Smart Car

Did you take any motorcycle rider training courses? Sounds like you did. Any motorcycle rider who utilizes those skills, no matter what they are operating, are better drivers. If I were King, everybody behind th' wheel would have to ride a motorcycle for at least 3 months per year or lose their license. Period.

We have superior skills. We have less potential distractions and stay magnitudes times more focused than car drivers. There are stupid people on motorcycles too, sooner or later Darwin will get them. I firmly believe that stupid should be painful or worse.

Saw a guy get his arm ripped off in a 12 x 36 lathe and felt bad for th' lathe.

Snarl

As my wife stated about my motorcycle. You never fell off your race car. And when I broke a rod and split the barrel when the rotary valve broke. (Kawasaki 350) I luckily did not go down. The bike hopped a little, but enough speed and weight that everything sort of broke apart, not locking up the drive train. Decided that maybe 4 wheels were safer.

On Sat, 08 Aug 2009 17:55:21 -0400, the infamous Wes scrawled the following:

C'mon, Wes. It's all viable energy. It's just not viable or reliable BASE energy. For that, we need nuclear, which would preclude the need for any bullshit carbon crap'n'trade.

-- Content thyself to be obscurely good. When vice prevails, and impious men bear sway, the post of honor is a private station. -- Joseph Addison, 'Cato'

feet away by

Yup, My SOP on the wheel is to ride like the invisible man. I KNOW that the cagers won't see me even if they are looking right at me. I KNOW that they will cut into the lane next to me without noticing I am there. BTDT more than once. Of course I also love to ride and know I'm the only one who will look out for me (unless I'm riding with a like minded group).

That's exactly what I mean by not implementing them properly.

Properly:

- No attempts at utility scale solar plants, they have too much environmental impact and you still have transmission problems.

- Utilities place their utility scale plants on the roofs of existing large area buildings, i.e. shopping malls, warehouses, etc. through some combination of leasing the roof area and providing cheap power for the building below. Keys here are no new environmental impact through the use of existing roof area as well as improved transmission due to a large building already having a large capacity feeder and being able to export power over it sun up and still have adequate capacity to pull from the grid sun down.

- All residential housing gets roofed with solar panels and linked with grid-tie inverters. Could be utility provided / managed with cost offset or government subsidized. Keys here are again utilizing existing surface area as well as the distributed nature greatly helping grid capacity.

- The same overall structure applies for wind generation in areas where decent wind resources are available.

Of course underlying all of this should be clean, safe nuke generation for baseline loads and the elimination of all coal, oil and nat gas based utility scale generation.

I would be happy if everyone had to pass the CDL written test...

They see them just fine John, but they really don't care what happens to other people, just themselves. They know the motorcycle can't hurt them and most likely will do anything to avoid hitting them. I've had people flip me the bird after pulling out in front of me, to the point I had to squeal tires to avoid a collision. When you are riding a motorcycle you have to always be thinking what if...

Some people don't even care about themselves. I've had people look me square in the eye and pull out in front of my old pickup truck with a 6 inch pipe bumper on the front. It would cream the side of their car, drivers side no less and wouldn't take me more than a can of spray paint to repair. People that don't see you, don't flip you the bird afterwards.

When I worked on the farm years ago, my boss told about riding with his mother-inlaw. She famously pulled out in front of an oncoming vehicle, close call and he asked her "didn't you see that car coming?" To which she replied, "Oh he's got brakes!"

deformation

Scientific American a

crumple, ect

if I had the

my 26-30,000

accident is my

I went to the German museum in Munich some years back and remember seeing a display about automotive stuff. One of the item was about crash protection and Mercedes. They decided to do a crash test ,in the 1950s IIRC, and the result pleased the engineers initially, minimal structural deformation, great, then someone thought about what that meant for the passengers with the high decellerations they would have been subject to as a result of very little energy absorbance. Pulped, through the windsreen, or serious internal injuries. Crash protection then started to become a design objective.

The guy before me in the thread called it a death trap and I'm a motorcyclist...

But I agree that a MC is more dangerous in msot accident scenarios... I also agree that my driving on the bike is much more conservative than it is in a car so the liklihood of being squshed by others is lower... Especially since I avoid heavy traffic areas on the bike.

That being said, I'd rather be in a Smart Car, MG, or even a Fiat in an accident over being on the bike any day.

One major roblem with bikers is they (we?) usually go out in costume rather than real priotective gear. Leather is good and so is a helmet, but not as good as real riding gear and a full face helmet, etc. ..It's just not fun on days like today (91 with high humidity) to wear the right stuff so I took the car. :)

I'm on the border of Essex and Morris/Passaic. Not too far from you considering.

I can go out for an hour and see 2-3 of thise little bread boxes if I'm looking for them... Especially on 46.

Ah ... good one!

What is really popular out here in CA are the those Scion X things and even the new Cube's. I didn't know the Cube was even at the dealers yet but the are popping up all over. They really stand out.

One thing the new breed of small vehicles have that their predecessors lacked is styling. They are also extremely well furnished,if you take my meaning. I wouldn't be surprised to learn that the stereo systems they put in these things are structural parts of the vehicle.

I don't know about that Wes but you can count me in the group that would have you paying a 100 percent tax on every gallon of gasoline or diesel you put in your car.