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Ford's drive for safer drivers

The Ford Motor Company employees and dealers in the room applauded when Arnie Cuellar mentioned that he owned a diesel-powered F-250 pickup truck. But the Phoenix Police Department motorcycle officer assigned to the Arizona Governor’s Office of Highway Safety wasn’t here to sell trucks. He was here to save lives.

Handing a teenager the keys to a car or truck without giving them proper training is the same as handing them a loaded weapon, Officer Cuellar said, lamenting the fact that because of funding cutbacks and liability issues, fewer and fewer school districts are teaching teens to drive.

The Ford folks had come to Phoenix – and will be going to six other major cities – to announce a multi-pronged driving safety program that includes Driving Skills for Life, Ford’s five-year-old teen driving education program that puts young drivers through a series of exercises designed to better equip them for real-world driving.

But teens aren’t the only one who will benefit from the programs sponsored by Ford, which also will offer:

* Corazon de mi vida, which is Spanish for “You are the center of my life” and provides Spanish-language instruction in the importance of the proper installation and use of child safety seats. Statistics shows that the fatality rate for Latino children ages 5 to 12 in vehicle crashes is 72 percent greater than the fatality rate for non-Latino white children.

* Car Care Clinics for teenage girls and for Girl Scouts (the scouts can earn their Car Sense badges by attending the clinic). Topics will include using vehicle safety features, the importance of basic car maintenance, personal security, driving safety awareness skills and a look at possible careers for women in the auto industry.

Ford shared not only its vision, but samples of the various courses, including two of the three behind-the-wheel sessions from Driving Skills for Life.

The dynamic activities are led by current and former professional racing drivers and their emphasis isn’t on learning to parallel park but on what to do in an emergency situation, or how to avoid such situations in the first place. (The session we didn’t experience was the one on not being a distracted driver. Texting while driving is, to say the least, strongly frowned upon.)

In one of our hands-on sessions, we drove into a simulated intersection where, at the last second, lights indicated which of three lanes to enter. Just as with more athletic activities, safe driving is a matter of hand-eye-foot coordination, with the emphasis on the eyes and looking well down the road so you can see what’s coming and react before you find yourself in a hazardous situation.

The importance of the driver’s eyes became even more apparent when we moved to the vehicle handling track, a small, coned-off oval track where we drove specially equipped Ford Mustangs. The special equipment was a set of casters under the rear axle. When activated by the instructor sitting in the passenger’s seat, jack screws lifted the axle so the car rode not on its rear tires but on the small caster wheels, basically spinning the car out of control.

Well, not really out of control, because the point of the exercise was to demonstrate how, by looking not where the car was going but where you as the driver wanted the car to go, you actually could maintain enough control to keep from hitting obstacles as you regained complete control and headed on down the road.

Even for an experienced driver, it takes a few laps to get the hang of it. For an inexperienced 16-year-old with a new driver’s license, such an exercise could be the difference between a close call and a visit to the emergency room.

So watch for word – in the news media or at your school – about Ford’s safety programs coming to your town, and then do whatever you can to take part.

As Officer Cuellar noted, there’s a big difference between a crash and an accident.

Crashes often can be avoided, an accident cannot. “An accident,” he said, “is what happens in your pants when you’re in a crash.”

-- Larry Edsall

Posted by Larry Edsall on 5/7/2008 3:49:37 PM |comments(0)

Volvo takes aim at the traffic toll

WITTMAN, Arizona

Each year, 1.2 million people worldwide, including some 43,000 Americans, die on the roadways. To put those numbers in perspective: 1.2 million people is the population of Dallas, Texas… eliminated each year; Forty-three thousand is the capacity of Progressive Field, home of the Cleveland Indians… wiped out on the highway year after year after…

A problem? More like an epidemic.

But Volvo, the car company that invented the life-saving seat belt, that car company already so well known for safety, has a new goal: By the year 2020, Volvo’s vision to produce vehicles in which no one will be killed or injured.

No, you didn’t misread that. “Our vision is that by 2020 no one will be killed or injured in a Volvo,” is what it says on the slide being projected onto the screen here at Volvo’s Arizona Proving Grounds northwest of Phoenix.

Thomas Broberg, Volvo senior technical advisor for safety (and Ph.D candidate at MIT), reads those words aloud for emphasis, and then adds his own in behalf of his employer: “You should not risk life and limb transporting yourself to work or to school.”

Imagine: Cars that prevent their occupants from being killed or even injured! An impossible goal? Perhaps. But the folks at Volvo hold it as their goal, and they’re working toward it very seriously. And it’s not only those inside Volvos they want to protect. They’ve already found ways to eliminate some collisions between their own cars and those of other brands, and they’re working on ways to keep pedestrians and cyclists from falling victim to vehicles as well.

In the next few days, Volvo will show its latest safety technologies to officials from governmental and insurance groups. Today, it did a pre-run with some Phoenix-area automotive writers, first explaining an alphabet soup of safety of that goes beyond ABS and ESP to include LDW, DAC, ACC, CWAB and much more. Then, we left the classroom and went out on the pavement for behind-the-wheel demonstrations.

In one of those demonstrations, Volvo showed us the City Safety technology that will be launched as standard equipment on the 2009 Volvo XC60. City Safety is a low-speed collision mitigation system designed to avoid, or at least mitigate, a collision between a Volvo and the vehicle just ahead.

Basically, we were put in a car and told to drive at about 15 miles per hour toward what appeared to be the rear end of a big blue car (actually, it was an air-filled, canvas-covered balloon). As we approached, lights and sound warned of an impending collision. Stand on the brakes and the car stops. No harm, no foul.

But even if the driver fails to respond quickly enough, the car applies its own brakes and the impact, if it even occurs, is scratch-and-dent, not the typical--but expensive--fender-bender.

We also got to leave the proving grounds to experience some other Volvo safety technologies in real-world traffic, systems that warn you that you’re about to cross a lane marker and perhaps leave the road or cross into on-coming traffic, that are designed to alert the drowsy driver should he or she start wandering back and forth within the lane, that help the driver keep a safe distance between vehicles at highway speeds, even Alcoguard, a portable breathalyzer device that reads the driver’s blood alcohol level and can prevent the car from starting.

Many of these systems already are available on Volvo vehicles. So is another one that I experienced unexpectedly when two dogs ran out of the brush in front of me. I made an emergency stop and then realized that my four-way flashers were flashing even though I hadn’t touched the red triangle switch on the dashboard.

Turns out that they come on automatically in such a situation, to alert drivers behind that you’ve stopped unexpectedly.

Very clever, these safety-conscious Swedish engineers.

Let’s hope that Volvo meets its 2020 goal, and that just like the seat belt, it shares its safety systems with other car companies.

--Larry Edsall

Posted by Larry Edsall on 4/2/2008 8:04:57 PM |comments(0)

What is an “American” car?

PHILADELPHIA

For whatever reason, members of the Philadelphia chapter of NAFA figured it must have something interesting to say, because they flew me in from Phoenix to speak at their meeting held in conjunction with the Philly auto show.

For those of you who don’t know, NAFA is the National Association of Fleet Administrators, an organization of vehicle fleet managers and their suppliers, which includes people who help them track safety records, who manage various aspects of their fleet activities and regional sales managers for several automakers who sell them vehicles by the hundreds and thousands.

What they heard from me was about the globalization and diversification of the auto industry as it involves a proliferation of both the brands of vehicles for them to consider and the types of fuels that will power those vehicles. Since I arrived early enough to do a lap through the auto show, I also offered them a “you gotta see this” list for their field trip to the exhibition halls following my speed and our group lunch.

One of the things I wondered out loud was whether a fleet vehicle buyer for, say, the state of Pennsylvania or the Township of Lower Merien, was being more patriotic buying a vehicle that wears a Detroit brand but is made in Mexico or Canada (or, before too long, in China) or an “import” brand vehicle that’s built in Tennessee or Texas?

Wow! Did that set off the local reps from Chrysler, Ford and General Motors. When my talk was finished and the floor opened for questions, they had them, sometimes phrased more as a challenge to what they considered to be my “agenda “

The formal part of the meeting concluded, we all moved to the buffet line and then back into the conference room for lunch at round tables. And guess at which table I found myself? That’s right, the table where the guys from GM, Ford and Chrysler were occupying half the seats. We had a good – and good-natured – give and take and I think we all left – them for the auto show and me for the airport – with a better and certainly much more cordial understanding of what I was trying to say and how they define an American vehicle. Part of their definition involves where the money goes regardless of where various parts are produced or where vehicles are assembled. At the end of the day, does the money spent on the vehicle go to Japan or Korea or Europe or does it stay in the United States?

My orientation, I suppose, has more to do with where those parts are produced and especially the nationality of the people who assemble them into a viable vehicle. If the sheetmetal is stamped here, if major components, such as the engine, are produced here, and if the assembly plant is located not in Canada or Mexico but in the nation that lies between them, then I’d argue that it’s an American car, because, ultimately, the people who get paid for building it are Americans.

--Larry Edsall

Posted by Larry Edsall on 2/5/2008 2:29:11 PM |comments(0)

General (Motors) gets specific

Politicians are pushing more stringent fuel economy, emissions and safety standards. The economy is hurting. Toyota appears to have moved ahead to become the world’s largest automaker. So why was General Motors chairman Rick Wagoner so upbeat when he sat down for half an hour with Phoenix news media personnel?

“At GM we’re feeling good,” said Wagoner, who flew in for the grand opening of the Henry Brown Buick Pontiac GMC dealership in suburban Phoenix. The store is the archetype for such one-store, three-brand sales and service facilities GM hopes to see dealers build across the country.

Wagoner was upbeat even as he was asked about the end of his company’s long reign as the world’s largest automaker, a title Toyota apparently has wrestled away, though Wagoner wasn’t quite willing to concede until some estimated sales figures become hard numbers.

“I haven’t had a chance to practice this answer a lot,” Wagoner joked when asked about a photo finish expected to show GM in second place.

Wagoner noted that the new Chevrolet Malibu won North American car of the year honors – and just a year after the Saturn Aura took the award in 2007. He said GM was getting rave reviews over the concept cars it unveiled at the North American International Auto Show earlier this month in Detroit. He noted that the company has a “broad array of technology” in its pipeline.

And speaking of pipelines, Wagoner added that much of that technology is designed to reduce dependence on petroleum to power the vehicles that GM builds and sells. He noted that GM already has trimmed $9 billion from its U.S. cost structure and will cut another $5 billion by 2010. “We need to,” he said, “to invest in new products and technologies and to meet the demands of the regulatory environment.”

He said GM is optimistic about the U.S. economy improving in the second quarter and beyond, and he wasn’t even all that bothered about slipping behind in the sales race with Toyota.