cars (Page 9)

Despite the upcoming oil shortage, the government is giving a special tax cut to businesses that purchase large trucks and SUVs. If gas prices are going to keep climbing, auto makers will have a harder and harder time selling these behemoths. So why don’t they sell more smaller cars instead? Because big SUVs are the only vehicles that make a profit.

Dan Lienert writes for Forbes.com that automakers lose money on cars that sell for under $30,000. This information is hard to come by: “At one time, we did have info from the dealers on what they sold,” says Mike Greywitt, of J.D. Power and Associates. “They were indicating how much profit they were making on each car. It’s not being made public now.”
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We sometimes notice that the combination of a car’s headlights, grill and front bumper looks something like a face. Men who love cars see “faces” in them, using the same parts of their brains that recognize human faces, which may be why they feel so much love for their vehicles.

Forty men, half of them car lovers, wore sensors that monitor electrical activity in the part of the brain linked with facial identification. They were then asked to identify both faces and cars, and the car lovers used the same brain techniques for both. They also had a hard time identifying images with both faces and cars in them, as if their brains were experiencing a “traffic jam.”

Maybe they need to learn how to see things in a brand new way.
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It isn?t only the speed at which people drive that causes car crashes, it?s also the speed of the music they?re listening to. Warren Brodsky of Ben-Gurion University in Israel says drivers who listen to fast music in their cars may have more than twice as many accidents as people who listen to slower tracks.

Previous studies have shown a link between loud music and dangerous driving, but Brodsky wondered if tempo had any effect on driver behavior. To find out, he put a group of 28 students on a driving simulator. Each student drove round the virtual streets of Chicago while listening to different pieces of music, or none at all. The students had an average of seven years? driving experience.
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