Safety
Are You Sitting Comfortably?
One of the things that I’m sure you’ve noticed in a lot of new cars coming out these days is all the adjustable this and that in the seats, especially the driver’s seat. You can adjust the seat angle, the seat back and how far the seat is from the steering wheel. With a lot of seats, you can also throw in lumbar support and (oh glory – one of my favourite bells and whistles) heating and even cooling in the seats. Then you’ve got the ability to adjust the steering wheel itself.
With the ability to adjust the seat to a position that’s just right, it’s something of an irony that a lot of us don’t really adjust the seat much at all, or not really beyond how far forward or back the seat is, plus the seat angle. And if this is all you do, you could be making a big mistake.
Believe it or not, seating position is actually a safety issue. This is for at least three reasons. Firstly, where and how you are seated affects things like how well you can see the road around you, including the mirrors and what’s over your shoulder (even if you have blind spot warning sensors on your vehicle, you still need to do a head check like your driving instructor told you to, just in case). Secondly, the position of your legs and feet affects the speed of your reactions if you need to bang on the brake and/or the clutch – and the same applies to your hands and arms working the steering wheel. Thirdly, bad driving position also increases driver fatigue, which is a contributing factor in a lot of crashes.
Given the importance of proper seating position for road safety, you might wonder why cars don’t just come with one configuration. Fortunately, the powers that be haven’t decided that this is the best solution, mostly because even the densest pen-pushing analyst knows that you can’t have just one ideal seating configuration because humans don’t come with the ideal proportions of the Vitruvian Man, crash test dummies, Barbie, etc. etc. I’m thinking of the four drivers in my family. My son is tall and lanky to the extent that he nearly hits his head on the roof of little hatchbacks, but my daughter is petite. My husband is stocky with long arms and has long since traded his six-pack for a grown-up keg, and I’m average height but with a long torso in proportion to my legs. There is no way that a single seat configuration would suit every single member of the family and the mathematical average would end up with all of us sitting in less-than-ideal positions.
So you’re going to have to adjust your seat and make sure that you’re sitting comfortably – and properly. Unfortunately, for a lot of people, what’s “comfortable” for them is not the best driving position. The worst of these “comfortable” positions are the two extremes: the driver (stereotypically young and male) who has the seat as back from the pedals as possible and the seat tilted back with the steering wheel low, and the driver (stereotypically older and female) who has hunches over a high steering wheel and the seat so far forward that she could just about steer it with her boobs or teeth. These positions will be hell on your back and neck if you stay in them for a long time, and they don’t make for great road safety.
So what’s the right way to sit in the driver’s seat?
First, get yourself ready. You want to have your back and front pockets free of house keys, wallets and cell phones (and put that phone somewhere you can’t reach it so you’re not tempted!). You also want to have footwear that plays nicely with the pedals. Footwear at both ends of the formality spectrum are unsuitable for driving, with work boots, flip-flop thongs, stiletto heels and wedge heels all being atrocious. Even bare feet are better than those. Flats and low heels that aren’t at the risk of coming off your feet or jamming around the pedals. Wear comfortable clothing, too. Anything that’s too tight, too baggy or itchy will distract you.
Now you can get into the car. Firstly, let’s get the seat at the right distance from the pedals and the wheel. Get it where you can rest your heels on the ground ready to operate your pedals and so your knees are slightly bent. Having your knees bent slightly but not too much reduces fatigue (a lot of us sleep with slightly bent knees) and also means that you can use more of your leg muscles if you need to bang on the brake hard and suddenly. Also play around with the seat height and tilt so that your hips are level with your knees.
Now for the seat back. You want it somewhere so that you can have your elbows bent so that your wrists are straight when you hold the steering wheel correctly. And the correct way to hold the steering wheel is the way that your driving instructor told you: 10 o’clock and 2 o’clock with your thumbs up as if you were holding wine glasses – or 9 o’clock and 3 o’clock if you want a bit of variation. What you need to avoid is 12 o’clock, or 5 o’clock and 7 o’ clock – and definitely not 6 o’clock! The seat back should be tilted somewhere so that your shoulders can press against the back – if you have to hunch forwards, your seat is too far back. Now pull the headrest forward so it cushions your head.
Your bum should be pressed all the way back to where the seat back meets the seat of the seat. You’ll strain your back if your bum is too far forward and there’s a big triangular gap between you and the seat back. Lumbar support helps but your bum should still be well back. Use cushions if you have short legs or if your car doesn’t provide you with lumbar support.
Some suggestions you see for ideal seat position go to the bother of telling you the ideal angles for this, that and the other thing. These are all very well in their way but forget that people don’t always have the proper proportions for the proper angles. I know that I don’t and if I have my seat back to the proper 100-degree angle recommended by some, I can’t bend my arms when holding the steering wheel.
Next, adjust the steering wheel. You should be able to hold it correctly as described above. It should also not be squashed against your thighs or your stomach or any other bits. You should also get the height of the steering wheel to that happy medium where it doesn’t block your view of the windscreen or of the dashboard controls. If you have to obscure some of the dashboard, make sure that you can see the important bits of the speedo so you can tell if you’re going over the speed limit.
Next, adjust all of your mirrors so you can see the road behind and around you. Never think that you can rely entirely on rear vision cameras and blind spot sensors. You may also adjust the vents on the climate control system so you get a nice cooling breeze on your face or warm air to toast your chilly toes.
Lastly, put on your seatbelt so that the lap belt is resting on the top of your hip bones (or where they’d be if you could see them) and so the sash runs from shoulder to hip and doesn’t press against your neck when you lean forwards. This is a bit of a nuisance for female drivers with bigger boobs, as the sash part of the seat belt is continually sliding up to the throat area. The right bra helps – something that separates the girls so you can get the sash between them rather than a hoist-me-high cleavage enhancer if possible. (Yes, I’m the wowser who says that it’s best not to drive in tight clothes that enhance your cleavage and stiletto heels – change when you get to the party!) It’s another story again if you’re pregnant – but that’s worth a whole post of its own.
Now, are you sitting comfortably? Good – then you can begin.
ESP Does Not Mean Your Car Is Psychic… At Least Not Yet
In the last 10 or so years, ESP has become almost as standard in new cars as seatbelts. OK, the manufacturers may not call this feature ESP, which stands for Electronic Stability Program(me) (the preferred term for Audi and a few others). It could also be called Electronic Stability Control (ESC – the original term used by Mercedes Benz and BMW) or some fancy marque-exclusive name like “Advance Trak” (Ford) or Porsche Stability Management (guess which marque uses that one!). ESC is the most common abbreviation but ESP has a tendency to stick in the mind a bit more, what with the mental images of psychic cars. Or maybe this only sticks in my mind because I’m weird.
Right, no matter what you call it, ESP or ESC is designed to prevent those hairy situations that happen during understeering or oversteering. For those of you who aren’t sure what this means, understeering happens when you don’t get enough turn when going out of the corner and fly off the side of the road, like a stone flying out of David’s sling while the sling itself (the road) keeps curving around. Oversteer is the reverse, when you end up turning more sharply than you ought to and end up on the road on the other side. This happens through driver error while we’re going through the learning process but it can happen to experienced drivers as well when the road is slippery.
This is where ESC or ESP kicks in. During understeer that isn’t caused by driver inexperience, the front wheels start sliding rather than rolling. During oversteer, the rear wheels are the ones doing the sliding. ESP detects that a wheel isn’t spinning all of a sudden when it ought to be but is sliding and skidding. This is done with yaw control. Yaw is a lovely old nautical term that’s been used for several centuries to describe how things swing and sway around a centre point, along with its siblings pitch and roll. You can visualise these easily by holding out your hand flat with the palm down and your thumb and pinkie pointing out so it looks like a plane. If you wiggle you hand from side to side so the tips of your fingers stay level with your wrist and your thumb and pinkie stay level, that’s yaw. Flip your hand over so it goes palm up, then back again and you’ve got roll. Tip your hand up and down like you’re doing a snake-arms wave dance move, and you’ve got pitch. With me so far? Well, the yaw detector feels how the car is yawing and matches this to what the steering system is doing. If there’s a mismatch, the rest of the system kicks in. It works alongside the traction control, which compares how fast the wheels are turning with how fast the engine is going (a mismatch means slipping (spinning too fast) or skidding (not spinning fast enough)).
ESP always works in tandem with ABS (anti-braking skid) brakes. This is because the main way to stop a skid is to reduce the speed, which your ESP system may do by overriding what your right foot is doing and controlling the throttle to take the power down, and by braking. However, as most of us experienced when we were learning to drive, if you slam the brakes on when you’re travelling at speed, you skid. What we had to do when learning old-school style without any driver aids was to pump the brakes so they didn’t lock up and skid. ABS brakes, however, spare us all the tap-dancing, as they’re able to pump the brakes much faster than we can, even if we’re part of a Riverdance line. A really good ESP system will apply the ABS brakes to as many wheels as it needs to (one, two, three or four) to get the speed down and get the “what ought to happen” and the “what is happening” in the yaw and traction departments happening.
ESC has been proven to reduce accidents on wet, slippery or icy roads. However, like any other driver aid or active safety feature, it’s not a substitute for common sense and driving to the conditions. No matter how good the ESP package is, it can’t suspend the laws of angular momentum. It also won’t do anything about understeer or oversteer caused by driver error when an inexperienced driver turns the steering wheel too little, too much, too soon or too late, as these won’t cause the mismatch that triggers the system. Although it’s called ESP, it can’t actually read your mind as to where you want to go.
At least cars can’t read your mind and work out where you want to go quite yet. Inventors and other clever-clogs are working on it, however. In China at the end of last year (2015), some researchers at Nankai University, came up with a brainwave – or, more accurately, a brainwave detector. This consists of a headset that contains EEG sensors that read the electrical pulses given off by different thoughts, which are then transferred to the steering and braking systems. According to a press release and a video, the team has managed to rig this up to what looks like a standard Haval H9, and the “driver” can make the car go forward, reverse, stop, lock and unlock.
http://www.reuters.com/article/us-china-brainpower-car-idUSKBN0TQ23620151207#FyqvAPiGuj8bgRDV.97
The mind boggles at how this could be combined with Google’s Driverless Car concepts. But hopefully, the mind won’t boggle too much or goodness knows what might happen.
Real Life Bond Cars?
One of the neat features that you can expect in any good James Bond movie is a great set of wheels. It just wouldn’t be James Bond without the Bond car. In fact, it wouldn’t be Ian Fleming without the car, given that Ian Fleming also wrote Chitty Chitty Bang Bang.
However, cars tricked out with tons of neat features aren’t just from the movies. We don’t yet have cars that can get invisibility cloaks or ejector seats but it is possible to get cars that might look normal on the top but are otherwise underneath. Cars that are just a bit… well, I’m afraid that “badass” is about the only word, little as I like it (and even though the quality of being badass is nothing to do with substandard bottoms or donkeys).
Armoured cars or “personal protection vehicles” are more common than you might think. Plenty of Hollywood superstars have them – they say that Kanye West has one that has electrified door handles to zap overly invasive paparazzi. However, in the Middle East and Venezeula, you’ve got a combination of a bunch of super-rich folk and an unscrupulous underclass plus volatile politics and you’ve got a situation where kidnapping for ransom is likely. And it’s not just something that happens in dodgy countries – it happens in the USA as well. Heck, it could happen here some time. For the oil sheiks and similar, a personal protection vehicle is a good investment. It’s a good investment to the point that there’s even a company based in Texas (where else?) that specialises in customising vehicles so they have what it takes.
However, many of these badass personal protection vehicles aren’t the cool Aston Martins and Lotuses (Loti?) that you’d see James Bond drive. Apparently, the cars that get done up most often are Toyota Land Cruisers and Lexus LX 570s. In the case of the Lankies, it’s probably because they’ve got the off-roading capacity to go gnarly places in their day-to-day lives as well as taking evasive manoeuvres if needed.
The Texas Armouring Corporation (check them out at http://www.texasarmoring.com/) takes its job seriously. Their job involves keeping the cars in question nice and luxurious while being as tough as nails – now, that sounds Bondish enough for me. They also have to keep the handling of the car top-notch, although a bit of handling and performance will be sacrificed, as all that armour will add a bit of weight. The job usually involves a total strip-down before the Kevlar, ballistic grade steel and other cool materials get added in. Then comes the bulletproof glass, the run-flat tyres, the improved suspension and braking (to deal with the extra weight) and other extras before the interior is re-installed. Some of the badass Bond-type gadgets that can be added include the electric-shock doorhandles, road tack dispensers, smokescreens and night vision.
The end result is a vehicle that might look like a regular luxury sedan but can withstand fire from an AK-47. Here’s one of Texas Armouring Corporation’s videos showing a Mercedes-Benz being shot up in a promo video:
Of course, given the unfortunate frequency of terrorist attacks, one vehicle company now makes production vehicles that can withstand AK-47 fire. BMW has come up with the BMW X5 Security that comes straight from the factory floor with one of three spec levels of armouring. It looks like a regular X5 with BMW’s X-drive and all the other luxury features but it’s also got armouring, bullet proof glass, fireproofing and emergency fresh air.
The BMW X5 Security isn’t available for regular sale in Australia yet, although there are a few knocking around in the hands of the Federal Police. Some of BMW’s other luxury armoured vehicles (based on the 7-series) were bought by the government for the top brass during the G20 conference. The rest of us oiks have to stick with the ordinary – if you can call it that – X5 and 7-series. However, us ordinary oiks probably don’t have to worry about kidnapping threats, so that’s OK.
Safe and happy driving, even without armour,
Megan
Freezing Out Smartkey Hijackers
Smart keys are included as standard features in the majority of new models these days. Keyless entry all seems so simple. You walk up to the car with the smart key fob in your pocket or your handbag and hey presto! The car door unlocks itself just like that. With the newer models, you don’t even have to press the button. All you have to do is to walk within a metre of the car and a wee sensor inside the car will detect the presence of the fob and its unique electronic signal.
It’s convenient, especially if you’re struggling with lots of bags or a wriggly toddler. However, there’s a downside: they can be hacked with a fairly inexpensive device (if you think I’m going to give you the full details of exactly how to get hold of the device, you’ve got to be joking!).
These smart key hacking devices sound like something out of James Bond or possibly MacGyver and operate using a very simple procedure. Instead of messing around trying to read your radio signal and nicking the code that’s transmitted from the fob to the keyless entry sensor (something the very sophisticated high-tech car thieves do), this hacking gizmo simply amplifies the signal coming from the fob. This means that instead of triggering the unlocking mechanism when you’re close to the car, the fob will trigger it from a lot further away. A lot further away as in over 200 metres away.
This means that when you’re sitting indoors and your keys are hanging up on the hook where they usually live, they’ll be able to unlock the car when the car is sitting on the street. Once the car’s unlocked, it doesn’t take a crim very long to hotwire your lovely new car and whizz off with it. You have been warned.
Is there anything you can do to foil these smart key hijackers? The first thing you can do is to use ordinary precautions such as keeping your car in a locked garage or at least behind a locked gate if all you’ve got is a lean-to. This means that your car isn’t about to go walkies in the middle of the night when you’re asleep with the keys sitting safely on top of the fridge. After all, if your car is parked somewhere insecure with bad lighting, it’s still vulnerable to low-tech attacks with the help of a crowbar or a lock-pick, either of the main door or the fuel cap.
The other thing you can do, at least according to a technical writer for the New York Times, is to keep your smart keys in the freezer. I double-checked to make sure that this advice wasn’t in a piece put out on April Fools’ Day, so it seems to be fair dinkum. Apparently, a freezer acts as a “Faraday cage”. These block the entry of electric or electronic signals from getting to what’s in the cage. If you’ve seen those TV shows where someone sits inside a vehicle or a metal cage with lightning zapping around them, you’ve seen a Faraday cage. Apparently, this is how shark cages for “diving with sharks” operations work as well – it’s thought that the metal interferes with the sharks’ ability to sense your electrical signals (and solid steel protects you from bites, of course). But I digress…
The other Faraday cage that you are likely to have in your home is a microwave. Ordinarily, a microwave’s Faraday cage stops the radiation that cooks your food leaking out and cooking you or whatever’s in the fruit bowl beside the microwave.
Therefore, here’s a couple of handy hints for these safer storage spots:
- If you opt for the freezer, make sure your keys are dry (no raindrops) before putting them in. Use gloves when you get them out.
- If you opt for the microwave, be careful not to switch it on by mistake or you will fry (a) the keys and (b) the microwave. Put the microwave where fiddly little fingers or kitty paws can’t switch it on by mistake.
Safe and happy driving,
Megan
PS: I’ve heard that surfers and the like hate smart key systems, thanks to the habit of hiding the keys somewhere near the car while heading off into the waves. Now you know why surfers like to drive classic old Holdens and VW Kombis – it’s not just an image thing!
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