CRASH: Ep 1: Carnage: Car Safety & Car Crashes: Pt 5 ...
From the UK Documentary Series CRASH: Episode 1 of 3: Carnage. This episode gives a brief history of car safety, showing how our love of the car ...
Seatbelt Safety
Bryanna Odell's Gold Award Seatbelt Safety
Room to Live - Safety Cage - Seatbelts Save Lives
Reporter visited junkyards and sat in the "safety bubble" engineered into cars and showed that every driver thrown from a vehicle and ...
The Story of J, Part 2
It has been eternity since I last blogged. However, here goes an update in the story of Josephine.
Josephine got her appointment with the DRIRE, the French agency that approves foreign cars, in April. Thomas got the letter in the mail and immediately contacted me. I was in Donana, doing fieldwork. Since the appointment was in a week’s time, I immediately booked a flight. There was only the little problem of a volcano erupting in Iceland and all air traffic being paralyzed. I checked my airline’s website and the web in every spare minute for updates. The day was the day I flew out. The appointment went fairly well. Josephine is so pretty that the engineer examining her made little comments about such American cars and people that bring them over to “faire le keke sur les Champs-Elysees” [showing off (slang) on one of the most posh streets in Paris – also the street where French soccer players hung with underage escorts]. He become more friendly after we explained that I came from the U.S., had had Josephine for years, and I was a field biologist who used a 4×4 for my work. I have to say that I was a little proud to have passed unnoticed as an American, such is my now minimal accent in French. He nonetheless wanted Josephine to remove her extra seatbelts (the middle front seat and rear jumpseats cannot be used) and change around her blinkers.
The next step was scheduling an appointment with UTAC, the agency that checks the mechanistics of the vehicle to conform that they meet French standards. The DRIRE agent said to do it asap since “ils ont souvent un peu de retard, surtout l’ete” [they often are running a bit behind, especially in the summer]. I guess that by French standards, un peu equals 3 months. My appointment was set for july. Remember how the guy at Versailles said Josephine absolutely could not be driven? And that, in theory, the customs people said she could only be driven four months on her old plats? Hah!
Thomas and I arrived early for the UTAC appointment since they threaten to charge you fees if you arrive late. However, the guard at the gate gave me a nasty look and finished her text messaging before telling me that I absolutely could not enter the complex before 1 pm (it was 10 mins ‘til). We waited and passed exactly at 1 pm. The appointment started badly because she failed the parking brake test – they load her at her maximum allowable weight and put her on a 20% grade with just her parking brake to hold her. And the parking brake cannot be pushed all the way in. They gave us a chance to try to tighten the tension, if possible (it wasn’t – I had brought the Ford Ranger manual just in case of such problems). We did try but to do it right involved taking apart the rear brakes. I gave stink eye to the man who had an appointment at the same time as me – clearly a middle-aged Frenchman who had treated himself to a sweet little Corvette. Bastard. I had to reschedule – next available appointment: Oct. 1. Even the engineers were trying to convince the secretary to squeeze me in sooner because it is only a 10-min test. She would not budge. I think it gave her pleasure.
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