MotorSports Digest

Air Bags, Front Wheel Drive
and Daytime Running Lamps

Without a doubt, Air Bags are one of the biggest dangers you can have in your car. While most of my information on Air Bags is on another page, I'll explain how it's a total scam here. The Automakers tell you that they give you Air Bags to keep you safe - Not True! They give you Air Bags to make you think they want you to be safe. If they really wanted you to be safe, they would use what they learn in auto racing.

Race Cars are about the safest vehicles you could ever imagine driving. They are safe not because of Air Bags, but because they are built with safety cages and have 5-point safety harnesses. When I say safety cages I am not talking about the cages the automakers talk about. Automakers consider safety cages to be a slightly built-up framing of your cars body - not a true safety cage. While a true tubular safety cage would be great, they wouldn't be very practical for production cars. However, an effective safety cage could be accomplished with little more than a tiny bit more effort and money to be spent in the production of new cars. This would cause your car to weigh a little more and requiring slightly more power to perform the same. More on that power thing later.

The best thing the automakers could do other than to add a cage, is to use self-tensioning seat belts. In order for a seat belt to work correctly, it can't have any slack in it. Even the slightest amount of slack in the belt reduces its effectiveness greatly! I'm not saying that we all need 5-point safety harnesses, but we do need seat belt that are designed to actually protect us, without relying on Air Bags to do most of the work.

Update: As car makers put more and more faith in the use of Air Bags, other safety aspects are being overlooked. Several car makers are now producing their seat belt systems so poorly that they offer unsafe levels of stretch when involved in an accident. As amazing as this may sound, its even worse that this is being discovered during testing by the Insurance Institute on current production vehicles and not by the manufacture itself.

Front Wheel Drive (FWD) is another huge scam. Don't get me wrong, FWD has it's place - in very small commuter cars. FWD was created for three reasons - to save a small amount of interior space, to speed-up production, and to reduce production costs. As a plus, the automakers also found out how great it was for consumers to have constant upkeep - they get to keep making money! If you've ever replaced your CV joints, you know what I mean. Most people can't replace them themselves, and they are expensive to have someone else repair or replace.

From a manufacturing standpoint automakers like the fact that they can make essentially one drivetrain and drop it into just about of all their cars. They assemble almost the entire drivetrain and front suspension as one big piece, then drop it into the car as it goes down the assembly line. Just the way they like it - simple and cheap.

To justify this, as with everything else they want you to believe, they try to tell you how great this is and how much you'll like it. As usual we all believe what they tell us, and so eventually WE may even begin to think this is what we actually do want. To help prove this, again, I'll go back to racing for my comparison. If FWD is so good, why don't they make race cars that way? Because it's simply not as good! FWD systems can't handle large amounts of power very well, and any reasonable amount of power causes torque steer. Torque steer is that pull from side to side when you accelerate in a FWD car. People who have never driven a Rear wheel drive car probably don't even know this only happens only in FWD cars. Also when you spin your tires, either by excess power or from slippery conditions, you don't want it to be the tires you steer with that loose grip with the road. The most important thing to understand is that if automakers have their way, all cars will eventually be FWD. This can only mean less power and more (expensive) maintenance. If you think I'm blowing things out of proportion check this out - Chevy stopped making the Caprice Classic (also the Impala SS) to make more trucks. They claim they will be bringing the Caprice back as a FWD car in the next few years.

Update: As was predicted at the time of this article, GM did bring back the Impala, and it is now a FWD car. This great move has allowed GM to loose Police contracts all across the county as most Police departments will, understandably, only use Rear Wheel Drive (RWD) vehicles. This worked out well for Ford as they currently supply most Police departments with the Crown Victoria.

Also interesting to notice is that as people are beginning to demand better choices in new vehicles, more manufactures are starting to move back to RWD. Even Dodge, which hasn't built a RWD car in many, many years, is now offering RWD in many of their newest designs. As luck would have it, you just may start to see Dodge Police cars in your near future, as many departments are showing interest.

Update: Once again, as was predicted, Dodge is fast becoming the car of choice for Police Departments that are updating, or adding to thier fleet. With the Ford Crown Victoria suffering from a design flaw which can cause the gas tank to explode, it's nice to see another option work out.

Daytime Running Lamps are one of the newest safety scams to hit the showrooms. GM is really pushing this so called "safety device," apparently without thinking about what is does. People use their headlights in the daytime to help draw attention to their cars and school busses. The part that the automakers forgot is that if everyone had their lights on, what would make them stand out? It would be like having every police car, fire truck, and ambulance using it's sirens and flashing lights all the time! They wouldn't stand out when they need to. Imagine also, if there were traffic signs every few feet, eventually you would stop paying attention to all signs - even the important ones. Get the point? Automatic headlamps coming on at dusk is a great idea - Daytime running lamps are a horrible and dangerous idea!