I’ve never understood what’s so difficult about staying on your own side of the road. Yet every year, hundreds of thousands of motorists insist on veering into the oncoming lane, causing horrendous carnage and maiming and killing themselves and others. A good portion of these people, it turns out, are asleep. The NHTSA reports an estimated 100,000 sleep-related crashes a year in the US, and in a terrifying poll on msnbc, at last count, 64% of respondents reported having fallen asleep at the wheel. Apparently it’s not bad enough that our roads are full of idiotic drivers—now it turns out that we can’t even count on them to be conscious. Ugh. Enter Saab and Volvo, ever at the forefront of automotive safety, now developing eye- and face-scanning devices to monitor and correct driver drowsiness. Forbes Autos reports that Saab’s driver-inattention package will use a pair of infrared cameras to monitor eye movement, and a dashboard display that chimes and flashes a series of increasingly severe warnings each time the eyelids slip closed. Moreover, the driver’s seat will sternly vibrate if the system notices the driver’s head oriented toward anything other than the "primary attention zone." Volvo takes a gentler approach, monitoring the vehicle’s movement in relation to lane markers and cheerfully warning the driver with an icon of a steaming cup of coffee any time the vehicle leaves its lane without signaling. I really don’t know if this is all going to be enough to thwart the most ambitiously sleepy drivers; maybe electric shocks would do a better job.

By Rob

Editor-in-Chief

Our buddies at Forbes Autos asked us to cook up a list of the top 10 trends at SEMA. We were pretty thrashed when we wrote it, but they managed to make us sound half-way literate anyway. Thanks guys! You can read the full article here. Or if you want, just look at the pictures.

The big news of the day is Chrysler picking up Jim Press, a Toyota executive and board member, to run marketing and product strategy. Mr. Press is also quite the swimmer. Congrats, Chrysler. Here’s the news:

• Pics of the upcoming Mazda 6 have been released, and it’s looking pretty good. Maybe it’s time to trade in my Protege: km77.com via Jalopnik
• If you’re in the market for an affordable luxury car with design elements stolen from other auto makers and boasting questionable safety performance, Chery will take care of you…in 2009: Leftlane News
• Check out Forbe’s list of the world’s most coveted cars, and let us know which ride you want more than anything in the world: Forbes
• The plug in version of Volvo’s Efficiency is going to be really, really green: Top Gear