Check out the Dell Store on CNETThe Insurance Institute for Highway Safety's Top Safety Pick award for 2010 goes to 19 cars and eight SUVs. And for the first time, the vehicles were tested on roof strength, to measure protection in a rollover. Top Safety Pick winners also must have electronic stability control, which research shows significantly reduces crash risk. This is the second time the Institute has tightened criteria since announcing the first recipients in 2005.
According to the IIHS report out today, Subaru is the only manufacturer with a winner in all four vehicle classes. The automaker earns five awards for 2010, followed by Ford and Volvo, coming in with six winners. Volkswagen/Audi has five, and Chrysler follows with four awards. Two new small cars, the Nissan Cube and Kia Soul, join the Top Safety Pick list for 2010.
The new requirement for strong roofs are in response to the fact that rollovers kill more than 9,000 people in passenger vehicles each year. The Institute estimates that stronger roofs reduce the risk of serious and fatal injury in single-vehicle rollovers by about 50 percent compared with roofs meeting the minimum requirement.
(Source: Insurance Institute for Highway Safety)
Space-age design: The mPower Emergency Illuminator is set to hit stores in March, 2010.
(Credit: mPower)Flashlights are becoming more and more sophisticated, as well as rather expensive. Case in point: the upcoming mPower Emergency Illuminator, which made its press debut this week at an event in New York. Designed by the Porsche Design Studio to be "a stylish product with emergency utility, it will cost somewhere between $250 and $300 when it comes out in March of 2010.
Aside from the fetching design, the mPower Emergency Illuminator boasts some innovative battery technology. One battery "tube" stores two CR123 batteries, while the other has what's called an OnCommand Reserve Battery that the company says has a minimum 20-year shelf life and will deliver "power on command when and where you need it."
While the special reserve battery isn't rechargeable and will wear down if you use the flashlight a lot, it will never degrade just sitting around in its tube. In other words, you could never turn this torch on for years, and it would still work the moment you need it--according to mPower. Replacing the backup battery will cost you around $25, though that price may go up with inflation over the years.
It's also worth noting that the flashlight has a built-in USB port for charging cell phones and other gadgets. If there's juice available from the CR123 batteries, your device will draw power from them; if not, it will charge up via the backup battery.
Comments? Would you rather have this model or the battery-free LED quick charging flashlight from 5.11 Tactical?
TOKYO--A senior Toyota executive last week denied statements by U.S. safety authorities that the company issued "inaccurate and misleading information" about a safety recall.
Toyota's recall of 3.8 million vehicles in the United States advised drivers to remove floor mats that may jam the gas pedal and cause unintended acceleration.
In a statement last week, Toyota said the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration found "no defect exists in vehicles with properly installed floor mats." In fact, NHTSA said, Toyota vehicles have a "very serious defect."
Toyota Executive Vice President Yukitoshi Funo denied that the automaker tried to sidestep engineering or design defects. He said the company is working closely with NHTSA to pinpoint the cause of the problem.
"It is not a part of Toyota's culture and the Toyota Way to cover up anything, and we are proceeding with open and frank discussions with NHTSA," Funo said.
According to a NHTSA statement, the accelerator and floor design of the vehicles create "the potential for entrapment of the accelerator by floor mats." The statement said removing the floor mats is only an interim solution that does not correct the underlying defect.
Funo said Toyota had "no disagreement on this issue."
The floor mat recall was prompted by an August 28 accident involving a runaway Lexus ES 350 in San Diego that killed four people.
The company has said it would begin sending letters to owners urging them to remove the floor mats from their cars while the company considers what to do about the problem.
(Source: Automotive News)
Ford's inflatable seat belts are designed for the rear seat.
(Credit: Ford)Ford announced a new seat belt innovation on Thursday: seat belts that inflate during a collision. Designed for rear-seat passengers, Ford claims the new seat belts spread collision force over five times the area of a traditional seat belt when inflated. In a crash, the seat belts limit head and neck movement, which should reduce injury.
Ford also says the extra bulk of these seat belts gives them a padded feeling, making them more comfortable, so rear-seat passengers are more likely to wear them. Current usage statistics show that 82 percent of front seat occupants wear seat belts, but only 61 percent of rear seat passengers wear them.
These inflatable seat belts will be included in the next update to the Ford Explorer, with other Ford vehicles following.
Automatic parking systems are becoming more common, and some automakers are offering several 2010 models with the convenience feature.
Volkswagen AG, Ford Motor Co. and Toyota Motor Corp. are leaders in the commercial introduction of automatic parking systems, which allow vehicles to identify and steer themselves into parking spaces.
VW offers the system in six Volkswagen models and the Audi A3. Ford's 2010 Lincoln MKT crossover and MKS sedan have it as well. Both worked with Valeo SA to develop their own ultrasonic-based systems. The Valeo technology, called Park 4U, won a 2008 Automotive News PACE Award.
Toyota's Advanced Parking Guidance System will be an option on 2010 versions of the Lexus LS 460, LS 460 L and hybrid LS 600hL and the Toyota Prius hybrid.
The Toyota version, from Aisin Seiki Co., started in 2003 as a camera-aided visual system on the Japanese-market Prius. But Toyota and Aisin Seiki have added ultrasonic sensors from Denso Corp. to develop the system into a more sophisticated feature that also allows the vehicle to back itself into perpendicular parking spaces.
... Read more
We purposely attempted common jumper cable errors with the PowerSafe cables and lived to tell the tale.
(Credit: Antuan Goodwin/CNET)I was given my first set of jumper cables at the same time I received my first car. Before setting me loose on the world, my father gave me a very serious speech about the dangers of improperly jump-starting a vehicle. I was warned of potential electrocution, sparks igniting gasoline fires, and--most seriously--acid spewing battery explosions if the cables weren't connected in just the right way and in just the right order. Even armed with this sacred knowledge, I still throw sparks every time I jump-start a car, just for kicks. Sorry, dad.
However, most drivers didn't get my dad's speech and as a result, they find themselves in an even more precarious situation when the day comes that they need to borrow a few electrons to jump a dead battery. Here's where Energy Safe Technologies come in with its PowerSafe jumper cables.
The PowerSafe jumper cables look like your standard jumpers, with a pair of terminal clamps on each end. However, midway through the cables' length is a small electronic brain that monitors the state of the connections and only lets power flow when everything is hooked up just right.
So, if you accidentally connect your cable backward on either end, the system will display a red warning light and the power stays off. If you accidentally touch the loose ends of a live cable, the red light glows and there are no sparks. If there's a short of any kind, even within the dead battery, the red light glows and everyone remains safe.
Once both ends are properly connected and both indicator lights glow green, the system uses a soft start circuit to gradually ramp up the power flow, eliminating power spikes and protecting delicate vehicle electronics.
We were given a demo of the PowerSafe cables prototype at Energy Safe Technologies' booth, tucked away in the back of the SEMA Show's north hall. No matter how haphazardly we connected or disconnected the cables, we were unable to cause a fire, throw wicked sparks, or create an acid-spewing battery explosion--which is boring, but very safe.
The PowerSafe jumper cables should be available in early 2010. Pricing has not yet been announced.
Badge of death?
(Credit: Josh Miller/CNET)A tide of Toyota owners report incidents of sudden, unintended acceleration, according to a story by ABC News. Toyota attributes these incidents to improperly installed or wrong-sized floor mats jamming the accelerator down, but the ABC story cites owners' fears of electronic throttle controls. The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration has investigated and discounted problems with electronic throttle control.
The ABC story includes harrowing accounts from owners. One driver claims her Prius "suddenly shot up to 90 miles an hour." Given the Prius' acceleration, she would have had plenty of time to react. The proper thing to do under these circumstances is put the car in neutral.
When Consumer Reports tested how different cars coped with sudden acceleration problems, it found that some European automakers install a nifty little mechanism that idles the throttle when the brake is depressed, something Toyota should look into--if for no other reason than to allay future fears.
Want to tweet with Ford's Sync? There's an app for that.
(Credit: CNET)Editors' note: Ford has clarified that its open platform is still in the prealpha testing stages. The article has been updated to reflect this information.
When Ford and Microsoft opened up their joint Sync platform for its own applications and updates, we wondered when the day would come that third-party developers would be given a crack at the in-vehicle infomatics interface. Well, that day may be on the horizon. Ford announced that it is testing an open-source platform to could be used in the future to develop applications that make use of Sync to connect to social networks in the cloud.
Ford's representatives said the system is built on a Robotics Studio platform by Microsoft that has been layered with an open-source cloud-computing platform developed by Ford that will allow rich--and hopefully seamless--interactions with social networks such as Facebook and Twitter.
So what's the point? How can social network interactions be useful and safe in 2,000-plus pounds of steel moving at 70mph? Ford's Venkatesh Prasad, group and technical leader of vehicle design and infotainment, posed the following scenarios:
The Ford Fiesta will be the test vehicle used in the University of Michigan's Ford open platform competition.
(Credit: Ford)Imagine you're on a cross-country road trip and you decide to stop in a new city for something to eat. Now, you don't know this new city very well, so you ask Sync to grab some dining and sightseeing suggestions. The application could then fire out a tweet, update your Facebook status, or query Yelp on your behalf and when the responses roll in, it could format them in an easy to understand way, for example as a custom points-of-interest menu.
Another possible application is a Green Car Challenge, where you compete with your friends to see who can average the highest fuel economy while suggesting the greenest driving routes to one another.
This all sounds pretty cool on paper; we'll have to wait a bit longer to know exactly how effective these apps will actually be. We expect that it will really depend on the size, make up, and responsiveness of your social network. I shudder to think of all of the Twitter-bots that currently follow me supplying any sort of advice.
The first test of Ford's open-application SDK will be in conjunction with a competition at the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor. Students will compete to develop the best Sync application that makes use of the cloud. The winning team will have their app installed in Ford's first test mule, a Ford Fiesta, and will take a road trip from Ann Arbor to San Francisco to participate in the 2010 San Mateo Maker's Faire.
Ford currently has no road map for when we can expect to see the Sync open platform in production vehicles, as it is still in the prealpha testing phases.
Researchers at Ford Motor have some high-tech tools to help them understand driver distraction and to improve safety behind the wheel. One of those tools is the "Distraction Lab," a full-motion-based driving simulator.
The Virttex (Virtual Test Track Experiment) simulator has been in operation since 2001. It looks like an egg-shaped alien spacecraft on legs. The Virttex simulator has helped Ford develop new products, such as SYNC, and continues to help researchers understand driver distractions.
Consumer Reports tested the Toyota Venza's brakes with a wide-open throttle.
(Credit: James Martin/CNET)After the Toyota recall over loose floor mats interfering with gas pedals, Consumer Reports tested stuck throttle scenarios with a Toyota Venza, Chevrolet HHR, Volkswagen Jetta Wagon, and Mercedes-Benz E350. The nature of the test was simple, but probably a bit harrowing: the drivers floored the gas pedal until the cars reaches 60 mph, then, keeping the gas depressed, pushed down the brake pedal to see if the car would stop.
The Jetta wagon has Smart Throttle technology, which idles the engine when the brakes are used.
(Credit: Corinne Schulze/CNET)The test wasn't quite fair, as both German cars had a tech trick, called Smart Throttle, for just such a situation. When the brakes are applied, the throttle lifts, no matter what's happening with the gas pedal. According to the Consumer Reports blog post, both cars easily came to a stop, and the engines idled even with the gas pedal floored.
With the Toyota and the Chevrolet, the drivers performed this test at 20 mph the first time because the cars did not have the Smart Throttle technology. Both cars downshifted quickly when put through this test, and the drivers had to struggle to keep pressure on the brakes, fighting engine torque. But they were able to bring the cars to a stop. Repeating the test on these cars by running up to the full 60 mph, the drivers were able to slow to about 10 mph, but brake fade kept them from coming to a complete stop.
Consumer Reports concludes, as Toyota said in its advisory, that the best thing to do if your throttle is stuck is put the car in neutral. The engine will continue to run at horrendous speeds, but the rev limiter will keep it from burning up over redline. When the car is safely stopped on the side of the road, you can turn it all the way off.
