Guard Rails And Crash Barriers

One of the hazards of losing control when travelling at speed is that you’re going to hit something. What usually springs to mind if you dare to let your imagination linger on this is hitting another vehicle. However, this isn’t the only thing that you can hit – there is a reason why they do the lamppost test while crash testing, after all. Sometimes, if you lose control and/or let your attention wander (or, in most accident cases, first letting attention wander and then losing control), you don’t end up on the other side of the road but going off the edge of it. This might be somewhat better for the people in the oncoming vehicle but it’s definitely not good news for you. In fact, according to ARRB Transportation Ltd., 30–40% of all serious and fatal crashes in Australia are caused by someone going off the road and colliding with a fixed object such as a lamppost, rock or similar.

Let’s just say that hitting a rock, lamp-post or similar in real life is nothing like hitting one in a computer game, where these obstacles simply disappear after being struck while your virtual car carries on at 200 km/h.  Need For Speed games have a lot to answer for… (though I kind of like the special Porsche edition of the game with the nice scenery).

Vehicles come with a range of systems to stop the car drifting off the side of the road.  Traction control and ABS braking help to prevent skidding. ESC (electronic stability control) kicks in to prevent oversteer or understeer. Lane departure warnings detect that you’re drifting towards the side of the road where treacherous gravel lurks (in the case of rural roads). If things do go to custard, many cars have side impact protection beams, curtain or side airbags and pretensioned seatbelts to keep you safe, while the car itself usually has crumple zones to absorb the impact.

Absorbing the impact is key in any crash. It’s the shock of impact where all the force of Object A (the vehicle) gets transferred to Object B (a lamppost), so if Object B is hard and unforgiving, Object A takes the forces and gets damaged. If Object A is also hard and tough, all that force has to go somewhere and often gets transferred to the occupants of the vehicle… and humans tend to be soft and easily broken. There are heaps of examples in everyday life where we apply the principle of absorbing impact to prevent damage. We wear shoes with nice thick soles to protect our feet when walking or running (or at least we should). We lie down on mattresses rather than bare boards. We use mats when exercising on the floor and boxing gloves if we like slightly more aggressive forms of exercise. And there’s a reason why a scrum machine is padded like heck.

It’s not just the cars that have to absorb impact, either. Guard rails are becoming quite a common sight around many roads in Australia, especially in high-risk areas where the amount of traffic and/or the design of the road is likely to lead to a car going off the road. You also see them in places where going off the road is going to lead to something much worse than hitting a lamppost. You can miss a lamppost if you go off the road and may end up hitting a nice forgiving bush instead. You can’t, however, miss a cliff very easily…

Guard rails and crash barriers will stop your car going off a cliff or skidding onto the wrong side of the road and into an oncoming B-train if you hit a patch of ice or oil. However, you may have spotted the wee problem looming here: if they haven’t been designed right, they become hard, rigid objects in their own right and also cause problems when you hit them.

Road designers and road safety buffs are not stupid and are aware of this problem. People around the world are thinking up ways to make guard rails and crash barriers even safer. It’s a bit of a balancing act. Make the barriers too soft and flimsy and you’ll just plough through them and end up going through into that rock or off the cliff.  Make them too hard and they’ll have the same effect as hitting a lamppost but with less chance of missing it.  Make them springy (e.g. piles of old tyres like you sometimes see at car races, or tyres strung along like very ugly Christmas tree decorations like you see on the side of docks for big ships) and you get the problem of being bounced back in the other direction far too quickly.

What the designers like to do is to make a crash barrier that’s soft enough to slow you down but tough enough to stop you going off the road… and will allow you to slide along it so that you come to rest somewhere safe (and free from lampposts). Those fences made of very thick “wires” (more like metal cables) can do the trick, but they’re pretty nasty if a motorbike hits them, so some road safety experts don’t like them much. W-beams are “semi-rigid” structures that tend to the job a lot better.

However, there’s more to guardrails and crash barriers than just the actual barrier itself. The post the rail is attached to plays a role, as do the bolts holding the rails to the posts. The soil that the post is stuck into also affects how much energy the barrier will absorb for you.  Designers have also started thinking about putting things between the rail and the post – kind of like a washer sort of thing – to add an extra crumple zone.  They also have to think about what happens at the beginning and the end of the rail, and how easily a crashing car or motorbike can snag on the rail instead of sliding along to a safer place.

It would be nice if they thought about making them look a bit more attractive, too.

Of course, it’s much better for everyone if you don’t get a very close acquaintance with a guard rail or crash barrier at all.  Let’s stop to think how you are most likely to whack into one. Cornering is usually involved, as is speed. Ice or other slippery substances can also play a role. On straighter bits, wandering attention is usually to blame.  The moral? Go back to basics and drive properly, rather than relying on driver aids, active safety systems, passive safety systems and crash barriers to save you.  This means that you need to slow down in the wet and cold, and don’t thrash your car at speed around the corner.  And for goodness sake, don’t try to play Pokemon Go while driving!

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Which Cars Are Stolen The Most Often?

We all know that it’s probably not a wise idea to leave your car unlocked on a dimly lit street overnight if you want to see it again in the morning. Most of us know enough to at least lock the doors and take other measures, including garaging the car if our house has a garage or at least shutting the gate if all we’ve got is a driveway or carport.  Nevertheless, there are some cars that are thief magnets, just like some cars are cop magnets.

Surprisingly enough, it’s not the flash new sports cars such as Porsche 911s  that are the thief magnets (cops are another story).  The ones that tend to get nicked are the ones that are common – which means that they are harder to trace and more likely to end up in a chop shop with parts being swapped around to make a “new” vehicle out of the old one.  In the list put out by the National Motor Vehicle Theft Reduction Council , you won’t find a number of the more glamorous marques on the list of vehicles stolen most often between April 2015 and March 2016.  Looks like the light-fingered rotters out there just aren’t interested (much) in BMW, Porsche, Audi or Mercedes-Benz. Either that or the people who own these can also afford good garaging and security systems.  The ones that go AWOL most often are marques like Holden (mostly Commodores), Ford (especially Falcons) and a handful of Nissans and Toyotas.

So which cars are on the top 20 list for vehicles stolen most often in Australia?  Do you need to run out and buy a noisy car alarm and a bull terrier to keep your favourite set of wheels safe?  (Actually, Staffordshire bull terriers are great family dogs that get on well with kids and don’t need much grooming as well as being good home security systems, so I’d always recommend getting one, but that’s another story).  Here’s the list for 04-2015 to 03-2016, complete with model series and model year (MY) range:

1. Nissan Pulsar  N15 MY95_00: 831 vehicles nicked
2. Holden Commodore  VE MY06_13: 827 vehicles nicked
3. Toyota Hilux  MY05_11: 795 vehicles nicked
4. Holden Commodore VT MY97_00: 683 vehicles nicked
5. Holden Commodore VX MY00_02: 602 vehicles nicked
6. Holden Commodore VY MY02_04: 571 vehicles nicked
7. Ford Falcon BA MY02_05: 570 vehicles nicked
8. Holden Commodore VZ MY04_06: 479 vehicles nicked
9. Ford Falcon  AU MY98_02: 432 vehicles nicked
10. Toyota Hilux MY98_04: 399 vehicles nicked
11. Hyundai Excel X3 MY94_00: 369 vehicles nicked
12. Nissan Patrol GU MY97+: 332 vehicles nicked
13. Toyota Hilux MY12_15: 323 vehicles nicked
14. Ford Falcon FG MY08_14: 311 vehicles nicked
15. Nissan Navara  D40 MY05_15: 307 vehicles nicked
16. Toyota Corolla  ZRE152R MY07_14: 291 vehicles nicked
17. Holden Astra  TS MY99_05: 284 vehicles nicked
18. Toyota Hiace  MY90_04: 277 vehicles nicked
19. Toyota Landcruiser 80 Series MY90_98: 275 vehicles nicked
20. Holden Commodore VF MY13+: 273 vehicles nicked

The trend, according to the National Motor Vehicle Theft Reduction Council website, is that cars from the 2000–2010 period tend to go walkies most often, with 42.8% (that’s nearly half) of stolen cars being from this era; cars from the decade before that (1990–2000) and the decade after that (2010–now) are about even at 22.9% of car stolen and 23.8% respectively.

Regarding the when and where cars get stolen, the most common time for a car to get stolen is between 4:00 p.m. and 7.59 p.m. on a Friday afternoon/evening, followed by 8:00 p.m. to 11:59 p.m. on Saturday night.  In other words, when you’re having the end of the working week drinkies or hitting the pub on Saturday, it’s best to put your car in a very safe place!

If you own a 2000s era Ford Falcon or Holden Commodore, you are probably starting to get a bit nervous about now.  What can you do to help protect your car?  What’s more, you also need to protect your car keys, because if a thief can get his or her hands on the car keys, the job of nicking your vehicle is much easier.

Here’s a few tips for keeping your car and your keys safe (there’s more on the website):

• Make sure that your front fences and hedges are kept to a good height so they don’t give a thief a good hiding place from the street (time to call Hedge-Trimming-R-Us?)
• Motion-sensing security lights help deter thieves.
• Don’t put your address on your car key tags. If you lose your keys and a rotter finds them, he or she will know exactly where to go.
• Don’t hide spare keys on or around your car.
• Store your car keys where they aren’t visible from the windows easily (so that convenient set of hooks by the front door is out).
• Install a gate – the more a rotter has to do to get into your place, the less likely he/she will be to try. Put a lock on the gate if you don’t have one on the garage or if you don’t have a garage.
• Get a garage.
• Get a dog – even a yappy little Chihuahua will let you know if someone is poking around where they shouldn’t.

Car Safe – Entrapment from NB content on Vimeo.

A wee warning about car alarms: we all know that they can go mental and decide to go off at odd moments.  I remember very well the time that the Mazda Bongo van we once owned had an alarm go mental like this in the carport.  My husband rushed outside to investigate and switch the ruddy thing off… without putting any clothes on first.  Unfortunately, a passing policewoman also came to investigate…  At least she was smart enough to realise that the guy in the nude fooling around with a car with an alarm going berserk was probably the owner!

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ESP Does Not Mean Your Car Is Psychic… At Least Not Yet

In the last 10 or so years, ESP has become almost as standard in new cars as seatbelts.  OK, the manufacturers may not call this feature ESP, which stands for Electronic Stability Program(me) (the preferred term for Audi and a few others).  It could also be called Electronic Stability Control (ESC – the original term used by Mercedes Benz and BMW) or some fancy marque-exclusive name like “Advance Trak” (Ford) or Porsche Stability Management (guess which marque uses that one!).  ESC is the most common abbreviation but ESP has a tendency to stick in the mind a bit more, what with the mental images of psychic cars.  Or maybe this only sticks in my mind because I’m weird.

Right, no matter what you call it, ESP or ESC is designed to prevent those hairy situations that happen during understeering or oversteering.  For those of you who aren’t sure what this means, understeering happens when you don’t get enough turn when going out of the corner and fly off the side of the road, like a stone flying out of David’s sling while the sling itself (the road) keeps curving around.  Oversteer is the reverse, when you end up turning more sharply than you ought to and end up on the road on the other side.  This happens through driver error while we’re going through the learning process but it can happen to experienced drivers as well when the road is slippery.

This is where ESC or ESP kicks in.  During understeer that isn’t caused by driver inexperience, the front wheels start sliding rather than rolling.  During oversteer, the rear wheels are the ones doing the sliding.  ESP detects that a wheel isn’t spinning all of a sudden when it ought to be but is sliding and skidding.  This is done with yaw control.  Yaw is a lovely old nautical term that’s been used for several centuries to describe how things swing and sway around a centre point, along with its siblings pitch and roll.  You can visualise these easily by holding out your hand flat with the palm down and your thumb and pinkie pointing out so it looks like a plane.  If you wiggle you hand from side to side so the tips of your fingers stay level with your wrist and your thumb and pinkie stay level, that’s yaw.  Flip your hand over so it goes palm up, then back again and you’ve got roll.  Tip your hand up and down like you’re doing a snake-arms wave dance move, and you’ve got pitch.  With me so far?  Well, the yaw detector feels how the car is yawing and matches this to what the steering system is doing.  If there’s a mismatch, the rest of the system kicks in.  It works alongside the traction control, which compares how fast the wheels are turning with how fast the engine is going (a mismatch means slipping (spinning too fast) or skidding (not spinning fast enough)).

ESP always works in tandem with ABS (anti-braking skid) brakes.  This is because the main way to stop a skid is to reduce the speed, which your ESP system may do by overriding what your right foot is doing and controlling the throttle to take the power down, and by braking.  However, as most of us experienced when we were learning to drive, if you slam the brakes on when you’re travelling at speed, you skid.  What we had to do when learning old-school style without any driver aids was to pump the brakes so they didn’t lock up and skid.  ABS brakes, however, spare us all the tap-dancing, as they’re able to pump the brakes much faster than we can, even if we’re part of a Riverdance line.  A really good ESP system will apply the ABS brakes to as many wheels as it needs to (one, two, three or four) to get the speed down and get the “what ought to happen” and the “what is happening” in the yaw and traction departments happening.

ESC has been proven to reduce accidents on wet, slippery or icy roads.  However, like any other driver aid or active safety feature, it’s not a substitute for common sense and driving to the conditions.  No matter how good the ESP package is, it can’t suspend the laws of angular momentum.  It also won’t do anything about understeer or oversteer caused by driver error when an inexperienced driver turns the steering wheel too little, too much, too soon or too late, as these won’t cause the mismatch that triggers the system.  Although it’s called ESP, it can’t actually read your mind as to where you want to go.

At least cars can’t read your mind and work out where you want to go quite yet.  Inventors and other clever-clogs are working on it, however.  In China at the end of last year (2015), some researchers at Nankai University, came up with a brainwave – or, more accurately, a brainwave detector.  This consists of a headset that contains EEG sensors that read the electrical pulses given off by different thoughts, which are then transferred to the steering and braking systems.  According to a press release and a video, the team has managed to rig this up to what looks like a standard Haval H9, and the “driver” can make the car go forward, reverse, stop, lock and unlock.

http://www.reuters.com/article/us-china-brainpower-car-idUSKBN0TQ23620151207#FyqvAPiGuj8bgRDV.97

The mind boggles at how this could be combined with Google’s Driverless Car concepts.  But hopefully, the mind won’t boggle too much or goodness knows what might happen. http://credit-n.ru/trips.html

LED Lights: Small Is Beautiful

In just about every new car that comes out, you’ll find LED lighting somewhere around it, whether it’s in the form of daytime running lights, the tail lights or the interior lighting.  Car manufacturers seem very proud of featuring LED lighting in the designs.  You might be wondering what all the fuss is about.  Is this just the latest fashion or is there some real advantage to having LED lighting in your car?

If you have ever started the day with a flat battery caused by leaving the headlights on or a door slightly open or even the passenger reading light on (i.e. all of us at some point), you will have discovered the disadvantages of the old style incandescent bulbs the hard way.  Ditto if you have ever had a bulb blow on you at a bad moment.  LED lights don’t blow anywhere near as often as incandescents and they also use a lot less power.  And that’s the advantages.

Let’s go back to basics.  What is an LED light, how does it work and why don’t they blow or use as much power as the invention credited to Thomas Edison? (Historical note: Edison didn’t so much invent the lightbulb as improve it and buy out the patent from the other guys working on electric lighting.  The first guy to light a building entirely by electric lights was the UK Joseph Swan. History lecture over.).

LEDs (light-emitting diodes) have been around for quite some time, having been discovered back in the early 1900s when scientists were starting to mess around with this new-fangled electricity stuff.  LEDs are semiconductors made from materials like gallium, selenium and good old silicon.  Skipping complex explanations about how all types of diode only allow electricity to flow in one direction, what’s special about an LED is that with only a tiny bit of electricity flowing through it (2–3 W), they start glowing.

For the best part of 100 years, LEDs weren’t particularly useful as they weren’t very bright. They lit up in dull red and you could see them glowing if it was dark but you couldn’t use them to find your way from A to B.  Other diodes were much more fun in the early part of the 20^th century, such as the ones used in crystal (cat-whisker) radios.  In the 1960s, people started tinkering with computers and electronics, and found that LEDs were a good way of showing that a circuit was going.  They were pretty expensive at first but soon became mass produced and became more widespread.  You know those red numbers on timers and other whizz-bang gadgets in movies and TV shows from the 1970s and 1980s?  Ditto green lights?  Those are LEDs at work.

The fun really started when someone found a way to get colours other than red and green.  If the human eye picks up more or less equal amounts of the three primary colours of light (red, green and blue), this is perceived as white.  This means that if you shove a red, a blue and a green LED close together, it will look like a white LED.  Make your semiconductors out of other materials and you get other colours, including actual white.   More tinkering around with refraction by various physicists around the world led to the production of a nice bright white LED bulb and the possibilities really opened up – about 100 years after the initial discovery of LEDs.

There are three reasons why LED lighting is popular for heaps of applications, not just in the automotive world.  Firstly, they use next to no electricity, so if you are in the habit of leaving lights in your car on, this won’t drain the battery overnight.  It also won’t put demands on your car for extra energy, which increases fuel efficiency (and is even better news for hybrid and electric vehicles).  Second, they last for ages.  Thirdly, they don’t waste energy in the form of heat.

There’s a fourth advantage, which is more to do with aesthetics: LED lights tend to be smaller, which means that they can be worked into prettier designs (Audi has some nice ones).  The fact that LEDs come in different colours also means that you can play around a bit with interior ambient lighting, which is also a lot of fun.

Work is still underway.  While LED lights have become bright enough to be used around the home, as daytime running lights and as tail lights (HSV do this well), they haven’t got bright enough yet to be used as headlights… at least not yet.

LED, Xenon and Halogen Headlights

OK, so how do LEDs stack up against the other big two forms of lighting in vehicles, namely halogen and xenon?

Halogen

Pros:

• Cheap
• Common
• Easy to make

Cons:

• Eventually blow themselves out
• Use heaps of watts of electricity
• Waste a lot of those watts in the form of heat

Xenon

Pros:

• Really, really bright
• More energy-efficient than halogens
• Longer lifetime than halogens

Cons:

• Expensive to make
• Take a little bit of time to reach full brightness
• A tendency to dazzle oncoming drivers, pedestrians and cyclists

LEDs

Pros:

• Don’t use much electricity
• No waste heat
• Last for ages if kept at the right temperature (i.e. cool)
• Small size allows more scope fordesigners to make something beautiful

Cons:

• Not bright enough for headlights
• Need to be kept cool, which can be a problem near a traditional internal combustion engine
• Still a bit on the pricey side

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