258
votes
Accepted
Are cars in Arizona melting in the 2018 summer heat?
The weather is not melting cars. But there was a big fire in Tucson and the heat from the fire melted plastic parts on a bunch of cars in the parking lot. The pictures in this article fairly clearly ...
- 7,777
116
votes
Accepted
Does the production of a Tesla battery produce as much CO2 as driving 200,000 km?
tl;dr: The claimed range is 50% higher than the worst assumptions for battery production, and 500% higher than the best assumptions. But it's not an apples to apples comparison.
Carbon emissions ...
- 10.2k
94
votes
Accepted
Are roundabouts actually statistically safer than traditional traffic patterns?
Here is a study of traffic safety at roundabouts in Minnesota. In this study they looked at all roundabouts in Minnesota, and look at the recorded crash data at these sites, comparing the data before ...
- 3,858
92
votes
Accepted
Does saying "sorry" after an accident count as legal admission of fault?
I focused on the US for this answer. An apology does not automatically lead to the party being found guilty:
The apology may not be admissible in court (but the laws are complicated, as usual).
When ...
- 32.7k
88
votes
Did a Tesla car collide with a Russian robot?
It's a PR stunt, and a very bad one at that. There are several debunkings out there, e.g. from ElecTrek, or (the best IMHO) from DÆrik @ YouTube.
Strongest points made by DÆrik:
The press release by ...
- 19.1k
80
votes
Accepted
Is it true that there is not enough electricity to power all vehicles in the United States if they were electric?
tl;dr: The claim is false. The claim is that there would need to be six times as much electric generation, but if all cars in 2019 had been electric, only 1.43 times (43%) more generation would have ...
- 10.2k
79
votes
Accepted
Was the Ford Model T black because of the speed black paint dries?
This is something of an urban myth - the drying time gains were made by using oven-dried enamel coatings on the parts that could withstand the required curing temperatures.
The so-called "baked ...
- 1,634
74
votes
Accepted
Does the source code of the software for a high-end car contain on average around 100 million lines of code?
Ford has said that the F150 pickup has 150 million lines of code.
According to the New York Times:
Twenty years ago, cars had, on average, one million lines of code. The General Motors 2010 ...
- 108k
71
votes
Does the production of a Tesla battery produce as much CO2 as driving 200,000 km?
In addition to all the other great answers there is one very important fact that's always ignored in these comparisons (Google translation, lightly corrected by me):
The total emissions of petrol ...
- 689
70
votes
Accepted
Is a woman more likely than a man to be seriously injured in a car crash of similar severity?
I remember reading this article at the time; these kinds of articles tend to be riddled with hyperbole and exaggeration.
The article says 'But when a woman is involved in a car crash, she is 47% more ...
- 5,304
65
votes
Does China control 85% of the supply of rare metals used in lithium batteries?
...but China only has 37% of the world's reserves
Michael Karnerfors has provided evidence that China produces 95% of the world's rare earth elements. However, China does not hold that much of the ...
- 1,103
47
votes
Do women get cheaper car insurance?
It appears to be rational behavior for auto insurers to take a driver's gender into account when assessing the risk the driver presents to them and consequently how much they should charge that driver ...
- 5,444
47
votes
Are roundabouts actually statistically safer than traditional traffic patterns?
Germany started to reintroduce roundabouts in 2000, so quite a lot of research has been done, and there is plenty of experience.
The German "Bundesanstalt für Straßenwesen", federal road ...
- 521
45
votes
Does the source code of the software for a high-end car contain on average around 100 million lines of code?
LOC is a particularly bad metric, because it raises the question of what is a line of code. Do you include whitespace and comments? Compiler directives? Preprocessor definitions? How about lines ...
- 1,592
41
votes
Have children's car seats not been proven to be more effective than seat belts alone for kids older than 24 months?
There is evidence otherwise
The second author of the NYT article is Steven D. Levitt, who also wrote Evidence that Seat Belts are as Effective as Child Safety Seats in Preventing Death for Children ...
- 32.7k
34
votes
Are cars in Arizona melting in the 2018 summer heat?
A search on https://tineye.com led me to this tweet by @AyeElleJay with the caption "Slimmmmm! Arizona weather real different 😩" against that image.
Replies to the tweet questioned its validity, and ...
- 9,015
34
votes
Did a man complain that his Pontiac wouldn't start whenever the ice cream he picked up was vanilla?
If I'd spent 30 seconds looking instead of 2 minutes posting here I'd have found the answer on Snopes. Its an old legend dating back to at least 1978.
Origins: This legend surfaced in print in ...
- 16.8k
30
votes
Is it true that there is not enough electricity to power all vehicles in the United States if they were electric?
No, about 40 to 60%
Internal Combustion Engine (ICE) vehicles currently use 146 billion gallons of gasoline used each year annually. A gallon of gasoline represents about 33 kWh of energy. So all the ...
- 21.1k
28
votes
Accepted
Do women get cheaper car insurance?
Yes, in general women do get cheaper car insurance.
Some jurisdictions have banned this - several states in the US prohibit charging women more. Here is the EU guidance from 2012 where gender ...
- 5,746
27
votes
Does saying "sorry" after an accident count as legal admission of fault?
At least in Canada, no.
Canada actually has an "Apology Act" that essentially says that you can apologize for something and that apology is not to be considered a confession, admission of fault/guilt....
- 371
26
votes
Is sleeping in a car with the windows rolled up dangerous?
According to Measurement of air exchange rate of stationary vehicles and estimation of in-vehicle exposure (1998):
The air exchange rates or air changes per hour (ACH) were measured under 4 ...
- 5,746
24
votes
Accepted
Does one SUV tank of ethanol "take as much grain as could feed a person for a whole year?"
Mathematically accurate
From Cornell University News:
An acre of U.S. corn yields about 7,110 pounds of corn for processing into 328 gallons of ethanol.
That's 3,225 kg and 1241 liters.
Let's ...
- 10.2k
20
votes
Has an engineer called Trevor Jackson invented a revolutionary battery allowing for a car range of 1500 miles?
While I don't know if this particular company is doing something useful or not, I can talk about what an aluminum battery could be used for in electric cars.
In general, electric cars use lithium ion ...
- 401
20
votes
Does the production of a Tesla battery produce as much CO2 as driving 200,000 km?
IVL, the source of the 150 to 200 kilograms of CO2 figure, recently published a new study that ended up with a much lower estimate: 61-106kg per kWh of battery capacity, depending on the energy ...
- 433
18
votes
Accepted
Do Chevrolet commercials feature "Real people. Not actors."?
Summary: Chevrolet explain that they took some effort to avoid actors, but further investigation found that some had appeared in the adverts.
The "Real People, Not Actors" is a ad campaign which is ...
- 22.8k
18
votes
Accepted
Did Winston Churchill praise Rolls-Royce engines?
There is no reason to doubt that Churchill explicitly mentioned Rolls-Royce in the context of the quote.
A Google Books search limited to books published before 1960 returns at least four publications ...
- 9,528
17
votes
Has Pokémon Go caused hundreds of deaths?
This is the research paper in question.
The research paper was just released Nov 18th, 2017. Typically it takes some time for a proper peer review, and with a proper peer review, the next step for ...
- 1,146
17
votes
Accepted
Is this accident footage authentic?
No, it is not a real accident.
The advert was created by Foote, Cone & Belding (FCB), on behalf of the Western Cape Government and AT&T's #ItCanWait campaign.
It is discussed in an AdWeek ...
- 144k
17
votes
Accepted
Do car tires create more pollution than exhaust fumes?
tl;dr
The study only focuses on particulate emissions.
It does not take into account other forms of pollution.
It does not claim all tire emissions are worse for the environment than all exhaust ...
- 21.1k
15
votes
Accepted
Do cars drop 7% in value every month?
When buying a new car, a car will depreciate around 11% just driving it off the lot. However, after this first trip, the depreciation rate falls drastically.
Rates of depreciation on cars are ...
- 22.4k
Only top scored, non community-wiki answers of a minimum length are eligible