Cars That Drive Too Much Where is the point of diminishing returns for advanced automotive technologies? The European City Mobil project investigated drivers’ reaction times in a critical-safety event and found that drivers in a highly automated vehicle had slower reaction times than those who retained full manual control of the vehicle. City Mobil conducted [...]
Reprinted from The Safety Record, Volume 8, Issue 1, March 2011 Fuel “spit back” through the filler neck has been a longstanding problem in several Chrysler, Dodge and Jeep models, caused by the Inlet Check Valve (ICV) mounted in the fuel tank. Despite some limited recalls and at least one extended lifetime warranty, this defect, [...]
Reprinted from The Safety Record, Volume 8, Issue 1, March 2011 WASHINGTON, D.C. – As the government ran on the fumes of a continuing budget resolution, and as the House Republicans and the Senate Democrats continued wrangling, the U.S. Consumer Product Safety Commission completed its soft launch of the new publicly accessible and searchable consumer [...]
Reprinted from The Safety Record, Volume 8, Issue 1, March 2011 WASHINGTON, DC – Will the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration determine that seat heaters exceeding human burn tolerance are defective, as other public health agencies do, or will they continue to argue that not enough people have been burned?
Reprinted from The Safety Record, Volume 8, Issue 1, March 2011 WENDOVER, UTAH – Last November, as NASA’s Engineering and Safety Center was dotting the “i”s and crossing the “t”s of its “exacting” study of Toyota’s electronic throttle control, Paul VanAlfen was in a panic. The Utah man was frantically trying to disengage the cruise [...]
Reprinted from The Safety Record, Volume 8, Issue 1, March 2011 Last month, the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration closed an investigation into the problem of fuel spit-back affecting Jeep Wrangler vehicles from the 2007-2008 model years, concluding that no safety-related defect trend had been identified. Fuel spit-back occurs when a vehicle’s inlet check valve [...]