Safety

Your car's tires are, simply put, the most important bit of equipment on your car; they are literally where the rubber meets the road, and keeping them in their best condition is paramount in maintaining your vehicle's performance and safety. Tires are a consumable part that eventually wears out, but it can be difficult to tell how worn a tire is simply by looking at it. Designers Gao Fenglin and Zhou Buyi hope that their Discolor Tyre concept can help with that.

The Discolor Tyre is a conceptual tire design that looks like your average black rubber tire, but features a layer of bright-orange rubber that is molded and embedded within.

When the tire has worn down to the legal minimum level (after about 20,000 km or 12,400 miles) that orange rubber is exposed and can be easily seen from curbside by the driver. When you see orange, then it's time to replace the tire. It sounds simple, yet effective.… Read more

A story by Business Insider reports that 16 Fisker Karmas at the Port of Newark in New Jersey, submerged in seawater by Hurricane Sandy, caught fire.

Because of the storm damage, Fisker representatives have not had access to the port facilities. At this point, there is no reliable information about what might have happened, or if the fires had anything to do with the cars' electric drive systems.

A Fisker spokesman sent CNET a statement saying that the cars were not being charged at the time, and that there were no injuries related to the fire. The statement goes on … Read more

Congrats to Jean F. of Gainesville, Fla., for scoring a Crux360 iPad case with Bluetooth keyboard in last week's giveaway.

Do a lot of driving? You and your car (and your insurance company) will love this week's freebie, a Cowon Auto Capsule AC1 dashboard camera.

The 2-megapixel cam with a 16:9 wide screen records and stores high-resolution 1,280x720-pixel high-definition footage in real time at 30 frames per second. When the device's internal accelerometer detects a shock, it automatically captures a video clip ("see, a Tasmanian devil really did dash in front of me!"). … Read more

I can't wait for cars to drive themselves, and here's one more step in that direction.

Nissan wants to cut the mechanical link between the steering wheel and the tires on some of its 2013 automobiles with steer-by-wire technology. It could make driving more like playing a video game, or more of a full-on engagement with the road, depending who you ask.

The system would replace the conventional rack and pinion setup with one that controls the tire angles and steering inputs with independent electronic controls, similar to the trusted fly-by-wire interface in aircraft. … Read more

Modern luxury vehicles are available with a wide range of driver assistance technology and use a variety of sensors to power that tech. Lane departure warning systems use front-facing cameras to watch the lines painted on the road. Blind-spot monitoring uses sonar arrays to check the area around the vehicle for obstructions. Rear proximity detection also uses sonar arrays to detect objects behind a reversing vehicle. The 2013 Nissan Altima will be able handle all three of these functions with only one rear-facing camera.

Nissan's system uses a rear-facing camera that constantly watches the area behind and to the … Read more

When shopping for a sports car, safety is often not high on the list of priorities. In many cases, it falls far behind handling, acceleration, and overall driving enjoyment. Thankfully, for those interested in either the Subaru BRZ or the Scion FR-S, safety is not something to sacrifice. The twin Japanese rear-drive sports coupes earned the Insurance Institute for Highway Safety's 2012 Top Safety Pick award, the highest rating available.

Each passed all three categories -- front, side, and roof strength tests -- easily, and are the only sports coupes in the $30,000 price range to do so. … Read more

The U.S. government is launching a project in Michigan where 3,000 "smart cars" will be able to "talk" to their drivers.

No, it's not some Knight Rider-esque KITT scenario, it's actually specialized technology that's equipping cars with Wi-Fi to see if such communication can make the roads safer.

"Vehicle-to-vehicle communication has the potential to be the ultimate game-changer in roadway safety," administrator David Strickland from the Department of Transportation's National Highway Traffic Safety Administration said in a statement, "but we need to understand how to apply the … Read more

Driving around in a snowstorm or heavy rain often feels similar to the hyperspace travel effect seen in the various "Star Wars" movies, which can distract even the most seasoned driver (unless you can make the Kessel Run in 12 parsecs). A new smart headlight from Carnegie Mellon University could make distracting precipitation far less dangerous to drive through.… Read more

So Lit Motors is developing what looks a lot like a motorcycle, but with several traits from a car: You don't have to balance and you don't get wet. They call this model the C-1 and the full-size running prototype is, admittedly, in a very basic state. But here we see the sort of thinking that is perhaps just this side of too radical, while performing drastic surgery on one of the last great areas of waste in our daily lives: the amount of car we lug around for no particular reason.

I like Daniel Kim, he wants to change things but isn't up "there" in a world of intangibles. He began his career as a Land Rover mechanic and, like Steve Jobs, did a little coursework at Reed College in Oregon before moving on (probably bored with the routine progression of college.) He's assembled a team of about a dozen people in a old warehouse in San Francisco that looks like a poster child for urban renewal. … Read more