cars (Page 8)

Someday you may be able to buy a car that “smiles” or”frowns,” meaning you’ll no longer feel the need to makenasty gestures to other drivers.

Sabra Chartrand writes in The New York Times that Toyota isdeveloping a car that can glare angrily at another car aswell as appear to cry, laugh or wink. Kenji Mori, NaotoKitagawa, Akihiro Inukai and Simon Humprhies have designed acar with an antenna that wags, a body height that raises andlowers, headlights that vary in intensity, and hood slitsand ornamentation designed to look like eyebrows, eyelidsand tears, all of which can glow with colored lights toexpress different emotions.
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Hybrid cars, that use both a gasoline engine and an electric motor, could put rescue workers at risk of serious electrical shocks as they try to rescue people from crashed cars. “If you’re walking up to a [hybrid] car that’s laid up on its side, the last thing we’re looking forward to is getting electrocuted,” says volunteer fireman Herbert Scott. “Without a doubt there will be a day where that will happen.”
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We recently wrote about a car rebellion in a town near Area 51 in Nevada, where one day almost all their automatic doors refused to unlock. Now cars are fighting back in a shopping mall parking lot in the U.K., as dozens of cars refused to unlock, setting off all their alarms at the same time.

The Derbyshire (U.K.) Evening Telegraph reports that some people think this might have been caused by signals from cell phone antennas, while others blamed radio waves or planes flying overhead. In Nevada, the rebellion was blamed on the same radio bands that are used to unlock cars being used at the nearby military base.
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Getting ready to buy a new car? You might want to pay attention to new research showing that people driving silver-colored cars are 50% less likely to be injured in a serious crash. Even white cars don’t protect you as well as silver. Researcher Sue Furness says, “We think it may be due to a combination of light color and high reflectivity.”

Shaoni Bhattacharya writes in New Scientist that white, yellow, gray, red and blue cars all have about the same crash risk, but black, brown or green cars are twice as likely to get into a crash causing serious injury.
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