My Car Does What?

According to the National Safety Council, we have over 30,000 traffic deaths every year in the US, and 90% are related to driver error. If you are interested in driving safety, and how cars can make us all safer, you might want to check out a website titled "My Car Does What?" at this link:  www.mycardoeswhat.org

I'm not going to make this political at all, so please understand I'm only interested in driving safety. I'm not going to talk about self-driving cars, because the reality of right now is that I don't have a self driving car. One thing I know is that many cars have safety features that I don't know about or fully understand, so this new website that is trying to educate more people on what safety features are available makes sense to me.

From our experience with auto-cross and driving on a track in a controlled environment, the drivers at Nixon Motor Sports know that the most important thing is safety, both in how we drive, what we drive, and every other safety tool in our tool kit. Regular maintenance, driving appropriately in bad weather, wearing safety gear like helmets (in certain types of driving) and seat belts (always), are simple steps we can take to be safe drivers.

A quick glance at www.mycardoeswhat.org, (developed by the National Safety Council and the University of Iowa) shows that the website explains some of the latest technology available to drivers that are useful tools in making any driver (like you and me) safer on today's roads. Here's a partial list of some car features explained on the website that you may not not have experienced:

     -Forward Collision Prevention
     -Adaptive Headlights
     -Automatic Emergency Braking
     -Obstacle Detection
     -Pedestrian Detection
     -Night Vision
     -Adaptive Cruise Control

One of my favorites that we have on our Camry, and I never thought I'd need until I had it, is the back up camera. I believe that these cameras will be mandatory on cars in a few years, so many vehicles have these now. On the website it even states that this educational program is funded by Toyota, so I have to give them an A+ for working to improve auto safety.

(The My Car Does What logo is used with permission)

The DMV Experience

One of life's greatest pleasures is....   No, really, the one part of life that I could do without is visiting the Department of Motor Vehicles. The bottom line up front, or "BLUF" (which is supposed to mean FACTS but amazingly the acronym as a word means you're NOT telling the facts) is that my most recent visit was simple, quick, to the point, easy, free, and painless!

Believe it or not the planets must have lined up and all the cosmic tumblers slipped into place on Friday morning, because the DMV visit was as good as it good be! First off there was plenty of parking outside the usually crowded building. Then there was no one in line at the first screening station when I arrived. After that I only waited for about three other numbers that were called before it was my turn. At the service window I handed over my old title from another state, and the friendly lady handed me a shiny brand new Virginia title in a matter of minutes. Free, true story, believe it or not, still amazed, newsworthy, like-winning-the-lottery, wow!

Stay tuned to this blog for more amazing TRUE stories in the future. (and some that won't be true too!)

Today's Tool Thoughts

They've got sockets

If you're a car fan, you probably have some tools. Well, unless you are literally a car fan, in which case you are an inanimate object that lives under the hood of a car and spins like crazy to force or pull air into a radiator.......(awaiting groaning from our loyal blog reader).......I'm back now, and ready to share today's tool thoughts!

They've got the cheap basic set

With a glorious day off from work, I spent some time at the nearby Sears store, which believe it or not is still in business! It's fun to realize that the Sears and Roebuck company hit it big in their early days with home-shopper catalogs and mail order business. As the decades passed, Sears continued to be be a major retailer, and eventually added Land's End and Kmart to their company. Today however, the retail business isn't what it used to be, as today's version of mail-order, which means Internet sales, has taken much of the business away from Sears. What goes around comes around I guess.

They've got the torque wrenches

But enough about business, let's talk tools! At Sears, you can still find nearly any tool you might need, and specifically that means the Craftsman brand with their famous lifetime warranty. For the most part, if any Craftsman tool breaks, just take it to your nearest Sears store and they will give you a new one to replace it. Free. That's good old fashioned customer service in my book, and in my blog!

They've got the all-in-one garage jack stuff

So the Craftsman brand is not the most expensive brand in the world, and maybe not the top drawer super high quality used to build nuclear reactors, but for the every day guy like me, their tools are great. I've got a lot of wrenches and sockets of various sizes to use on the NMS fleet, mostly in the 3/8th and 1/2 inch sizes. One of my favorite wrench sets is a Craftsman ratcheting set of box wrenches that I found at a good discount at a Kmart store that was going out of business. If you haven't experienced this yet, I can tell you it's a blast to find a Kmart store going out of business, and then if they have any items you might want to buy, just stop by every week as they start lowering the prices. In the case of the wrenches I bought, the store started selling everything somewhere around 30% off, and slowly worked their way to the final day when everything was 95% off. I think I've stopped at four different Kmarts in the past few years, but only at the first one did I find the huge inventory of tools that led me to buying anything at a great price.

They've got the basic metric and inches sets

Oh, and when you've got to find a place to put all your tools, you need more storage boxes! And if you have empty spaces in your storage boxes, then naturally you need more tools to fill them up!

They've got the storage boxes