Archive for the ‘test’ Category

We've mentioned the FastSkinz applique a couple of times on TCC. It's a wrap for cars that's dimpled like a golf ball, and the manufacturer says it boosts fuel efficiency by 18% to 20%. According to what we've read, those claims are wildly inaccurate, but that didn't deter the Discovery Channel's Mythbusters team from running a similar experiment using a Ford Taurus, some modeling clay, and 1082 dimples. Their results? Mildly surprising. The whole episode is embedded below, but you can jump to the 40 minute mark if you're short on time.

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Last Thursday was the 50th birthday of the three-point safety harness, invented by Volvo's first safety engineer, Nils Bohlin. After we ran an item to commemorate the event, we got a nice note from the UK offering us a video clip with some Volvo safety history.

The video turns out to have wonderful historic footage of how safety testing used to be done, back in the old days. Note, for instance, the extremely apprehensive look on the face of one test driver (around 0:15 into the video).

At about the 1:35 mark, you'll find out why he looks that way: Test drivers belted themselves into Volvo 544s and actually drove them onto ramps to flip them...

In light of yesterday's news from the Centers for Disease Control that Onstar raises accident survival rates, owners of Fords with the Sync system may wonder about their own chances using the similar system.

Ford has recently added a "911 Assist" function to the latest version of Sync, which is built into various 2010 models including the 2010 Ford Fusion Hybrid we're test driving this weekend.

That function automatically dials 911 if the airbags deploy, the linked mobile phone is on and synced to the car, and the driver doesn't respond to a Sync request to confirm that he or she is OK.

Luckily, some older Sync systems can be upgraded to...