Questions tagged [road-vehicles]
Use this tag for question about cars, trucks and other road transport.
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Does using a neck brace reduce damage taken in a car crash?
In the movie Focus, you can find this scene, where a man puts on a neck brace, before crashing into another car, and this same guy seems to be the only one unscathed. I know movies tend to portray ...
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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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Can boiling water break car windows?
A friend of mine in Australia has heard from several of her friends that it's unsafe to pour boiling water on car windows in order to defrost them.
Online examples of people claiming it's unsafe ...
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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 a turbo-charged engine require a "cooling down" period?
Some people are saying that after having driven a car with a turbo-charged engine, you need to let the engine run for several seconds (or even minutes) before switching off the engine. But nobody is ...
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Does marijuana impair driving?
Is the use of cannabis/marijuana/THC associated with risks when driving a motor vehicle, similar to impairment from the use of alcohol?
The conclusions of public studies seem inconsistent. For example,...
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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 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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Do electric cars create more fine dust pollution than comparable petrol cars?
According to this Flanders Today (a local Belgian newspaper) article (dead link, archive on archive.org).
a new small car on petrol in the city creates less fine dust than an electric car of average ...
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Are there lots worldwide filled with thousands of unsold new cars left to ruin?
This link came in an email that was getting passed around the office today:
http://www.vincelewis.net/unsoldcars.html
The premise is that car manufacturers, not wanting to dilute their inventory to ...
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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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Can you unlock a car using a cell phone?
I have heard that it is possible to unlock a car using the remote key-fob over a cell phone network.
Scenario: Adam locks his keys in his car. He uses his cell phone to call his wife, Betty, who is ...
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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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Do women pay more than men when buying cars?
In the recent Bud Light commercial, Amy Schumer makes many claims regarding gender equality. One of these claims is that women pay more than men when buying cars.
Here's a link to said video.
Is this ...
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Does gender affect driving skill?
Are there any differences in either sex which are provably beneficial and/or detrimental to their driving abilities?
Also, is it possible that stereotypical gender roles make any difference in ...
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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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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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Does waxing your car have a long-term beneficial effect on the paint-work?
Everyone, especially people who love washing and waxing their cars, has been telling me about the long-term benefits of regular waxing. They tell me that the layer of wax acts as a protective shell ...
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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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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 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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Does lowering speed limits by 10 km/h have any impact on air pollution?
Europe has been under exceptional sunlight for the past ten days, cf. Eumetsat's picture. According to French media, this prevents smog from escaping major hubs. In an attempt to reduce this air ...
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Are seat straps in child restraints less effective when they are twisted?
My wife and I have seen many parents in a rush buckle their kids in a car seat despite one of the straps being twisted (I've even done it myself a few times- don't tell my wife- because I had a hard ...
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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 speed bumps cause more deaths than they save?
After a few speeding incidents in a residential neighborhood, some residents will clamor for speed bumps.
In case your municipality does not have one, here is a picture of a speed bump (also AE ...
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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 ...
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Do Chevrolet commercials feature "Real people. Not actors."?
Many Chevrolet commercials I have seen in the past few years have started off with the disclaimer: "Real People. Not Actors". They have several of these commercials such as this one and that one.
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Is it possible to disable a vehicle with microwave oven magnetron from that distance
In a well-known Youtube channel there is a scene where a scooter had some kind of short circuit caused by magnetron used as a weapon from a distance. I never saw this channel to have fakes but one guy ...
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Do gas pods improve fuel efficiency?
I ran into this claim today about detachable car fins, and was wondering if there is any validity to it:
about a five percent reduction in drag and corresponding five percent boost in fuel ...
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Does the 'two-second rule' provide a valid minimum gap for safe driving?
Most of us will have been taught the two-second rule when learning to drive.
The two-second rule is a rule of thumb by which a driver may maintain a safe following distance at any speed. The rule ...
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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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Is using the A/C in a car less fuel efficient than having the windows down?
This is an age old debate that i have with a coterie of friends; without backing up with much scientific fact. It's all recently been based on arguments of experience.
Is it possible that utilizing ...
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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 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 lowering the legal BAC make driving safer?
Lower legal blood alcohol concentration limit laws are passed under the assumption that a lower legal limit will reduce the number of accidents.
For example, the U.S government lowered the legal BAC ...
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Have more people been killed by automobiles than by all wars combined?
I read this claim somewhere recently, and a google search shows that it's occasionally made around the web, but was perhaps more common in the 1970's (many of the stories I find online are people ...
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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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Can Doom run on a car's infotainment system?
In this youtube video a hacker claims it is easily possible to mod the infotainment system in his Porsche to run the game Doom using the controls of his car to control the game.
This Gizmodo/Sploid ...
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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 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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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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Were there only two cars in Ohio in 1895, and they managed to crash into each other?
Currently on Today I Learned, Reddit.
TIL [Today I Learned] In the entire state of Ohio in 1895, there were only two cars on the road, and the drivers of these two cars crashed into each other.
...
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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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