I owe my car life to two men. And when one of them left us today, I kept his Duesenberg and his Rolls-Royce.

Last Friday my sister called. She doesn't call at 10 in the morning. So before I took the phone, I made a checklist - gas up the Honda, put my black suit in its bag, don't forget my long socks. In an hour, she was ready too, and we drove back home to Washington for the funeral that had been a long time coming.

My grandfather, William Grove, didn't just love cars. He was part of the car life in America. His grandfather puddled steel in Pittsburgh and at 70, moved to Detroit to build cars. His father was a taxi driver and, when he was able to see clearly after long nights chasing GIs' wives around Sunnybrook Tavern during wartime, an avid car buff. Both are probably why Granddad spent his nights collecting used cars to be wrecked, in the days when people only bought new cars.

Instead of wrecking them, though, he'd rescue them. The Cadillac with a nut-sized dent in the fender became the car he parked on the northeast block off K Street in D.C. The Duesenberg he briefly possessed - when Duesenbergs fell from fashion - was stationed on another block. At one point he had seven cars, including the Rolls-Royce he saved to squire Grandma around town. Gas was cheaper than Coke; tags were $1.

By the time he moved my mother and the rest of the extended family south into Maryland farm country he'd already owned a gas station, and would own another in the 1980s where I first saw a '55 Thunderbird. Where I first lusted after a Mustang. Where I saw my first girly calendar on the greasy wall in his office. And where I would sit for hours while my dad and uncle passed humid afternoons all summer long, air lines hissing tires to life like friendly cobras and the smell of raw gas never more than a few dizzy feet away.

The stations are long gone, and so are the Duesie and the Rolls, preceding me by 50 or more years. But I kept them with me today, and when I drive all the new cars back home as I do often, I'll drive by Granddad and let him see them. Because I know he'd want to.

I vote for a new design of the vacancy indicator at the top of the cabs, so that we can tell from at least half a block away whether or not the cab is available, this way I stop whistling my brains off or I give my undulating arm a rest until the next one! What do you think?

Having been raised in New York and worked in Manhattan for several years, I know a little bit about yellow cabs, especially some of the tricks needed to succeed in getting one over taller and more commanding individuals, or good looking women, or imposing couples, or very loud whistles coming from bell boys from nearby hotels. But perhaps, in the very near future, all of these challenges and many more may soon fade into oblivion due to a workshop held in New York city a couple weeks ago called "Designing the Taxi".

Urban planners, architects, designers, citizens advocates, along with taxi drivers, owners and regulators convened to discuss some of the new design ideas for the familiar yellow cab; scratching their heads about the future, and not just the future of the taxi vehicle -- the future of the whole taxi system, the taxi economy, the taxi aesthetic and the city all those taxis serve, although imperfectly but hey, they discussed unique ideas like credit-card swipers in the back seat, sliding doors that won’t injure those loyal and crazy delivery dudes on bicycles, a separate dog compartment (now, there is an idea), baby seats that fit appropriately without jeopardizing the adult sitting area, a unique New York taxi silhouette, as recognizable around the world as London’s, which of course means dropping the infamous and dreary Crown Vic, or the ever-so-fading Caprice Classic, and last but not least, and this noble idea may be the hardest of all, smoothed out passenger “interface points.” Are you kidding? Telling New Yorkers where to stand to hail a cab or how to do “the cab thang”!

So should the taxi of the future be street-hailed or summoned by electronic text messaging? Should global-positioning satellites plot the best route to Tribeca or La Guardia, or the Chrysler building?

"GPS is a wonderful thing," taxi driver Erhan Tuncel declared at this workshop. "An expensive abomination," driver Bill Lindeaur shot back, warning of blurry video images, IRS tax snooping and assorted other potential hazards of the high-tech mapping technology.

What did you expect? Uniform agreement on the future of New York's most notoriously cantankerous industry? At least somebody is talking about this stuff.

Actually, big credit goes to the Design Trust for Public Space sponsoring such a far-ranging conversation and to the Parsons School of Design for hosting it.

The exercise could have been called "Re-designing the Taxi," only the current state of taxi affairs was never consciously designed in the first place. It just kinda got here by fits and starts, like a rush-hour cab inching its way into the Midtown Tunnel.

Matthew Daus, chairman of the city Taxi and Limousine Commission, had the best line of all. "Why change anything, they're not that horrible," he said. "They're selling them on 42nd Street as Matchbox cars."

Bernie Ecclestone thinks Indy fourth-placer is a domestic appliance. Funny, our George Foreman grill can't even hit 100 mph in the straights.

The Governors Highway Safety Association thinks that highway deaths should have gone done, with all these fancy new airbags and such. So they're talking up a return to the 55-mph speed limit. What's the best way to get voted from office, you ask? That's right, kids.

Apparently, New Mexico Gov. Bill Richardson isn't one of them.

The S-Class has another new look - its fourth in four tries. We'd say something about those regular visits by the milkman, but 90 percent of you wouldn't remember a milkman, so we'll just suggest that they all have different fathers and leave the rest to Divorce Court.

Chrysler's new Durango-based ute is going to be the Aspen. Local fading celebs are available for the ad campaign we hear - and this time Don Johnson promises not to wear pastels.

The Wall Street Journal says HOV lanes cause accidents. We can personally attest to this fact, but right now we're trying to merge across four lanes to our exit from the damn lane itself.

The reviews are in - and Herbie gets a decent runaround this time thanks to the effervescent Lindsay Lohan. End result: remake of Days of Thunder with Olsen twins gets greenlight for development.

Cowboy rules: sometimes a group of Pistons just can't overcome one strong Spur.

Formula 1 racing has its occasional firestorms - and you think last week's fiasco at Indy would have stuffed Bernie Ecclestone's publicity maw for a while.

You would, of course, be wrong.

Maybe Ecclestone was trying to be funny last weekend during an interview at Indy when he commented on Indy fourth-placer Danica Patrick's groundbreaking 500 drive. Or maybe he thought he was at Target? "Women should be all dressed in white like all other domestic appliances," Ecclestone said - and then later reiterated in a phone call he placed to Patrick, ostensibly to congratulate her for her IRL driving.

Patrick says she was utterly confused by Ecclestone's comments. "I can't believe that he would say it to me over the phone, not to my face, but directly to me," she told the AP. "I don't know if he was talking about someone else or the majority or what, I'm not really sure. Or, maybe that's his real feeling."

Backhanded compliments like those are usually reserved for Wimbledon and mothers-in-law, aren't they?

Motor vehicle accident and fatality rates continue to fall, but not quite fast enough for the Feds, who still blame higher speed limits for highway deaths while nothing is done about lane discipline and unlicensed drivers.

The Governors Highway Safety Association sent out a "survey" to automotive journalists under the header, "Speeding a Serious Problem 10 Years After National Speed Limit Repeal" -- implying that traffic accidents and fatalities have actually increased since Congress repealed the 55-mph National Maximum Speed Limit (NMSL) law back in 1995.

In essence, the "speed kills" argument is being trotted out again by parties who'd like to see the 55-mph speed limit re-imposed -- for "safety's sake."

But the fact of the matter is that since the repeal of the NMSL in 1995, overall accident and fatality rates on U.S. highways have either remained the same or declined.

GHSA's Jonathan Adkins admitted: "The issue is more that speed fatalities haven't decreased in the last decade. Rather shocking considering all the advances with vehicle safety (i.e. airbags) and the fact that seat belt use has doubled since the early 90s."

But that, of course, is not what the "survey" or the press release implied at all. It wasn't titled, "Fatalities Haven't Decreased" -- or "Safety Advances Haven't Saved As Many Lives As Hoped."

Adkins may find it "rather shocking" that airbags and increased seatbelt use haven't saved more lives -- but that's got nothing to do with whether highway speeds of 65 or 70 or even 75 mph necessarily means "less safe." If it did, driving faster than 55 mph would automatically and always mean more traffic accidents, more people being killed in cars. But people today routinely drive at speeds that, prior to 1995, put them in peril of very expensive tickets for "speeding" -- with no more risk of being involved in an accident than was the case prior to the 1995 repeal of the NMSL.

That's the facts -- as distinct from the political agit-prop of the Governors Highway Safety Association.--Eric Peters