Posts Tagged ‘ Automotive ’

With where Cars are Heading, my Money’s Going in Funeral Homes

May 21st, 2010. By Hunter West

chrysler dashboard With where Cars are Heading, my Moneys Going in Funeral Homes I love to drive—but I just may have to give it up and be done with it. Because I don’t like where the cars of the future are going.

For that matter, I don’t like where they are now.

A recent article in The New York Times focused on the cars of the future and what our dashboards are going to look like. Specifically, a demonstration by Cisco Systems showed how an LED dashboard display can be manipulated and customized much like the screen on your smart phone, iPad or laptop.

In other words, if you don’t like the fuel gauge over HERE, you can drag and drop it over THERE.

Same with the icons for the car’s web browser, the weather channel, the stocks channel, the news feed, the video screen, the keyboard and the GPS.

Here’s the problem…

It’s one thing to have the dashboard evolve from a collection of mechanical dials to integrated electronic bars, and graphs. This gee-whiz stuff has been happening since the 1980′s.

The problem—and I’ll say it again—is all the interconnectivity that automotive manufacturers have, or are bringing into the car.

Were cars to have the capacity to drive themselves, then I’d be all for it. Just like the cockpit of an airliner, where you can throw the multi-million-dollar jet on autopilot and play with your laptop while the plane overshoots the airport by an hour…

Oh, wait a minute. That’s not so good, either.

The point is, even if cars were to have the kind of sophistication that commercial jets have, Read the rest of this entry »

Tags: Automobile, Automotive, Cars, Cisco, LED Dashboard, Smart Car
Posted in Accidents, Automotive, Defective Products | 3689No Comments »2010-05-21+14%3A15%3A51Hunter+West

Congratulations Lawyers–you may get in accidents, but you don’t speed!

March 16th, 2010. By AbiK

Or is it that you just don’t get caught? lawyercautionsign Congratulations Lawyers you may get in accidents, but you dont speed!

Yes, believe it or not, according to the top 10 list of crash-prone professions that was put out by Quality Planning Corp. and Insure.com at the end of last year, lawyers rank only above social workers for getting speeding tickets. However…

When you look at accidents, well, that’s a bit of a different story.

Here’s the break down on the top 10 crash-prone professions (journalists, pat your backs—you’re not on it). The accidents and speeding tickets are per 1,000 professionals in each category:

1. Doctors: 109 accidents and 44 speeding tickets

2. Lawyers: 106 accidents and 37 speeding tickets

3. Architects: 105 accidents and 72 speeding tickets

4. Real Estate Brokers: 102 accidents and 39 speeding tickets

5. Enlisted Military Personnel: 99 accidents and 78 speeding tickets

6. Social Workers: 98 accidents and 33 speeding tickets

7. Manual Laborers: 96 accidents and 77 speeding tickets

8. Analysts: 95 accidents and 40 speeding tickets

9. Engineers: 94 accidents and 51 speeding tickets

10. Consultants: 94 accidents and 50 speeding tickets

If you’re thinking this was an outlier kind of year, not so. Five years ago, in 2004, the same report listed these groups as the top 5 for being accident-prone:

1. Students

2. Doctors

3. Lawyers

4. Architects

5. Real Estate Brokers

Tags: Accidents, Automotive, Highway Safety, Speeding
Posted in Accidents, Automotive | 2986No Comments »2010-03-16+12%3A35%3A54AbiK

Car Recalls: Technocrats and Bureaucrats Need to put Safety First

February 12th, 2010. By Hunter West

(Source: A.S. Sangiovanni-Vincentelli, EE 249, UC Berkeley, Fall 2002.)

If the recall troubles of Toyota and now Honda are knocking you out of your comfort zone, better get used to it. As cars become more complicated and sophisticated, recalls are going to be a fact of life.

In other words, the more automakers do, the more they have to ‘undo.’

Tacked onto an MSNBC story about the recent Honda expanded recall for airbags was a comment from Yoshihiko Tabei, chief analyst at Kazaka Securities.

“While the way automakers handle recalls is important, I think people should be careful not to overreact to every single recall,” he said. “Rather, my concern for the auto industry is their earnings for the next financial year, given the absence of the boost they enjoyed from government incentives this year.”

Other automotive analysts agree that automakers regularly trigger recalls, although some have suggested the media reaction to the Toyota case has been overblown. That latter statement may, or may not be true depending upon one’s perspective. In the Toyota case, the story for decades has been that the Japanese automakers had it Read the rest of this entry »

Tags: Automotive, Honda, Honda Recall, Toyota, toyota recall
Posted in Defective Products | 2706No Comments »2010-02-12+17%3A57%3A28Hunter+West