Archive for the ‘damage’ Category

The stylish and delicate-looking front and rear bumper areas of most new vehicles are, just as they appear, damage-prone and expensive to fix, even from minor parking-lot-speed impacts. However the new 2010 Subaru Legacy fares well; in the latest round of bumper evaluations from the Insurance Institute for Highway Safety (IIHS), it gets one of the best ratings yet.

The most impressive area of improvement was in the front full-width test, where the vehicle is run into a steel barrier that simulates another car bumper. In this, the 2010 Subaru Legacy sustained just $847 in damage, versus an estimated $4,049 for the previous 2007 Legacy...

Navigation systems using GPS seem to be behind a whole host of bad behavior. They lead BMW drivers to the brink of cliffs, and now they're causing truck drivers in New York State to drive into bridges.

The engineering magazine IEEE Spectrum reports that GPS devices are directing truckers, especially out-of-state drivers unfamiliar with the region, onto limited-access parkways that ban commercial traffic and have bridges too low for modern tractor-trailer rigs.

The New York State Department of Transportation cites more than 1,400 truck-into-bridge accidents over the past 15 years, with the vast majority of them on the Hutchinson River Parkway...

We have friends who are weather fans, or weather fiends. They reload storm maps obsessively, and converse in the language of descending fronts and scattered sprinkles. We are not those people. We just get rained on occasionally.

But even we were drawn into the Weather Channel's website by its compelling slideshow of the carnage Mother Nature can wreak on innocent vehicles doing nothing more than sitting in a driveway when, say, a tornado happened to visit.

No matter what heinous things humans may do to a Ferrari 599, or a Bugatti Veyron, or a BMW Z4 ... Mother Nature can do far, far worse.

Take a look at the whole slideshow. Then consider a...