and 70's muscle cars, which get old after a few minutes. Here are a few photos I grabbed.

A carefully restored 1965 Volvo. With Arabic script on the rear window.

A not yet carefully restored Volvo.

This dog was posing in front of his owner's hot-rod.

The street preachers took up shop outside the Hall Of
The Mountain King, near some Avantis.

Near the Ford area, some Edsels (still ugly after all these years).
In the upper right is an experimental hydrogen fuel cell powered Edge.

This horned monster truck was cruising through the
Birmingham shopping district. Too much, dude, too much.

A segway nerd scoots past a non-plussed Oakland County sheriff.

The Dream Cruise experience was under-whelming. Too many muscle cars, not enough really old cars. I did see a restored deuce-and-a-half WWII vintage truck cruising around, which was neat. There was also a cube van plastered with huge photos of dismembered fetuses, to protest abortion, which was not. I am pro-life, but man, don't rub it in my face like that. There were a lot of for sale signs on cars--if you were in the market for an expensive toy, you could have done very well at the Dream Cruise this year.

Video Idiots, Vol 7: How Not To Remove A Pole

No, his bumper does not come off. It's about as bad, though.


How Not To Remove A Basketball Hoop - Watch more free videos

Scoring SCORE

In an article in their vehicles section, Forbes online published a list of the least safe 20 vehicles, ranked according to the Statisical Combination Of Risk Elements (SCORE) metric. The SCORE metric is published by an organization called Informed For Life (which I have not heard of before), and is an attempt to rate how safe a vehicle is by combining various statistics into one number.

I have some reservations about the usefulness of the SCORE metric, however, because it doesn't really correlate that well with actual driver death rates, as published by the IIHS.

Here is a plot published by IFL which claims to show the correlation between the SCORE an driver death rates per million registered years:


What you might notice right away is the large spread of SCORE values for any given driver death rate bin. For example, for the 50-60 bin, which is well below average, the SCORE varies from 80 to 180--from 20% better than average to 80% worse than average. I also notice the R^2 value of 0.48, which is not a stellar mean squared error. SCORE clearly has some correlation with driver death rates, but it is rough.

Here are some specific examples of vehicles that have high (bad) SCORE scores but have pretty good real-world safety records:

• Mid-sized SUV: 2004 Jeep Grand Cherokee
• SCORE = 181 (ave = 100)
  
• IIHS DDR = 57 (ave = 79)
  
• Small SUV: 2004 Ford Escape
• SCORE = 172
• IIHS DDR = 65
• Mid-sized car: 2004 Buick Regal
• SCORE = 123
• IIHS DDR = 57
  
• Compact car: 2004 Saturn Ion
• SCORE = 114
• IIHS DDR = 67
• Compact car: 2004 Pontiac Vibe
• SCORE = 115
• IIHS DDR = 62

All of these have higher-than average risk according to the SCORE metric, but in real life have lower than average fatality rates! It seems that SCORE puts too much emphasis on crash survivability, and not enough other factors like the ability of a vehicle to avoid an accident. It also seems to over-state the danger of rollovers. Something that is not widely publicized is that 70% of rollover fatalities occur when occupants are not wearing seatbelts (source: NHTSA). However, most people (~80%) are wearing their seatbelts nowadays, which partly accounts for why SUVs have a good safety record overall. The SCORE is really an estimate of how safe a car is in an assumed buy unspecified crash.

Aside; The IIHS driver death rate statistic also has some problems. IIHS does not account for driver behavior, which causes some vehicles such as sports cars to have much higher driver death rates than their crash test results would suggest. An interesting example of this is the DDR number for the Ford Mustang convertible (DDR 97) vs Ford Mustang hard-top (DDR 150). The two cars have nearly designs, from a crash point of view, but the Mustang hard-top has a much higher single vehicle death rate. It would appear that hard-top owners drive stupid more frequently than convertible owners.

The SCORE metric is an inconsistent predictor of vehicle safety in the real world. That doesn't mean it is worthless, but like anything, even the IIHS driver death rate statistic, it should be considered as part of a larger picture.