A Tesla whistleblower this week claimed self-driving car tech is not safe enough for public roads, but how safe is safe enough? After all, there’s a double standard where road safety’s concerned. A once-in-a-decade train crash that kills 5 people will generate wall-to-wall media coverage, a public enquiry and changes to working practices, but the daily UK road death toll…
Car makers may have got better over the last 50 years at protecting drivers in a crash, but much of the progress has been at the expense of those outside the vehicle. There’s a blind spot where road danger’s concerned. And we’re not talking about societal apathy – we mean an actual, real-life blind spot. Alongside a fashion for high…
Running a car is the single largest household expense (excluding mortgage repayments) for rural families, and the second largest for urban ones. As a result, transport costs have pushed over 5 million people into poverty according to research by the Social Market Foundation. The average British household spends £5,740 on driving, but only £87 on bus travel. Poorer regions are…
What if you could remove the battery from an electric car and carry it inside to recharge? One of the reasons electric bicycles make so much sense is that, unlike electric cars, they don’t rely on widespread charging infrastructure; e-bikes have removable batteries that can be replenished via a household socket. Most electric cars have batteries that are too heavy…
Everyone wants to stay safe on the roads. Unfortunately, there are wildly different ideas about how that’s best achieved. Beaonisation is a digital version of the red flag they waved ahead of early cars* – except this time it’s for cyclists. If you think fitting pedestrians and cyclists with transponders to prevent them being run over in the brave new…
12/10/23
