Archives
Friday, April 30, 2010
Federal Safety
Magic
Can
you believe it? Magic is, uh, deception.
RELEVANCE. Scientists in particular are quick to tell us there's no such thing as magic, and professional magicians are fond of telling us the same thing: what appears to be magic is only an illusion accomplished by 'misdirection,' the ability of an illusionist to make you look at what the right hand is doing while the left is operating in secret. The intent, of course, is to fool your perceptions, so that you see only what the illusionist wants you to see, which makes him godlike and you a willing thrall.
But in this context, the word 'illusion' is really a stand-in for 'trick,' which is fine in show business but not so fine when it pertains to matters of life and death in the real world. That's the nature of the game being played with the new healthcare bill, and it's encouraging that so many people sense it viscerally even if they can't pin down exactly how the necessary misdirection is being implemented. The good news is that we can pin down a parallel misdirection in another area that pertains directly to real world life and death. So, as I talk about automotive issues in the remainder of this post, think healthcare. Precisely the same mechanisms are involved.
When it comes to cars, the federal government has been in the business of 'magical' solutions for about 35 years now. It started with Carter (!), who rammed Corporate Average Fuel Economy (CAFE) standards through congress. Yes, the government gets to require technological advancements (and consumer compromises) by simply legislating they must occur. All in the public interest (look at my right hand) while the actual result was the (don't look at my left hand) Chevy Vega and the Ford Pinto. Both abominations with good fuel economy ratings. The Vega was an unreliable, rust-doomed lemon and the Pinto was a deathtrap.
Thank you, federal government. The main point of which is that the federal government has been interfering in the automotive industry for close to two generations while it declined and gradually, in partnership with government, put itself out of business.
There's a big break in my personal history of the public versus the government in American automotive history. I grew up as a South Jersey motorhead with a bias toward sports cars as opposed to Detroit iron, and I was therefore a devotee of a magazine called Car and Driver, which played a leading role in exposing the fraud behind the charges of unintended acceleration levelled against Audi in the early eighties and was, when I suddenly transplanted myself to Dayton, Ohio, leading the charge against airbags -- because they weren't safe. Car and Driver in those days ascribed to a philosophy that automotive safety was best achieved by skilled drivers and nimble, good handling cars. Their position on Audi's supposed unintended acceleration problem was that there is no such thing as a car which can't be stopped by its brakes. Their position on airbags was that they deployed at the exact moment when a good driver should be engaged in maximum accident avoidance maneuvers. uh, you know. Something about individual responsibility and the value of skill and knowledge over government regulation.
Of course, as a motorhead in the midwest, I wound up being a consultant for General Motors. I also learned that drivers in the midwest don't drive. They steer. When I lived in Dayton, I was shocked by two things. First, that weather reports for the Miami Valley were always accurate, unlike the mercurial experiences of the Delaware Valley that continually confound weathermen in Philadelphia. When Dayton's toupeed weathermen said it was going to rain, it rained for days. Which makes life predictable. And, second, that automobile accidents in the midwest are incredibly, overwhelmingly, one car accidents. People suddenly lose control of their vehicles on interstates because they've never learned anything about driving close to other cars and trucks in traffic. Any kind of closeness is too much for them. They don't know where their fenders and bumpers are. Because their cars aren't anything but appliances that are somehow supposed to protect them from all harm. I remember a young Dayton lady who thought she was a hotshot balls-to-the-wall driver in Ohio but suddenly stopped dead in the middle of a South Philadelphia street and pronounced herself unable to continue.
Well, I returned after a few years, as east-coasters always do, to my home country. I picked up a copy of Car and Driver and discovered that they had become devout exponents of airbags. WTF. Now they were judging cars by how many airbags they had. In the interim, I had actually visited in my consultant role an airbag manufacturer in Salt Lake City, whose engineers made it clear to me just how delicate the technology was. It was an explosive device a few inches from the driver. Nothing to be trifled with.
Yet we have been trifling with it for decades now, all in the name of safety. Even before I went to Dayton, I'd been through the first safety misdirection of the government, which had to do with a technology called "interlock," an early attempt to save us from our own stupidity:
By the mid-1970s, auto manufacturers
modified the system so that a
warning buzzer would sound for several seconds before turning off (with
the warning light), regardless of whether the car was started. However,
if the driver was buckled up, the light would appear, but with no
buzzer. New cars sold in the United
States in 1974 and the first part
of the 1975 model year were sold with a special "ignition interlock",
whereby the driver could not start the car until the seat belt was
fastened; however, this system was short-lived.
Short-lived because people figured out they could either get the system dismantled at obliging dealerships or defeat it for nothing by permanently fastening seatbelts under their butts. If you didn't mind a buckle lodged permanently under your ass, you had no problem.
Back in the old days, Car and Driver thought "interlock" was pretty funny. They were libertarian rapscallions who thought driving was the best thing in life. That's why I was so disturbed to discover that they had become so pro-airbag. A generational thing? Kids coming along who no longer understood the danger the government posed? But I don't think it's that, really. I think they're so intoxicated with advancing technology that they just, er, forget that not everyone who's out there driving is a twenty-something balls-to-the-wall type who knows the risks he is taking and wants a last-gasp defense against the worst possible road decision. They're still enthusiasts. Which is why they probably don't know this:
AIRBAG INJURIES TO SHORT WOMEN DRIVERS
Short adult drivers, especially women, have been severely and fatally injured by the explosive force of a driver’s airbag… even in low to moderate speed crashes. Because of their short stature, from perhaps 4’10’’ to around 5’4”, shorter drivers need to adjust their seat virtually to its full forward position. This places their chest and head in close proximity to the steering wheel. And in the center hub of that steering wheel is the stored airbag, ready to explosively inflate in a frontal impact. The explosive inflation can move the unfolding airbag toward you at 120 to 200 miles per hour, and generate a force of 2,000 pounds.
Some of the initial accident case examples concerned shorter women drivers, sitting very close to the steering wheel, who were fatally injured when the explosive force of the airbag fractured their ribs, which punctured and tore their aorta. The crashes were moderate in nature, and the airbag was the needless cause of death in what would have easily been a survivable collision. Some of the women were shorter, older, and more frail… making them more susceptible to the airbag inflation forces breaking their ribs, tearing their aorta, and causing fatal injuries.
HOW AND WHY AIRBAG HAZARDS OCCURRED
How could such a prominent safety technology as airbags been compromised, leading to needless deaths and injuries ? Airbags are not a new development, despite the general public perception that airbags are a technology of the ‘90’s. In fact, the development of airbags goes back to the ‘50’s and ‘60’s, when the earliest dynamic: sled tests and car crash tests by GM and Ford showed their great promise to reduce traumatic injuries in collision accidents. There was anticipation in the early-‘70’s that airbags would soon be installed. NHTSA had initiated rule-making, and the car companies in the U.S., Europe, and Japan were all developing airbag systems for their vehicles. But top officials from Ford and GM and Chrysler went to the White House in 1971, and urged President Nixon to delay the then-pending auto safety standards, including the requirement for airbags. The game plan was to delay, delay, delay. A delay that lasted almost 20 years.
Thus, the pending 1970’s requirement for airbags was politically shelved, and languished in limbo into the mid-1980’s. There was nothing preventing car companies from installing airbags on their own. After a Supreme Court decision in 1983 forced NHTSA to re-examine their latest cancellation, the rulemaking process began again. NHTSA and DOT responded with a 1984 plan to link mandatory buckle-up laws to a decision about requiring airbags.
But without waiting for a NHTSA mandate, Mercedes introduced airbags in some models in 1984, and Ford offered a driver airbag option in the 1985 Tempo. Then in 1988, Chrysler began to promote airbags as a standard feature in most of their cars. This was a stunning turn-around by Chrysler CEO Lee Iacocca, who had railed against airbags for years… including his criticisms made in 1971 in the Oval Office to President Richard Nixon, who was thus encouraged to cancel an impending airbags regulation to be phased in during the mid-1970’s.
Short adult drivers, especially women, have been severely and fatally injured by the explosive force of a driver’s airbag… even in low to moderate speed crashes. Because of their short stature, from perhaps 4’10’’ to around 5’4”, shorter drivers need to adjust their seat virtually to its full forward position. This places their chest and head in close proximity to the steering wheel. And in the center hub of that steering wheel is the stored airbag, ready to explosively inflate in a frontal impact. The explosive inflation can move the unfolding airbag toward you at 120 to 200 miles per hour, and generate a force of 2,000 pounds.
Some of the initial accident case examples concerned shorter women drivers, sitting very close to the steering wheel, who were fatally injured when the explosive force of the airbag fractured their ribs, which punctured and tore their aorta. The crashes were moderate in nature, and the airbag was the needless cause of death in what would have easily been a survivable collision. Some of the women were shorter, older, and more frail… making them more susceptible to the airbag inflation forces breaking their ribs, tearing their aorta, and causing fatal injuries.
HOW AND WHY AIRBAG HAZARDS OCCURRED
How could such a prominent safety technology as airbags been compromised, leading to needless deaths and injuries ? Airbags are not a new development, despite the general public perception that airbags are a technology of the ‘90’s. In fact, the development of airbags goes back to the ‘50’s and ‘60’s, when the earliest dynamic: sled tests and car crash tests by GM and Ford showed their great promise to reduce traumatic injuries in collision accidents. There was anticipation in the early-‘70’s that airbags would soon be installed. NHTSA had initiated rule-making, and the car companies in the U.S., Europe, and Japan were all developing airbag systems for their vehicles. But top officials from Ford and GM and Chrysler went to the White House in 1971, and urged President Nixon to delay the then-pending auto safety standards, including the requirement for airbags. The game plan was to delay, delay, delay. A delay that lasted almost 20 years.
Thus, the pending 1970’s requirement for airbags was politically shelved, and languished in limbo into the mid-1980’s. There was nothing preventing car companies from installing airbags on their own. After a Supreme Court decision in 1983 forced NHTSA to re-examine their latest cancellation, the rulemaking process began again. NHTSA and DOT responded with a 1984 plan to link mandatory buckle-up laws to a decision about requiring airbags.
But without waiting for a NHTSA mandate, Mercedes introduced airbags in some models in 1984, and Ford offered a driver airbag option in the 1985 Tempo. Then in 1988, Chrysler began to promote airbags as a standard feature in most of their cars. This was a stunning turn-around by Chrysler CEO Lee Iacocca, who had railed against airbags for years… including his criticisms made in 1971 in the Oval Office to President Richard Nixon, who was thus encouraged to cancel an impending airbags regulation to be phased in during the mid-1970’s.
No, I'm not saying the government wants to kill small, short, old women. I'm saying they are killing small, short, old women. In the name of SAFETY. And in the name of increased control of our private decisions. Why have all parents become chauffeurs of their own children, who sit in the back of the car like the "Little Emperors" of China? Because airbags kill people, especially children, who now have to be trussed up like little sacks of potatoes whenever we transport them somewhere. Freedom. Get them used to being trussed up at the earliest possible age because trussed up is their inevitable fate in the new normal.
So, I have to admit, I gave Car and Driver the benefit of another look on the matter of Toyota's unintended acceleration problem. By golly, here's what I found:
Our tests were conducted at highway speeds, as the incident with the Lexus ES350 happened on an expressway, and in the lowest possible gear, as that's the worst-case scenario. Here is how to deal with a runaway car:
Hit the Brakes
Certainly the most natural reaction to a stuck-throttle emergency is to stomp on the brake pedal, possibly with both feet. And despite dramatic horsepower increases since C/D’s 1987 unintended-acceleration test of an Audi 5000, brakes by and large can still overpower and rein in an engine roaring under full throttle. With the Camry’s throttle pinned while going 70 mph, the brakes easily overcame all 268 horsepower straining against them and stopped the car in 190 feet—that’s a foot shorter than the performance of a Ford Taurus without any gas-pedal problems and just 16 feet longer than with the Camry’s throttle closed. From 100 mph, the stopping-distance differential was 88 feet—noticeable to be sure, but the car still slowed enthusiastically enough to impart a feeling of confidence. We also tried one go-for-broke run at 120 mph, and, even then, the car quickly decelerated to about 10 mph before the brakes got excessively hot and the car refused to decelerate any further. So even in the most extreme case, it should be possible to get a car’s speed down to a point where a resulting accident should be a low-speed and relatively minor event.
The old defiance and technological arrogance are gone, but the conclusion is still the same. Brakes stop cars. Hmmm.Yet here's what the NHTSA has just released:
All new cars would have to be equipped
with "black boxes" that record performance data and federal safety
regulators would be granted the authority to order immediate recalls
under newly proposed auto-safety legislation being considered by
Congress.
The draft of a bill was released Thursday by one of the House committees investigating Toyota's massive recalls for unintended acceleration in its vehicles. Rep. Henry A. Waxman (D-Calif.), chairman of the House commerce committee, and Sen. John D. Rockefeller (D-W.Va.), chair of the Senate commerce committee, have said they intend to collaborate on automobile safety legislation this year.
The draft contains a wide array of provisions. Some require new safety features, such as the black boxes -- called event data recorders -- and brake override systems that allow a driver to stop a car even when the throttle is stuck open.
Other elements of the bill give the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration more power to crack down on automakers that break the rules.
"Our initial thoughts on this are that Congress have given us a legislative vehicle that has come fully loaded with all the options," said Gloria Bergquist, a vice president at Auto Alliance, the industry trade association. "We are going to look at each one of these and ask: Where are we going to get the safety enhancements?"
The draft of a bill was released Thursday by one of the House committees investigating Toyota's massive recalls for unintended acceleration in its vehicles. Rep. Henry A. Waxman (D-Calif.), chairman of the House commerce committee, and Sen. John D. Rockefeller (D-W.Va.), chair of the Senate commerce committee, have said they intend to collaborate on automobile safety legislation this year.
The draft contains a wide array of provisions. Some require new safety features, such as the black boxes -- called event data recorders -- and brake override systems that allow a driver to stop a car even when the throttle is stuck open.
Other elements of the bill give the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration more power to crack down on automakers that break the rules.
"Our initial thoughts on this are that Congress have given us a legislative vehicle that has come fully loaded with all the options," said Gloria Bergquist, a vice president at Auto Alliance, the industry trade association. "We are going to look at each one of these and ask: Where are we going to get the safety enhancements?"
Love the black boxes concept. Our cars can report on us continuously to keep us safe, so that the feds can intervene when we screw up by trying to drive ourselves.
MEANWHILE. Gosh, the government loves us, don't they? Except that cap-and-trade and new CAFE regulations are designed to force us into smaller and smaller cars with higher and higher fuel mileage because they love "the planet" a little bit more than they do us.
Which means, in the end, that they're asking us to make ourselves more vulnerable to other traffic on the road. If you look at this Brit road test of the diminutive, highly efficient "Smart Car," you won't get the bottom line until the final 20 seconds of the video. Go ahead. Watch it. It takes 5 full minutes of reassurance to get to the very un-reassuring bottom line that the car might survive but the passengers won't.
Worse, collisions on the highway tend not to be with concrete walls that are no higher than the hood of the offending car. They tend to be with taller obstacles like tractor trailers and buses. Which cause things like, uh, decapitations. Especially when great big vehicles are contending for the same space on the road as very small vehicles, which tend to be invisible to drivers of llimos, trucks, and SUVs. (Don't tell me you've never bluffed or muscled or IGNORED a smaller car out of the way in your minivan. You do it without even thinking. The way you do motorcycles. And I've been there, Charlie.)
Pretty much, they don't give crap about the common man. It's a good bet that government officials will still be able to buy the fantastically athletic BMWs. Audis, Mercedes, and Cadillacs that will survive the death of capitalism, free choice, and prosperity because they can avoid accidents rather than survive them. Cadillacs are likely to be the first to go. As the government strives to keep them in business as a source of employment, GM luxocars are likely to begin resembling the automotive products of that other great government controlled economy, China. Which means they'll look like and act like this (because we can't diss the need for full employment...)
Which, I guess, is why I can still give houseroom to this kind of protest. (aside from the fact that I know the man in the box pictured.) He doesn't, can't, remember when driving was fun and a manifestation of American freedom like no other. I have to feel for his naive feeling that it might be something like freedom. It was.
Lotus 7. An open-wheeled, 1200 pound sports car anyone could buy.
And here's a hint from the days when you were still allowed to love cars because you could pilot them as if you were directing your own life.
But nobody's directing his own automotive life anymore. You're just a rolling suspect. Are you protecting your kids from the airbags we force you to buy? Is your carbon footprint bigger than what Al Gore or Harrison Ford would approve of? So you actually love screaming down the back roads under your own control?
Then what do you expect us to do with you when you are no longer contributing to our vision of society? You carbon pig you.
They SAY they care about us with the right hand. With the left hand, they do everything they can to put us in a drab, uniform tissue box. I just wish the "man in the box" had had some experience of the joy they're taking away before he ever got to feel it. I guess that's what martyrs are really made of. Not the ones who know what they've lost but the ones who know it only secondhand. God bless you, Peter.
Now think about your healthcare. With the government at the wheel. Are they going to save you from all pain and suffering? Sure. It's called magic.