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yes, you're giving other drivers too much credit.

If they get arrested for reading text messages, you can be 100% sure too many morons will be using it to read and post facebook messages.

At least the idiots who post "just hit a child while driving, he houlda looked both ways first lol" can be easily prosecuted.

It's illegal to leave your car unlocked? Eh? Try that again. WTF? Sorry, FFS.

Yes, it is.

The official story is that the local police felt their time was better spent writing tickets than chasing down stolen cars.

They just cannot ticket everyone who exceeds the speed limit because a large fraction of the public routinely does just that.

Australian politicians have accommodated that issue

Is that similar to buying a new printer because it's cheaper than replacing the carts? I remember the old days when the entire vehicle would cost less than a set of keys

You must be living in lala land if you seriously think that said account is not how those things are engineered to behave, and how they typically do behave, in fact.

I don't disagree with that, what I disagree with is the concept that A) a person "isn't aware" they are about to get smashed in the driver's door (I contend that if you're paying so little attention to your driving you don't see a truck barreling down on you, you probably don't need to be behind the wheel anyway), and B) that this is a universal truth.

The technical aspects of the post, i.e. times of sensor activation/system deployment, are entirely accurate.

Probably should have pointed out the specific aspect I found dubious from the get-go. Sorry 'bout that.

You must be living in lala land if you seriously think that said account is not how those things are engineered to behave, and how they typically do behave, in fact. Hand in the geek card. Do not pass go. Sigh. That's why driving an old car is insane if you care about your survival and injuries. Even an otherwise decent Volvo from early 1990s doesn't do half of it, yet it's standard on today's cars.

1) says some anonymous person that doesn't know me from Adam. Anyone capable of cogent thought will take your statement with a heaping serving of NaCl

Look at the timeline at the bottom: http://www.drive.com.au/Editorial/ArticleDetail.aspx?ArticleID=56781

The airbags have deployed and the crash is over before the human notices.

And of course, anecdote = fact!

How silly of me to not believe everything I read on the internet!

1) says some anonymous person that doesn't know me from Adam. Anyone capable of cogent thought will take your statement with a heaping serving of NaCl

Look at the timeline at the bottom: http://www.drive.com.au/Editorial/ArticleDetail.aspx?ArticleID=56781

The airbags have deployed and the crash is over before the human notices.

It's not theoretical best case when it's already been done, and I was not cherry picking numbers. Here's some that are closer to the state of the art, for comparison: A 99% efficient BLDC controller - most of the controller inefficiencies are from band-gap voltage drop, which gets smaller as you use higher voltages (as does resistive losses in the wiring). Here's a 98% efficient motor, used on the CSIRO-UTS solar racer..

Are you really claiming that (for example) a modern 50kW motor would shed 5kW heat? Mid-90s efficiency is typical today for larger motors - it is not a cherry-picked exception!

There were reports of stuck accelerators here in Australia for a while but it was the Fords not Toyotas.
Basically some guy rang police up on the freeway and claimed his cruise control was stuck at 80. There was a police chase/escort and eventually he was stopped. Soon after the incident there was a ton of idiots all ringing up talkback radio for days on end claiming the same thing happened to them in their Fords and that's why they crashed or got a speeding fine.

In the end the real storey started circulating. The guy who initially made the claim seemed to have issues. During the chase the police asked him to brake and he said it didn't work. They then asked him to change gear to neutral and he claimed it had no effect. They asked him to turn the key on a car with an old fashion manual key and he claimed that didn't work. His car was inspected afterwards and no fault was found.
In the end the reports of problems quickly disappeared. All the bandwagon jumpers suddenly shut the hell up.
http://news.drive.com.au/drive/motor-news/no-sign-of-cruisecontrol-faults-20100107-lwrq.html

You know I have no problem with /. rejecting my original submissions .. until you get to things like this dupe which happened within the last week. That really pisses me off.

Gratuitous rejected submission links

• Volvo Introduces a Collision Proof Car
• New Volvo crashes in safety demo

They were definitely going well in excess of 155 mph

So you say. Perhaps you're better at judging speed than you are at logic. You could hardly be worse.

I have never heard of any hard speed limitation imposed on cars

Can't be true then, if the omniscient one hasn't heard of it. I must have imagined this. And this. And all of these

While the design might be to ensure 155 mph with German engineering I am sure that they are designed to go 155 mph up hill with a strong headwind and so can probably go a lot faster on the flat with no wind.

You seem to be having trouble with the concept of a limiter. We're not talking about adjusting the power output so that the top speed is 155 in a certain set of conditions; that would have implications for acceleration too. A speed limiter limits the speed; the clue (for those who don't have one) is in the name.

North America +5 Insightful

Rest of the World +5 Sad

Compare for instance, two competitors in the sedan market, a 2009 V-6 Toyota Camry, and a 2009 V-6 Ford Taurus. The Camry gets 19/28 mpg, and the Taurus gets 18/28.

I am not going to attack the fact that you pick two random cars (with similar fuel consumption) to represent the entire US and foreign auto industries. Instead what amuses me is the fact that these are the typical models you select.

A sedan with a 3.5l V6 engine would hardly be my entry into a discussion on fuel efficiency. But then, North Americans seem to need that sort of grunt to propel themselves from one traffic light to another. We use to borrow my wife's grandmother's Taurus when we went to visit my in-laws in Canada. It had a 3l or 3.4l engine. We really did not need that power to do 50/70/90km/h. I remember a piece of highway on the way to Mt Washington where we were actually allowed to do 110km/h. I can assure you that her grandmother has never legally driven it more than 90km/h and most probably never legally taken it over 70km/h. (3l -> 18/26mpg or 3.4l -> 15/24mpg

Contrast that with their visit here when we traveled as 5 adults with a 7 ft luggage trailer and aircon in my wife's 160 Etude/Protege. We averaged 27mpg (actual figures over 1890km) at or near 120km/h most of the way. The car is quite capable of doing 160km/h on the deserted roads of the Northern Cape (never done it with the trailer) and with the aircon on the fuel consumption falls to 23mpg. It tows my Hobie just fine though I limit myself to 100km/h and it might struggle to maintain higher speeds. Over a 6 month stretch my wife averaged 35.6mpg commuting to work, though granted, most of it was highway.

So what is my point? This ( http://www.fueleconomy.gov/feg/bymake/BMW2009.shtml ) site seems to list the smallest BMW in the US as the 128i. Here it would be the 118i. The smallest 3 is the 328. Here it is the 320i, which would probably also be the most common. These cars are neither slow nor under powered, for everyday use. So while the 335ci (17/26mpg) and the Taurus (18/28mpg) might be comparable, they both pale in comparison to the 320i (46.3mpg combined according to http://uk.cars.yahoo.com/car-reviews/car-and-driving/bmw-320i-1002947.html) though realistically it is probably more like 22/33mpg ( http://www.drive.com.au/Editorial/ArticleDetail.aspx?ArticleID=10089 ).

I have no problem with people wanting powerful or inefficient cars. I too have a 3l V6 truck (bakkie). When I bought it it was the least fuel efficient 14.4mpg average to date (and most powerful) on the market. It gets me to work in exactly the same time as my little 1.3l car.

When people say that foreign (to North America) cars are more efficient, they are not saying that a Japanese SUV with a 4.5l engine is more efficient than a US SUV with a 4.5l engine. What they are saying is that in the rest of the world there are cars that can perform the tasks that the average North American car performs comparably, but using less fuel in the process. For example, they only thing that you achieve by commuting to work at 30 mph in a BMW 335/328 as appose to a BMW 320 is to burn more fuel.

So, even foreign cars in the rest of the world are more efficient that foreign cars in North America.

Diesel engines are a lot more efficient than gasoline otto cycle engines. Their efficiency advantage is greatest at idle and is smallest at full throttle. Most passenger vehicle usage is nowhere near full throttle, so a diesel engine can enjoy a huge advantage over an otto cycle engine. In stop and go traffic the advantage can easily be several hundred percent.

To state it more simply, in a typical commute, which is largely low throttle and idle, a diesel engine will get 2-4 times the fuel of a similar power gasoline engine. Only 10-15% of this massive difference is due to the greater energy density of diesel fuel.

They do make diesel race cars, and they are competitive with gasoline engines. Here is Audi's most recent one, which placed 1st at Sebring. In a race with significant portions of the track at partial throttle a diesel engine will vastly outperform a gasoline engine. It would be an unfair race.

Read the Vatican's list of car commandments; the only thing you should do on the road other than driving is pray, wave to people from behind your elevated glass enclosure (in a knowing, loving way), and recite passages from the Bible.

If you haven't read them yet then may God help your immortal soul.

Actually, if you go to the junkyard you probably won't find any F350s at all, because the vast majority of Ford trucks ever built are still on the road -- 98% as of the last JDPower stat I saw.

Dude... there were many gull-winged doors before the DeLorean. I'd put the 300SL tops in that category.

http://autospeed.drive.com.au/cms/A_2143/article.h tml

I thought I'd point that out... oh, and how old are you since everyone seems to be making that an issue?

http://www.trollhattansaab.net/archives/2006/04/di d_gm_screw_sa.html
http://www.trollhattansaab.net/archives/2006/04/th e_smoking_gun.html
http://autoweb.drive.com.au/cms/A_106337/newsartic le.html

...and they spin it like they're a generation ahead.

And even those who get it later are going to be a generation behind

News flash, guys. Toyota/Lexus has had a similar system for years.

What, you mean like the speed limiter on my car fitted as standard, which lets me pick any speed I like and will throttle off when I reach it?

They've been around for more than a few years now - go buy a better car :-P

Actually, supercomputing IS used for the bra.

Link: http://autospeed.drive.com.au/A_1260/cms/article.h tml

Ford and Blue Oval news had a similar lawsuit with trade secrets being revealed. BON won and verdict had nothing to do with public interest or whatever others in this thread are spouting off about. BON won based on the first amendment of the US Constitution.

Another link here which bascially describes the case.
The rules should not change because Apple is involved.

I wasn't aware there was a federally mandated highway speed limit in the US. Certainly the Feds can dangle the "Federal highway funds" carrot over the state legislature's noses, but I'm fairly certain that's ultimately up to the states. I just did about 5000 miles of highway/interstate driving the past 2 weeks, and speed limits varied from 55 (max speed on winding mountain-type roads) to 75 (various interstate highways). And 81 isn't typically bothered with on the interstate - at least not in the western US.

The state of South Dakota is currently deciding whether to up the speed limit on one of their highways from 65 to 70, and according to this article other states are doing the same "Texas has lifted its limit on some roads to 80mph (129kmh). Iowa has raised its rural road limit to 70mph (113kmh), which better reflects the actual speed of cars on rural highways, say legislators. Indiana has raised its rural maximum from 65mph to 70mph."

This is a common misunderstanding. Ford developed their own hybrid drivetrain, and discovered after it was done that parts of it were mighty close to infringing on some of Toyota's hybrid-car patents (particularly related to system controls). They paid the license fee (and traded some patent licensing of their own) to avoid the inevitable lawsuits, but they are still using their own design. I can't find the original article, but this press release indicates as much.

That said, I'm still more likely to buy a Toyota. Ford could win me back, but it takes a LONG time to prove your cars are consistently reliable again .

Quite agree. The Peugeot turbo diesel option (same Bosch direct injection technology) keeps setting world records. Their 307 just got 3.49 litres per 100km's (or 81.16 mpg in old money) according to this website. They averaged 1,700 Km per 60 litre tank! Why add all the complication of hybrid technology, or why not couple an engine like this with hybrid technology?

and its butt f**cking ugly

... I get my Aussie news from smh.com.au and the other day after reading the news I decided to go see what the car market was like for Sport Coupes. I was very impressed by drive.com.au - it makes decent use of web connected databases and hypertext to provide a service that dead-tree cannot (quick comparisons, searches, specifications, web reviews, etc). It makes the shopping "experience" so much easier I can see why it is popular enough to be profitable.

BTW - the careers classifieds are quite good as well if you are in Australia and looking for a job (professional).

- HeXa