According to Consumer Reports:

The overall top five — Honda, Subaru, Toyota, Volvo and Ford — all received reliability ratings of Better Than Average. No automaker earned the highest rating, Much Better Than Average, and none the lowest, Much Worse Than Average. {…}

Subaru was awarded an overall score of 73. Only one model, the sporty Impreza WRX, was cited for below-average reliability.

Subaru is probably helped by the fact that they release only a few different models and so can focus on making the best of what they have. It’s the upshot to the downside that they only participate in a relatively niche market: no minivans, no fuel-efficient compacts, and so on. I’m still not sure what Subaru is going to do when the CAFE standards go up. According to some market information I got in the run-up to purchasing the Forester, they’re working with Toyota (which has a stake in Subaru and a business partnership that has Camrys being made at a Subaru plant) to roll out some more fuel-efficient vehicles. Hard to do with standard AWD, though.

Clancy comes from a Toyota family and I come from a (mostly) Ford one, so it looks like we are well-represented across the board. When I was younger, we came from a Chrysler family. They didn’t fare so well:

For the third consecutive year, Chrysler earned the lowest overall score, with a 43. Despite Mr. Champion’s affinity for the company’s new products, he cautions that “reliability is still going to be an issue.”

Which is a shame, because for my money Chrysler makes the best looking cars on the market.

Curiously omitted were Mitsubishi and Suzuki. Kia was also excluded, but they may have been rolled in with Hyundai, which it is partially owned by.

Another article on the dangers of “distracted driving”:

“The dangers of driving while talking on the phone come not from our hands or from our eyes, but from our brains,” they wrote in The Seattle Times. Simons’ research backs this up.

In one of his driving experiments at the University of Illinois’ Beckman Institute, participants drove on a simulator depicting a four-lane, divided highway. Their sole task was to follow the car in front while performing a counting task. In this case, Illinois researchers found that if drivers are distracted while simply following traffic, they instinctively give themselves a little extra space with the car in front.

“This suggests that distractions wouldn’t be as bad as long as drivers don’t have to make any decisions and provided that nothing unexpected happens,” he says.

But unexpected things do happen, and distractions like talking on the phone can make you slower to respond. Problems also arise when drivers have to make a tactical maneuver, such as passing. If drivers are being distracted in these situations, Illinois researchers found that they usually drive too close—dangerously close.

Though it’s true that unexpected things do happen, it is not the case that they happen on a random distribution. People often tend to discuss this issue in black and white terms. It’s dangerous! Don’t do dangerous things! Of course, driving is dangerous. Life is a series of tradeoffs. Rather than suggesting that people should limit their cell phone conversations to when they are in potentially hazardous situations, we have the Secretary of Transportation trying to find ways to jam the signal (thereby preventing passenger and emergency phone calls). Cause danger is danger and all that.

On the other hand, as heretical as it may sound, not only does talking on the cell phone while driving not always pose the same hazard, it’s quite possible that sometimes it can result in safer driving:

When engaged in a secondary verbal task, drivers showed improved lane-keeping performance and steering control when vigilance was lowest.

This fits entirely within my experience. Even before phoning while driving became a no-no, I found myself rather uncomfortable doing it if I was driving on unfamiliar roads, times when surrounded by cars, and/or places of frequent stop-start. On the other hand, when driving on a long stretch on a freeway with light traffic, the hazards seemed pretty minimal to me.

Something like 70% of Americans with cell phones cop to either talking on a cell or texting while driving. Unless Secretary LaHood gets his insipid signal-jammers installed in cars, it’s not something that’s going to go away any time soon. It’s my hope that most people are instinctively aware when phoning while driving is more hazardous or less. Maybe our public relations campaigns should focus on that. It’s unlikely to happen, though, because of a relatively puritanical itch that people without cell phones and those that have them but never use them in the car have. I don’t want to do it, therefore you should never. And another group of people that supports these rules but doesn’t follow them because they can handle it but those other drivers are crazy.

Keep in mind, though, that if you listen to sports in the car, or you eat in the car, you are likely similarly distracting yourself. In fact, I personally find that the same rules I used to follow for cell phone usage I follow for eating. And to a lesser extent, with audiobooks. I tend to reserve these things for the freeways.

But as the chicken littles talk about how the sky is falling, there are a few important things to remember:

First, that there are tradeoffs. The second study linked aside, maybe in a perfect world nobody would multitask behind the wheel. They wouldn’t talk on cell phones. Or eat or smoke or listen to anything. Just keep an eye on the road. Realistically, though, we spend a lot of time in our cars. Making that time more pleasant is not without its own value. Being careful is one thing, but being miserable while doing it is another.

Second: The roads have never been safer. Accidents are fewer and farther between than they have ever been. The same goes for injuries and fatalities. And for all of the dangers that cell phones are alleged to cause, all three statistics have been on the decline ever since they were first introduced. I don’t think that this is because of cell phones, but it is true regardless. So let’s stop freaking out. {h/t OTB}

As you may recall, I bought a Subaru Forester relatively recently. On the whole, I am liking it a great deal and not feeling much in the way of buyer’s remorse. I probably wouldn’t have gotten it if I lived in a warmer client, but it’s suiting our needs pretty well. We’ll see how adding kids and maybe another dog changes that equation.

Pros:

• Price Point. There were other vehicles that offered AWD. But in addition to the Forester being part of a line that takes it more seriously, it was one of the least expensive. To get AWD and the other things I wanted (towing capacity, for instance), Toyota and Honda pushed you towards the more expensive models. With the Forester, I was able to get the base model. Even if I’d had to get the middle-tier, it was still significantly cheaper than most of the alternatives.
• Dealership. They’ve been great. My dealings with the Ford and Toyota dealerships have been lackluster. The fact that I am under warranty helps, but for the fact that Ford was making money off me when I wanted them to do this or that. Meanwhile, the dealership is giving me things they are not obliged to. I don’t know how universal this is, but the Redstone dealership has been great.
• Size & Overall “Feel”. Being a “small car guy”, I was worried about driving a bigger car. I wanted the cargo capacity and we will hopefully be needing something family-friendly over the next year or so, but I wondered what the tradeoff was. Turns out that there isn’t any. I feel just about as comfortable driving this as any of the other cars. It doesn’t have the feel of unwieldiness I was concerned about. It’s not as maneuverable as the Escort, but that’s likely a physical impossible. What it lacks there, it makes up for in terms of visibility and allowing me to sit completely upright.
• Three DC Connectors. Well, connectors in general. There are three DC connectors, one in the front, one in the storage compartment in the middle of the seats, and one in the back. Having my power-splitter almost feels like overkill. I also like that they have a DC connector and auxiliary jack in the middle storage compartment, making the plugging in of my smartphone (and placing of it in the cupholder) very convenient.
• Cheap to insure. I was expecting that to bite harder than it did. It’s about the same cost to insure as the Camry, despite the Toyota being 15 years old and only worth a few thousand dollars in an accident. The Escort was notably cheaper than both, though.

Cons:

• Transmission/MPG. On this, I was warned. Its posted mileage is 27/21, though for us it’s really more like 24/18. It’s attributable to the mountains as much as anything. The gains I should be making on the Interstate are lost due the constant ups and downs. This is aided by the lackluster transmission (only 4-speeds) that causes huge spikes in RPMs and drops in mileage. I seem to be averaging around 22mph. That could be much worse, but I suspect it would be better with a CVT.
• Stereo. On this, too, I was warned. It was less than a couple of days before I informed the dealership that I wanted an upgrade. The speaker setup in the Escort and Camry are both better, despite each being over a decade old and having a cracked base speaker (requiring me to shift sound output away from that speaker). After hearing about it, I was thinking it was something that I might want to replace at some point, but it became pretty urgent pretty quickly. Also, the video display is really weak. It doesn’t read ID3 tags for MP3 files and the file name doesn’t scroll so you only get the first several letters. We’ve upgraded the speaker setup, which is enough for now, but will probably upgrade the player later.
• Keys. It has a separate dongle for the power locks and no option to upgrade to put it in the key itself. The dealership loaned me a Legacy when they were upgrading the sound system, and it had the single unit with both keys and power locks. I asked if I could buy one for the Forester, but it’s not even available. It would make sitting down on my keys a lot easier if it were. I don’t know what I’m going to do when we replace the Camry and I have two of those things in my pocket, if her replacement car also doesn’t have the two-in-one.
• Susceptibility to wind. While I do like the size overall, Arapaho is windy and the Forester’s size causes it to catch that wind in a way that the Escort didn’t. It’s unavoidable and simple physics, but kind of a pain in the rear on a windy day. A couple times I thought that the alignment was off. Turned out it was just the wind blowing the car.

Toyota says plural of Prius is “Prii”:

The world can now rest easy. Toyota has officially embraced “Prii” as the plural of Prius. The Japanese automaker made the announcement over the weekend at the 2011 Chicago Auto Show after inviting the public at large to vote for the phrase that best fit the company’s new gaggle of hybrids. The voting kicked off on January 10th at the Detroit Auto Show, and while Priuses, Prius, Prium and Prien all surfaced as possibilities, Prii took home the majority of votes with 25 percent of the more than 1.8 million ballots cast.

BMW has a commercial with the theme of not accepting substitutes. Accept nothing less than what you want and all that. Presumably, they’re trying to talk people out of taking John Tierney’s advice of buying a Subaru WRX rather than a BMW with similar specs. What I find kind of amusing, though, is that if you read the small print across the bottoms, the precise models that they’re showing are not available in the US. So if you go to your local BMW dealership, you’re accepting a substitute.

I left the bar at around last call. Always dangerous. I’d had a light night, drinking-wise, with only two beers over three and a half hours. On the other hand, you never know how things are going to show up on a breathalizer. So, though I was in complete control of my faculties, my main goal was to avoid any sort of unwanted attention (even if you pass the breathalyzer, you still may get a ticket just so that the cop can justify his time.

Oh yeah, and besides all that, it’s last call on New Years Eve. The roads can be a scary place at this time. I think that knowing that was what made driving home so nerve-wracking. Was that car in front of me riding the break because they were a general break-rider? Or because they were drunk? Or because they were paranoid about drunks like I was? I asked this question for every abnormality. Driving too slow, driving too fast, changing lanes. Choosing not to change lanes even though the car in front of them was stopped (waiting to turn into an overfull parking lot) and there was a clear lane to the left?

In addition to being nerve-racking, I think my paranoia actually made me a less safe driver.

Maria commented:[I]t’s pretty lousy for [banks] to tell customers these new efficiencies [such as ATMs] would make banking cheaper as well as easier, and then, once customers got hooked on them, start charging for them.

This reminds me of a trick the Delosa Toll Road Authority kept playing.

Step 1: Human toll collectors, inefficient because you had to pay people to man them. So, in the name of efficiency, they replaced them with…

Step 2: Automated tolls, which accepted dollar bills and change. However, the dollar-slots were pretty crappy back then with all but the most crisp bills being spit back out. This lead to congestive back-ups and having to hire people to help get people through. So they had to raise prices again, before deciding…

Step 3: Pull out the dollar machines and replace them with correct-change buckets and… human toll collectors again. This was going to be more efficient, except that they lead to price increases because of all the people had to be hired back. So they went to…

Step 4: Quickthru tags, which automated everything by charging-by-scanner. This was absolutely great for regular tollway users who would no longer even have to stop. It was worth it for even irregular ones to use them if they used the tollways even periodically. These didn’t require people manning booths or machines and so was more efficient, until…

Step 5: Complaints about account-upkeep, which necessitated a monthly fee to use these tags that were going to be way more efficient, which then caused…

Step 6: People to cancel their accounts, forget that they had done so, and accidentally drive through the Quickthru lanes (or people who couldn’t get over into the right lane). Allegedly poor compliance with fines lead to shortfalls, which had to be made up for with increased rates for those that actually had the Quickthru tags. But with the account fees and fines, they still found it worthwhile to make…

Step 7: All new toll roads were made Quickthru-only and entrances to High-Occupancy-Toll lanes were put right on the freeway so if you were in the wrong lane, before you knew it you were in a HOT lane and subject to the fines that they had to raise toll rates for due to the allegedly poor compliance.

Truth be told, I can’t really complain about the toll rates in and around Colosse. They’re not all that bad. And if they would have simply said “We need to raise rates to pay for the roads” or “We need to raise rates to reduce congestion” I actually would have understood. The congestion on tollways is of course better than regular freeways, but could use some cleaning up with even more high prices. I just found it aggravating that they kept reframing it as they were doing these things to make things more convenient for us.

In the past, I have expressed a degree of discomfort with drunk driving laws. Primarily because the limit is (in my opinion) set too low, no distinctions are made between buzzed drivers and blasted drivers, and the enforcement of these laws represent some civil liberty problems. But I can’t quite get on board with this:

People do react to alcohol differently. For many people one drink may well be too many, while experienced drinkers can function relatively normally with a BAC at or above the legal threshold for presuming intoxication. A person’s impairment may also depend on variables such as the medications he is taking and the amount of sleep he got the night before. Acevedo et al.’s objections to the legal definition of intoxication highlight the absurdity of drawing an arbitrary, breathalyzer-based line between sobriety and criminal intoxication.

The right solution, however, is not to push the artificial line back farther. Instead we should get rid of it entirely by repealing drunk driving laws.

Despite all of the fears about the latest and greatest dangers of driving, the roads have never been safer. Accidents are down. Injuries are down. Fatalities are down. And not just on a per capita basis, but an absolute basis as well. I suspect that the transition of drunk driving from something everyone nods and winks at to a BIG DEAL is one of the reasons for this. It’s really hard to think of something that used to be so commonplace to become so universally scorned. Yes, people do continue to drive drunk, but by virtue of its social unacceptability, it’s something that people do much more judiciously in the past and avoid when they can.

Driving drunk (as in drunk-drunk) is hazardous in the same way that driving 100mph is hazardous. Other than environmental concerns, driving 100mph is not inherently dangerous, but most people can’t do it safely and it’s difficult to interact with traffic going 70mph when you’re going 100mph. The correct and true libertarian response to this could be that we should let people drive as fast as they want and only penalize them when they get into an accident. On some roads this may actually make sense, but the majority of the time it’s an eventuality that something bad is going to occur. The laws are put in place to (ahem, among other things) prevent that from happening. It’s not often I go around and defend speed limits given that this site is a hub for scorn towards speed traps, but the basis for having speed limits is sound.

Ditto for drunk driving. Yes, you outlaw drunk driving because of the impairment it causes. But that’s the same rationale for speed limits. If something is inherently unsafe for most drivers under a sufficient number of circumstances, it is worth our while to ban it. Not to set up checkpoints for it. Not to declare war on it. But to keep it illegal and take reasonable measures to enforce it.

As with so many other things, though, the reasonable basis for a law pushes it towards being something much more problematic. On this Balko makes a number of good points. We lowered the legal intoxication level from .1 to .08 in our War Against Drunk Driving when the main issue is with people that have a BAC of twice that level. Billboards say “Buzzed Driving is Drunk Driving!” when no, actually, the two are quite different. But the law doesn’t see it that way. And when you keep lowering the limit, you can actually make things worse. When you make it so that people equate the two, you’re not just telling people that are buzzed that they’re as bad as someone that is drunk (even if they aren’t, which is why we have two different words to describe the two different conditions), you’re also telling buzzed people “Go ahead. Have another beer. You’re already ‘drunk.'”

This also becomes problematic because it increases the rationale for encroachment on other personal behavior. You know those studies that show that people on a cell phone are the equivalent to being drunk drivers? Well, they’re equivalent to being at the legal intoxication limit, which is not the same. And so The Worst Cabinet Secretary In Recent Memory (that would be Ray LaHood) puts out the idea that maybe we should prevent cell phones from even working in cars. Yeah, it might be inconvenient for passengers in the car calling to get directions and the like, but who cares? WE’RE TALKING ABOUT DRUNK DRIVERS!!!(or the equivalent thereof)!!!! And truth be told, there are all sorts of behaviors that are likely to be more distracting than having a minimal (but legally impermissible) amount of alcohol in your system. Do you listen to sports on the radio? DRUNK DRIVER! Bring the limit down to .05, as some propose, and you’re probably in the “eating a sandwich while on the road” territory and banning drive-thrus.

I’ve never seen the science to back it up, but I’ve heard that smoking a cigarette behind the wheel is the “equivalent of drunk driving.” I don’t think this is true, but lower the limit much more and it might be. And before you start thinking “Screw the smokers!” I can tell you first-hand that smoking behind the wheel is far less distracting than eating a sandwich.

It would be great if we had only well-rested, completely sober drivers behind the wheel doing absolutely nothing but driving. Or rather, it would be great if everyone else on the road was well-rested, completely sober, and doing nothing but driving. But for me? That would be hell. I’ve got the sober thing down, of course, but music and audiobooks keep me sane. Eating on the road makes trips last shorter. Getting a hotel room any and every time I get tired would get mighty expensive (and would bring medical residency programs across the country to a screeching halt, though that might be in the “plus” column).

The City of San Fransisco is looking at implementing a bait car setup. For those of you that don’t know what a bait car is, it’s a car that is left with the keys in the ignition (sometimes running), theoretically in a part of town where car theft is a problem. Now, most anybody here if you pass a car with the keys in the ignition, your response is to maybe say “idiot” and walk on. A car thief, of course, thinks differently.

Hit Coffee has been pointedly critical of a lot of police behavior on this subject and that… and so it continues!

I mean, you look at a setup like this and say “How could it go wrong?” Nobody accidentally steals a car the same way they might accidentally speed or accidentally run a red light. It’s not something that is going to affect people who aren’t, well, criminals. On the face of it, the only real objection I might have is whether or not this is the best use of resources. But even then, the cars themselves are often donated by insurance companies. There’s still the manpower issue and all that, but this is actually one of those cases where they don’t have the financial incentives that they do with traffic tickets. I mean, these aren’t people that are just going to pay a fine and move on to get caught another day. They’re charged with felonies. They’ll cost the system far more than they will pay back.

And yet… somehow, the police department in Austin, Texas, managed to screw it up. There was a case where a couple noticed the car sitting near his house and their first response was… to call the police. It seemed odd to them that someone would leave a car there with the keys in the ignition and all. Their imaginations were running away with them, but their first instinct was one of civic duty. The officers who showed up expressed no interest and said that as long as the car was legally parked they should just ignore it. And maybe they should have, but after three days or so they became concerned and their imaginations got a bit carried away with some of the oddities of the car (broken window, rope, men’s work boots, bikini top in back. They decided to investigate. They were arrested thereafter and charged with burglary of a vehicle.

Now, the two could be lying, but their police call is a matter of record and it seems pretty clear they were investigating rather than thieving. Ledford, the man in question, has it right when he said that maybe he’s guilty of trespassing but not burglary. Even so, the evidence that they were acting on anything but good faith is pretty slight. Obviously, you don’t want people going vigilante, but when people see something curious and they’ve already tried to contact the authorities, do you want them to just ignore it for fear that they might be criminally charged for their concern?

So why did Austin charge forward with this? I can think of a couple reasons. First, perhaps they were worried that Ledford was going to muck up their investigation. But the criminal charges were completely unnecessary. Instead, I fear the reason is that once you have a setup like this going with thousands of dollars put into it, you have to get results wherever you can find them. I have similar concerns with some checkpoints run by officers in departments that I expressly don’t trust (a relatively small number of departments, in the overall, to be honest). Here they are getting grant money as well as some free equipment. It may not be enough for the system to pay for itself, but the need for results is still there if you want to keep getting the money that you can (it’s not a cop’s job to try to keep expenditures down).

San Fransisco is apparently lining up with TruTV (formerly Court TV) in order to put their findings on television. On the one hand, it leads to somewhat questionable motives. On the other hand, the SFPD would probably be embarrassed to charge Ledford if he was a TV star.

They convinced Ledford to plead guilty of something irrelevant. I can’t remember what because it post-dates the article and I don’t care to listen to the whole NPR sequence where I first heard it.

James Joyner has a good roundup on Google’s work in creating an autotaxi, a subject I have posted on before. It’s not exactly the same because my scenario involve “antcars” which were all entirely driven by automation while these have manual override, but you don’t get one without getting the other first.

A few observations:

• One of the links talks about who the big losers would be and singles out truckers. I would add another huge, huge loser: Public transportation. Other than being unable to afford a car (not applicable to most of the population) or traffic being so bad that it’s not worth it (pretty rare), one of the huge benefits of public transportation is that you don’t have to pay attention to the road. With autotaxis, you would get that benefit while also being able to go wherever you want and you would get to avoid the kinds of people that take public transportation. When I had jury duty, I took the commuter bus from Mayne to downtown and most of the riders were white-collar individuals. Most. However, throw in autotaxis and most of those people would probably prefer that to driving to the bus station, waiting for a bus, and then walking from their stop to their final destination (or worse, having to change buses).
• In my antcar post, Peter commented that these things would be a lawsuit waiting to happen. I think in the autotaxi phase this is true (by the time they become antcars, this has presumably been taken care of). It stands to reason that even in the event that the technology is invented here, we may be the last country to have widespread adoption. The makers would charge huge prices in preparation for the eventual lawsuit. As one of the cited links mentions, we are always much more anxious to blame technology when there is any ambiguity and the Toyota carnival is the perfect example of this.
• I stand by my scenario for antcars insofar as I believe that if these things ever achieve widespread adoption, you can very much expect the government to demand that records be kept for later subpoenas. They will probably justify it on safety grounds, arguing that it’s important to know what your car was doing in the event of an accident. Or something. They’ll almost certainly find some reason why it is technically necessary for some benign reason. Sort of like how Microsoft build IE into the fabric of Windows so that they could later claim that it can’t come not-preinstalled. The government will want it, but the makers probably will too in order to fend off future lawsuits (someone blaming the auto-drive for manual error). The only people against it will be the consumer, and what’s that good for?
• As you might have been able to tell from my antcar scenario, I think that Joyner’s question of how long human drivers will be allowed on the road once the safety of the computers surpasses that of human drivers is spot on. Once that threshold is reached, I really don’t know how long it will be until at least some people start agitating for it. Probably the generation that starts immediately with the autotaxis will be the generation that won’t see mandatory antcars as no big deal. Until then it will be the subject of contentious debate.
• Could the antcar ever comes to pass or autotaxis become completely automated and so ubiquitous that most people don’t need driver’s licenses? Driver’s Licenses are currently one of the primary incentives to get IDed by the government. What then?