Questions tagged [road-vehicles]
Use this tag for question about cars, trucks and other road transport.
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Have children's car seats not been proven to be more effective than seat belts alone for kids older than 24 months?
A comment on a question on the Travel Stack Exchange claims that "child seats [in cars] have never been proven to be more effective than seat belts for kids older than 24 months", and links ...
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1
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Do car tires create more pollution than exhaust fumes?
The article Exhaust fumes don't pollute nearly as much as this part of a car
claims that tires cause more pollution than exhaust fumes.
Car tires are worse for the environment than exhaust fumes
In ...
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Do antistatic car-straps reduce static shocks from cars?
There is a line of anti-static rubber straps sold for cars which attach to the chassis of the car and dangle down to the road. It is claimed that they allow static electricity to drain off, preventing ...
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Are roundabouts actually statistically safer than traditional traffic patterns?
We have had a number of roundabouts installed near us in South Western PA in the past decade, and a quick internet search shows other states doing so as well. This seems to be an almost universally ...
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Was the car that broke down near a West Virginian coal mine in September 2022 electric?
Recently, Donald Trump shared a link (via Truth Social) to a September 2, 2022 Western journal article that described an electric car needing to be pushed up to a coal plant to get charged.
“Today at ...
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Is a woman more likely than a man to be seriously injured in a car crash of similar severity?
This article makes a number of interesting points about the potential dangers faced by women in a world "designed for men", but I want to ask specifically about this claim:
But when a woman ...
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Did vehicle registration occur before automobiles?
I found an article online that makes the claim: "... registration plates having been used on carriages and wagons in the U.S. as far back as the early 1800s." The article can be found here: ...
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Do women get cheaper car insurance?
My coworker told me women pay less car insurance than men. So I did some research and found some sites proving that.
For example:
According to How Age And Gender Affect Car Insurance Rates, women tend ...
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Is it true that there is not enough electricity to power all vehicles in the United States if they were electric?
According to Scotty Kilmer, in his video, "The Truth About My Worsening Condition":
There is not enough electricity [currently] to charge the batteries of cars like Tesla that have lithium ...
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Is sleeping in a car with the windows rolled up dangerous?
I keep seeing this conspiracy get repeated. The conspiracy goes like this: car manufacturers don't want homeless people sleeping in cars, so when a car is off, the air vents automatically close. They ...
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Did Biden use 85 cars in a motorcade in Rome?
The Daily Mail reports US President Joe Biden's administration used a particularly large motorcade in the streets of Rome recently.
President Joe Biden was criticized for his use of a slow moving, 85-...
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Does decreasing an urban speed limit from 50 km/h to 30 km/h increase air pollution?
Starting on 2021-08-30, the driving speed limit within the Paris municipality was reduced from 50 km/h to 30 km/h. There is a debate on the impact that this will have on air pollution.
The Paris ...
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Are expired car seats no longer safe to use?
Many websites will claim a variant of the following claim:
Do not buy a used car seat unless you can verify the age of the seat. There should be a manufacturer's label on the back or bottom of the ...
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Did farmers adopt cars faster than inhabitants of cities?
I learned from this post: Start with a niche that:
Cars are almost among the lucky exception to the niche rule. However, there was still one group of people in the USA that moved from horses to cars ...
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Do modern diesel cars emit fewer fine dust particles than they suck out of the air when driving in a big city?
Winfried Stoecker writes:
Macht die Augen auf und lasst Euch den Dieselmotor nicht ausreden! [...] Die modernsten Versionen emittieren im Regelbetrieb weniger
Feinstaubpartikel als sie mit der ...
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Feasibility of electric car production given current production levels of various elements and compounds
This infographic (source) shows the elements required for production of 20 million Tesla cars per year, and compares that with current production rates of those elements. Looks like this was in ...
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Do "big-battery" electric vehicles release more CO2 than diesel equivalents over their lifetime?
Autocar report that Mazda have made a surprising claim about electric vehicles with larger batteries (i.e. 95kWh):
Mazda says it will never build a ‘big-battery’ electric car, because it believes ...
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Are Teslas with autopilot system safer than vehicles without it?
An AP article describes some recent crashes that may have been linked to the Tesla autopilot system. The article states that there have been three fatal crashes since 2016 potentially linked to the ...
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Did a man complain that his Pontiac wouldn't start whenever the ice cream he picked up was vanilla?
This story about a car that wouldn't start after its owner purchased vanilla ice cream has been used as an example of how customer service matters. (TL;DR The vanilla ice cream was faster to buy, so a ...
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Does the production of a Tesla battery produce as much CO2 as driving 200,000 km?
Recently I read on Greenpeace's website, that the production of a 100 kWh battery, as in the Tesla Model S, produces as much CO2 as driving a regular car for 200,000 km.
Source: Tesla car ...
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Did hundreds of thousands of people die due to lack of seat belts in the period before they were made mandatory?
In a recent interview, Tesla founder Elon Musk gives a historical reference as example of slow government reaction to public harm:
At 8m15s:
Take something like seatbelts. It was known for, I ...
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Has an engineer called Trevor Jackson invented a revolutionary battery allowing for a car range of 1500 miles? [closed]
Since a few days several websites report about an alleged revolutionary electric vehicle fuel cell that enables 1500 miles range:
Daily Mail Online
StarCarSifu
unserplanet.net
Citing the Mail Online:...
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Did Henry Ford ever say "any color he wants as long as it’s black"?
It's a common quote to attribute to him. Did he ever actually say/write it?
A customer can have a car painted any color he wants as long as it’s black.
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Was the Ford Model T black because of the speed black paint dries?
In this BBC news article labour historian and lecturer Steve Babson says:
The reason the Ford Model-T was black, was because it was the only
paint that would dry fast enough to keep pace with the ...
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Is there more than one registered motor vehicle for every adult in the US?
According to the US Census Bureau's table of estimated population as of July 1 each year, there were 268.3M people 14 years of age or older, including 260.1M people 16 years of age or older, including ...
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Did Winston Churchill praise Rolls-Royce engines?
In 1919, the world's first non-stop trans-Atlantic flight happened, and Rolls-Royce engines provided the power to make it happen. Marking the 100th anniversary of the 20th-century milestone, Rolls-...
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Does the Sion electric car solar cells provide enough charge for up to 30km travel per day?
Sonomotors have an electric car, the Sion. They claim that this car use its own solar-cells to charge the batteries in one day sufficient to drive up to 34km.
Their information sheet says:
Thus, ...
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Did a Tesla car collide with a Russian robot?
This story made the rounds in the news: a Tesla car "killed" an autonomous robot in Las Vegas in January 2019.
There is some controversy about whether the incident was a real accident or a ...
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Did Dr Ulrich Mellinghoff Suggest 140Km/h would be a safer limit on Australian roads?
The description below has been shared by the Facebook group Sensible Speed Limits Australia which claims that Dr Ulrich Mellinghoff suggested 140km/h would be a safer speed limit in Australia.
...
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Are car headlights getting brighter?
This news story in Popular Science asks whether car headlights are getting brighter and concludes they are not:
So are headlights actually getting brighter?
The short answer is no—although there was ...
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Is the apparent drop in insect deaths on windshields due to a decline in insect populations?
The "windshield phenomenon" is a
term given to the anecdotal observation that people tend to find fewer insects smashed on the windscreens of their cars now compared to a decade or several ...
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Is this accident footage authentic?
This video about texting and driving shows footage of a car crash.
Many posters on YouTube claim that it is "obvious" that the crash is fake. It is not obvious to me either way.
Is this footage ...
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Do cars produce more emissions idling than when in motion? [closed]
The author of this article claims that
Cars produce more emissions when idling than when in motion.
This seems like a patently false statement. How could cars produce more emissions when idling ...
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Is keyless theft/relay theft a practical threat for vehicles with fob/keyless entry?
Some sites, such as AutoExpress, are warning about a method of breaking into vehicles with keyless entry by capturing and relaying the fob's signal.
To quote AutoExpress:
The process criminals use ...
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Does one SUV tank of ethanol "take as much grain as could feed a person for a whole year?"
From The Great Transition, (c)2014, by Lester R. Brown (preface, page xiii):
[F]illing the tank of a large SUV one time with ethanol takes as much grain as could feed a person for a whole year.
...
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Is the Katy Freeway the widest in the world?
According to this source and several others (like Sylvester Turner, the mayor of Houston), a section of I-10 in West Houston called the Katy Freeway is the widest highway on Earth. Its widest point is ...
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Are American standards on automotive turn signals demonstrably less safe than European ones?
In most countries outside North America, vehicles have separate turn signals which are amber rather than red. In the USA (and probably Canada) this is not part of the standards and a flashing brake ...
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Are cars in Arizona melting in the 2018 summer heat?
Facebook just posted to my timeline this picture claiming that cars in Arizona are melting in the heat.
Is it true?
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Do we have enough renewable energy for a humanity only using electrical cars? [closed]
One of my relatives claimed that electrical cars are overhyped and my relative somewhere read that we don't even have enough (renewable!) power to support a humanity in which only electrical cars are ...
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Is filling multiple vehicles in one transaction at a gas station a safety hazard?
According to this gas station, pumping gasoline into more than one vehicle is a serious safety hazard:
The gas station making this claim charges different customers different prices per gallon ...
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Do cars drop 7% in value every month?
In their email communication car-buying organization wijkopenautos.nl (wkda.de) claims cars drop 7% in value each month. Their exact claim is:
Let op: een auto verliest iedere maand ongeveer 7% aan ...
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Is a tow truck driver killed every six days on average in the US?
Along I-90 in Massachusetts (and I presume elsewhere in the state), there is a digital billboard which sometimes displays a message from the Massachusetts Department of Transportation that a tow truck ...
user44729
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Can using heated car seats reduce fertility?
A family member warned me not to use heated car seats, since they cause infertility and cancer in both men and women.
I searched the internet for a source for his claims and I found this Telegraph ...
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Do defensive driving courses reduce car accidents in teenage drivers?
A fairly common claim is that young learner drivers should take defensive driving courses so that they know what to do if they lose control of their car. This comes with the implications it will ...
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Is travelling by car better for preventing climate change than by plane?
From the Fairfax website traveller.com.au: Tourism and environmental damage: How travellers are ruining the world:
Some friends of mine have stopped travelling. Pretty much, anyway.
They're ...
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Does saying "sorry" after an accident count as legal admission of fault?
It is common knowledge that after a car accident (presumably other types too), one shouldn't say they are sorry to the other person. While probably intended as an expression of empathy, the claim is ...
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Does China control 85% of the supply of rare metals used in lithium batteries?
A selected letter in The Guardian talking about electric vehicles claims:
The rare metals in lithium batteries are produced only in inconvenient places. More than 85% of the world’s supply comes ...
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Does E15 fuel damage cars newer than 2001?
Blogger David Woodsmall warns that E15 fuel (that is a blend of 15% ethanol and 85% gasoline) might be bad for some cars that are not certified to accept it:
One of the chief complaints by E15 ...
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Has Pokémon Go caused hundreds of deaths?
This article in The Register claims that Pokémon Go may have a bad side effect on road safety. The headline is:
Pokémon GO caused hundreds of deaths, increased crashes
And the article summarises ...
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Does the source code of the software for a high-end car contain on average around 100 million lines of code?
This infographic shows the different number of lines that some software applications (or a general type of them) have on average.
The number of lines shown for an average modern high-end car strikes ...
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