I’m sure a lot of you remember the Firestone/Ford fiasco back in 2000, which resulted in 6.5 million Wilderness A/T and ATX II tires being recalled following a disproportionate number of tread separations, leading to rollover wrecks in the flip-prone Explorer SUV. You might say that both brands were tainted by this ordeal, and that’d  probably be an understatement. But going on the theory that Jack In The Box is the safest place in the world to eat only after an e. coli outbreak, don’t you think Firestone would’ve way over-engineered its product following the disaster, as insurance against it ever happening again? Once bitten, right? I’m just wondering, because I’ve been shopping for new tires for my Eagle and have noticed that the ratings on Firestones generally tend to be pretty high. The user ratings for the Firestone Destination A/T’s I’m considering over at The Tire Rack are off the charts—you don’t generally see so many fields rated dark green (superior). It kind of leads me to believe that a little recall—or in Firestone’s case, a massive, precedent-setting recall—can be a good thing. How about you? Are you wary of manufacturers tainted by past recalls? Or do you figure their product must be safer than ever?

In case you were concerned that the beleaguered SUV and truck market doesn’t have enough to worry about right now, here’s a curveball: the Insurance Institute for Highway Safety is advocating new regs that would bring truck, SUV, and van bumpers down to the level of regular passenger cars. It might make for some funny-looking new SUV’s, and would certainly take a bite out of the larger vehicles’ ground clearance, one of their few remaining selling points. But it kind of makes sense: I’m sure it’s no fun getting your radiator mashed into your engine, or all your rear lights smashed out, in the course of some minor collision with an SUV or truck simply because its bumper isn’t the same height as yours. And the insurance companies aren’t thrilled about the higher payouts that result from such accidents, either. What do you think? Should new bumper rules be imposed on new trucks and SUV’s, or should the insurance companies (i.e., everyone who pays into a car insurance plan) just suck it up?

Source: Kicking Tires.

I did, and it wasn’t fun. I had my little sister in the car, I was doing about 70 on the PA turnpike and pulling out to pass a semi, my Eagle was rolling on the junk tires it had on it when I bought it out of a field for 500 bucks. When the left rear let go, it felt like the whole back end was suddenly on rollerskates. Fortunately, my mad driving skills and people’s instinctive tendency to get out of the Eagle’s way averted major catastrophe. But I sure wouldn’t want that to happen again, and I sure learned my lesson about being a dumbass about my tires. Continued…

Continue reading "Have You Ever Suffered A Blowout?" »

The hammer keeps coming down on Ford’s white collar staff, this time to the tune of a 14% across-the-dashboard cut. However, we hear that the safety engineering team will remain largely intact–cuts will be limited to 1% for them. This is good planning on Ford’s part. Aside from the obvious public relations disaster that most safety team cuts result in, it will give the safety team more pull in vehicle design decisions. This should help to keep passenger safety on the top of the list for the automaker, which endured the tire pressure fiasco some time ago. Avoidance of that sort of issue will be critical if Ford is to continue to pull itself back together.

As Bob Lutz pointed out at dinner the other night, the new CAFE standards requiring seemingly modest increases in fleet fuel economy really put automakers in a Catch-22. Government safety regulations, which require all cars to be increasingly heavy, structurally complex, and stuffed with airbags, cut into the very fuel-mileage gains that CAFE requires. But you kind of have to wonder, is this safety over-engineering really "what the consumer wants"? Sure, people are real ninnies about safety these days, wanting to sue over every stumble on the sidewalk and to legislate every detail of kids’ playgrounds. But does the average new-car shopper really feel they need a car with airbags in every surface that’ll pass with top ratings on every possible impact scenario—including those that very rarely occur in real life? Sure, all this stuff is already mandated by the government, and is unlikely to be rolled back. But with a ton of people shelling out good money for older Festivas and Geo Metros these days, I have to wonder: if you were given the choice, would you sacrifice five-star safety ratings for an affordable new car that got 50 mpg or better?

While we’ve been accused of Western propaganda for airing the mind-numbing crash tests of China’s car manufacturers, we generally feel that these videos speak for themselves. And when I came across this disastrous crash-test video mislabled as a made-in-China vehicle, I was more than willing to give the original poster the benefit of the doubt: the truck crashes exactly like all of the other Chinese vehicles we’ve featured on the site. But it turns out that China isn’t the only nation capable of manufacturing a vehicle that turns itself inside out upon impact: the truck is acutally a VW! Click here for footage German engineering at its finest. Thanks for the catch, valek and Toshi.

Hey, check out this nifty little statistic from MSN: 68 percent of teens killed in car crashes at night were unbuckled. Does this mean that more teenagers buckle up during the day? I don’t know. Probably. But the point is, wear your goddamn seat belt. Chicks dig it, and it could prevent you from being killed or permanently disfigured. And if you kids don’t start buckling up more often, some lawmaker is gonna bring back automatic seat belts, and no one wants that.

Continue reading "Hey Teens, Wear Your Goddamn Seatbelt!" »

The Truth About Cars found this fantastic crash-test video by national German car club ADAC, demonstrating that (surprise!) enduring a rollover accident in your drop-top would amount to a major headache. You don’t need to be fluent in German to figure out that the joy-riding dummies are the ones who lose when modern Euro-convertibles go barrel-rolling across the deck, even when there’s tall rear roll bars to buy them a little extra headroom. Too bad, because as the temperatures this weekend in Seattle soared into the balmy 80′s, I was almost thinking of resurrecting my long-forgotten K-car-convertible scheme. Of course, if I drove one of those, rollovers would be the least of my worries. Check out the footage!

Volvo has always been a pioneer in the field of safety, but its latest effort still seems overly ambitious. The company has set the lofty goal of making its cars injury proof by 2020, and even wants to use technology—like systems which will apply the brakes if an object is detected in the vehicle’s path—to even eliminate the possibility of accidents. Removing the human-error factor seems pretty far-fetched, but you have to wonder how close the Swedish safety savants can get to the injury-proof goal. For more details, check out the Reuters clip below.

First, it was a 2003 recall for same-year Liberties with lower ball joint problems. After some of the replacements were apparently botched, Chrysler issued a new recall three years later that included 800,000 2002-2006 Liberties, addressing LBJ’s that were showing "excessive wear and looseness." This time around, it’s the upper ball joints that are the problem on over 300,000 ’02-’03 Liberties. There’ve been a series of high-profile incidents in which the BJ’s have separated, dumping the body onto one or both front tires and thus seriously ruining the driver’s day. At least one ball joint has separated at 75 mph, and a handful have let go while the driver was either pulling out into traffic or making a left turn, leaving the stricken Liberty stranded in the path of oncoming traffic. To make a bad situation worse, Chrysler hasn’t yet actually issued a recall on this particular problem, instead awaiting the results of the NHTSA’s "engineering analysis" and attributing complaints to customers’ "confusion about the difference between the [previously recalled] lower and upper ball joints." Sure, yet another recall of the 300,000 affected Liberties wouldn’t be cheap, but can Chrysler afford to hem and haw while Liberty ball joints are coming apart at highway speeds?

Source: AP