As far as massive impact partners go, planets must be right up there...

That’s a very good point - cars insulate you much more effectively from the outside world than they used to, and the effect is amplified in high-riding vehicles (the ground doesn’t appear to rush past as quickly), and it’s very easy to travel at higher speeds than you think you are. I’ve got an old MR2 (not too much…

Ah, no worries. The vast majority of tests involve the vehicle being smashed into a barrier at a given speed, so it’s an easy idea to get stuck in your head.

Shitty wobbly single-sided channel-locks are awful. Good ones (i.e. Knipex ones) are damn handy.

Absolutely - behaviour (risk compensation in particular) has a significant effect on collision risk. I suspect (without having searched out the studies) that the likelihood of being involved in a collision is higher for people in giant SUVs and trucks than it is for people in small cars. Partly because the people…

The sled is used in side impact testing, so it’s testing the side impact structures (vulnerability to deformation, the way the side airbags work, et cetera) more than the tendency of the target vehicle to be punted across the floor by the test sled.

An argument for the Civic (and therefore, by proxy, against the Alto Works):

Damn right - his crash at Mandalika was heart-stopping.

And that’s not the crash that really messed his arm up. That was the one I’ve linked below (MotoGP’s rights owners don’t seem to like it being viewed anywhere but YouTube though):

Vehicles have certainly become both heavier and safer (roughly a 75 percent decrease in rate of traffic deaths per million vehicle miles from 1975 to 2015).

Even the word “expert” is doing a lot of heavy lifting there.

It reminds me a bit of the Elfin Streamliner...

It sounds just about as commie as Dwight D. Eisenhower.

I assumed that he was going to run the Hoonitron there, given it’s a tribute to a car that almost made its name at Pikes Peak.

Miami has already provided more than enough racing around a dead-flat carpark next to a stadium for this year. No need to play out the same scenario again in Russia.

I guess because she didn’t refer to any particular person/people that may be tricky?

Ah, but if you kiss it you get the gift of the herpes.

I don’t even have a working radio in one of my cars and it doesn’t bother me (one CD plays on infinite repeat), but I can see the value in a system that allows you to select music, take calls and access navigation software within the same user environment, and that stays broadly up-to-date (unlike the proprietary user…

That makes a lot of sense - Redding did have a tendency to get fairly sideways into corners (and through corners, and out of corners...). I miss Cal’s bluntness (and his amusing Nigel Mansell-esque bunker mentality of him against the world). He’s a character.

All very good points - a further one to highlight from the interview with Taramasso is that the magnitude of the “breaches” is not detailed here (it could be 0.01 bar, using a sensor that is only accurate to 0.02 bar as he notes).