Could In-Car Warning Systems Make Teens Safer Drivers?

A warning system can help make teen drivers safer, according to a trial program in Staffordshire County, United Kingdom. The County Council installed in-vehicle data recorders in the vehicles of 50 local teen drivers in March 2008 and studied them for six months.

The IVDRs, manufactured by GreenRoad of San Francisco, are normally used by truck drivers to help them learn safer driving practices and increase fuel efficiency. The IVDR keeps an eye on overly sharp turns, heavy acceleration, hard braking and quick lane changes. In this study, a warning system with red, yellow and green lights on a dashboard-mounted box was turned on midway through the trial. At that point, students received indications on how well they were driving.

After analyzing data from 18,000 trips, researchers found that the number of unsafe driving incidents fell by half after the warning lights were turned on.

It’s possible that insurance companies could charge lower premiums for teenage drivers who had such a system installed in their cars, according to Israeli safety researchers who studied the data.

Spy-in-the-Cab Could Improve Teenage Driving (New Scientist)

Safety Advocates Push for Safer Roads

Traffic fatalities fell to a 40-year low last year, in a large part thanks to the recession (which led to less driving) and to improvements in vehicle safety. As for road safety, the most obvious improvements include adding rumble strips to warn drivers when they’re nearing the shoulder, caps on the ends of roadside guard rails to prevent cars from ramping off of them and cable guard rails on divided highways to keep cars from crossing the median.

Gerald Donaldson, the research director for Advocates of Highway and Auto Safety told National Public Radio that the biggest hazards are two-lane two-way rural roads, which can be up to eight times more dangerous than an interstate. This is because of hazards that accumulate on the side of these roads—everything from telephone poles to trash.

Another hazard, they say, is trucks. Over 4,000 people were killed in crashes with semi-trucks last year, accounting for 1 out of every 9 traffic deaths. The trucking industry is asking Congress to increase the maximum weight for trucks on federal highways from 80,000 pounds to 97,000. The trucking industry says this will decrease the number of trucks on the road, but safety advocates say they’ll be even heavier road hazards hurtling along.

Critics Say Roads Safer, But Danger Still Lurks (NPR)

Gas Prices Rise with Thanksgiving Travel

If you’re traveling by car this Thanksgiving, you’ll notice a difference in gas prices from last year. Up 72 cents per gallon from a year ago, the national average stands at roughly $2.64, according to AAA’s Fuel Gauge Report.

Keep in mind that last year at this time we had just seen the crash of the housing and automotive markets and the meltdown of the financial sector. Thanksgiving travel plummeted by 25% from 2007 to 2008, and all the talk was of how to avoid a Great Depression redux.

AAA says Thanksgiving travel will rise 2% over last year, with a total of 33.2 million people hitting the road, and gas prices are actually down a few cents from a month ago.

Still, oil prices have been rising steadily and currently hover at around $77.56 per barrel. An unemployment rate of more than 10% should help keep that in check, but experts expect the economic recovery to be tested as energy prices rise.

The Energy Information Administration expects gas prices to rise past $3 per gallon during the summer of 2010.

Higher Gasoline Prices Greet Thanksgiving Travelers (USA Today)

Cities Pay Drivers to Carpool

Following the lead of other big American cities with congestion, Washington D.C. has set up a program to pay commuters $2 a day to carpool. The hope is that by giving people a short-term incentive, the cities can alter their long-term behavior.

Atlanta, Seattle, Birmingham and Los Angeles have tried similar programs. Atlanta’s program—led by the Clean Air Campaign—began in 2002 and has had 19,000 participants, most of whom have continued carpooling after their payments ended. Atlanta’s system works by allowing people to log their commutes online, receiving $100 after a three-month trial period. Drivers tend to realize the savings they’re making on gas and maintenance and stick with the carpools.

Still, some economists think this is an expensive way to incentivize drivers when tolls tend to work better than cash payments in changing driver behavior. Because tolls are politically unpopular, cash payments are easier to sell.

D.C.’s program aims to take just 750 cars off the road at first, a small difference when considering Beltway traffic. Nevertheless, city officials want to see if the program can alter driver behavior permanently.

Cities Use Cash to Encourage Carpooling (NPR)

Americans Slowly Buying More Fuel-Efficient Vehicles

U.S. consumers are increasingly buying more fuel-efficient vehicles, but the pace of mileage improvements remains slow, according to a report issued by the Environmental Protection Agency.

American vehicles averaged 21 mpg for the 2008 model year, which is a 0.4 mpg increase from 2007. The average is expected to increase to 21.1 mpg for 2009, although the EPA warns that the past year's upheaval in the auto industry could render that forecast false.

The elephant in the room is the Obama administration's insistence that automakers hit a 35.5 mpg average by 2015. Keep in mind that this is just what car companies have to build, though not necessarily what consumers have to buy. Even after the $4 per gallon of gas price spike of 2008, consumer behavior has not altered as quickly as some would like.

It should also be noted that the federal government's fleet average uses a completely separate formula for measuring mileage; it's not what the EPA lists on new-car window stickers. This means achieving the 35.5 mpg standard will not necessarily ensure a real-world 35.5 mpg fleet average.

Purchases of Fuel-Efficient Vehicles Increase Slowly (Detroit Free Press)

Iowa Town Has EV Charging Stations at the Ready

Iowa businessman Mike Howard’s philosophy on electric vehicles that can be summed up as, “You’ve got to start somewhere.” Thus, Elk Horn, Iowa – population 650 — has four charging stations built and waiting for EVs, with another four stations planned for next year. In terms of charging stations, this single-handedly puts Iowa ahead of almost every other state, excluding those on the West Coast.

Each station costs $6,000; Howard has already spent approximately $30,000 on the total effort, with plans to drop another $50,000 next year to expand farther into Iowa and Nebraska. Howard wants to focus on Interstate 80 corridor, with eventual plans to build a charging corridor from Chicago to Denver.

Is this ambitious or pointless? With only 96 EVs out of the 4 million registered vehicles in Iowa (and only one converted Chevy S-10 pickup in Elk Horn), you’d undoubtedly think the latter. However, Howard might simply be better at reading the writing on the wall.

The Obama administration established a $3.4 billion grant program to develop electric vehicles and upgrade the power grid, but that money went primarily to Arizona, California, Oregon, Tennessee and Washington. As vehicles like the Chevy Volt and Nissan Leaf hit roads in the next year, plug-ins will become a permanent fixture of the American automotive landscape; EVs are expected to be 2% of cars on the road by 2015 and 30% by 2030.

While the investment may take a while to pay off, could you imagine owning the largest network of charging stations on a major Interstate? As long as he has a good dose of patience, Howard could turn out to be prescient.

Tiny Iowa Town Has the Chargers, Awaiting Drivers (Associated Press)

Fewer Than 200 Have Returned GM's Guaranteed Cars

GM’s 60-Day Satisfaction Guarantee program has proven to be a confidence booster for the company. Today, GM announced that fewer than 200 buyers out of 222,000 who purchased a new GM car have returned them unsatisfied. However, that’s out of 658 who took the guarantee offer over $500 in cash back. That’s a 33% return rate.

These returns don’t cost the buyer the full price of the car, but they are out taxes, fees and two car payments. This means those who returned cars were very unsatisfied and skeptical to begin with. GM says it is being proactive about the returns; they're following up with each customer and conducting high-level interviews with engineering staff to find out what the customers didn’t like. A few of the purchasers returned the cars for other models or trim levels, but many just didn’t like the cars or trucks.

New Jersey Turnpike Turkey Finally Captured

A week before Thanksgiving, a turkey became a local celebrity in New Jersey when she took up residence along Exit 14B on the New Jersey Turnpike, creating a hazard for motorists.

Dubbed Tammy the Turnpike Turkey by the media, the clever bird managed to evade authorities for a week while crossing the highway and creating safety concerns as drivers slammed on the brakes to avoid hitting her.

Agents from New Jersey’s Fish and Wildlife division finally managed to lure her from the nearby woods where she’d been hiding. They used a gun-powered net to ensnare her.

Tammy will be relocated to the Popcorn Park Zoo in Lacy Township, N.J., where zoo personnel assured the public that far from being someone’s Thanksgiving dinner, Tammy will be paired with a tom turkey named “Gobbler.”

Happy Ending for Tammy the Turnpike Turkey (NBC New York)

Feds Green the Fleet but What Happens to Old Cars?

The American Recovery and Reinvestment Act appropriated money to buy 17,246 new vehicles, including 3,000 hybrids, in an effort to improve the fuel economy of the federal fleet across agencies as diverse as the Marines to the U.S. Forest Service.

The General Services Administration claimed that this would lead to a 40 percent improvement in fuel efficiency and remove 334 million pounds of greenhouse gases over the next seven years. However, the GSA does not take into account that unlike the Cash for Clunkers program, which scrapped consumers’ cars, the government’s vehicles will be sold at auction and presumably put back on the road.

Depending on how much these old vehicles are driven (and whether they replace vehicles that are even less fuel efficient), they could still be on the road for a long time. While greening the federal fleet certainly won’t hurt the environment, the GSA claims must be balanced against the fact that the old vehicles will likely still be driven in some capacity.

"At a value of approximately $40 million, the government-owned replaced vehicles will not go to waste," the GSA said in a statement. "They will be resold to further invest in greening the federal fleet."

The GSA used $300 million in stimulus money to replace cars, trucks and buses with new models that offered better fuel economy. So far, the agency has auctioned off approximately 8,000 of the old vehicles.

Spin Meter: Feds Buy Green Cars, Auction Rejects (Associated Press)

Obama, China Come to Agreements on Clean Energy

As expected, President Barack Obama’s trip to China did not produce any major breakthrough agreements on greenhouse-gas emissions reductions. However, the trip did lead to a number of agreements on how the U.S. and China will cooperate on clean energy initiatives, according to the Obama administration.

The White House released a list of seven energy- and environment-related deals finalized on Obama’s trip, the most relevant of which may be the U.S.-China Electric Vehicles Initiative. The initiative will foster cooperation between the world’s two largest economies in developing “joint standards” of battery and grid development, which will lead to demonstration projects in more than a dozen cities.