Road safety, Chinese style

As the World Health Organization puts it in their 2004 World report on road traffic injury prevention:

Road traffic injuries are a major but neglected public health challenge that requires concerted efforts for effective and sustainable prevention. Of all the systems with which people have to deal every day, road traffic systems are the most complex and the most dangerous. Worldwide, an estimated 1.2 million people are killed in road crashes each year and as many as 50 million are injured. Projections indicate that these figures will increase by about 65% over the next 20 years unless there is new commitment to prevention. Nevertheless, the tragedy behind these figures attracts less mass media attention than other, less frequent types of tragedy.

It's true: despite great improvements in car safety over the years, road accidents are still a major cause of death everywhere in the world that has cars. So it's a subject worth taking a look at. And because that news item on Chinese prisoners being forced to play World of Warcraft got me thinking about China, we'll take a look at Chinese road safety.

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The Euro NCAP does crash tests of commercially available cars and posts the results online, so we can see what we're getting into when we buy a car. As a starting example, here's the crash test video from a Volvo V70 estate. My dad drove one, or something very similar to it, and even though it was never crashed properly, one of the near-death situations in my life did occur in it when a lunatic in Finland ran a red light at very high speed, nearly hitting us.

To get an idea of how things are supposed to work, here's the Euro NCAP video of a Volvo V70 crash test:

As you can see, the essential features of modern car safety are functioning. There's airbags to cushion the impact, and most of the force of the collision is absorbed by the crumple zones of the car while the passenger compartment stays intact. The V70 got a five-star rating, out of a possible maximum of five.

Here, on the other hand, is a Chinese-made Brilliance BS6 in an Euro NCAP crash test.

As you can see, well, yeah. It got one star. In case you're wondering what you have to do to get no stars, here's the Jiangling Motors Landwind:

And if that wasn't frightening enough, here's an inside view:

And finally, an unidentified Chinese car being crashed into a barrier at 64 km/h in Russia.

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I'm not in a position to offer any kind of advice on buying cars, but I will say this: there seems to be a rather large difference between a five-star rating and a no-star if-you-drive-this-you-are-going-to-die rating.

Funny pictures

I'm not the only person who associates the Nazi Pope with a certain bear. Via the Huffington Post, of all things:

It's a little too small to make out properly. Suffice to say that a police department in California recently warned parents about this dangerous "mascot".

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While I was doing my post on Sheriff Joe of Maricopa, I remembered a particular image I'd seen floating around the Internet a while ago. To my great regret, it's fake, at least in the sense that if the vehicle exists, it's in private hands, not official use.

The picture is still awesome, as it contains more repressed homosexuality than I've ever seen in my life. If it's actually overt homosexuality, then it's just awesome.

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On that topic, some nations have great newspapers. Here's Uganda's Red Pepper, with the most unreal and hysterically funny headline I've ever seen.

I wish we had headlines like that.

Although nothing seems right

If this wasn't on Time Magazine's website, I wouldn't believe it.

Time: The Government Can Use GPS to Track Your Moves

Government agents can sneak onto your property in the middle of the night, put a GPS device on the bottom of your car and keep track of everywhere you go. This doesn't violate your Fourth Amendment rights, because you do not have any reasonable expectation of privacy in your own driveway — and no reasonable expectation that the government isn't tracking your movements.

That is the bizarre — and scary — rule that now applies in California and eight other Western states. The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit, which covers this vast jurisdiction, recently decided the government can monitor you in this way virtually anytime it wants — with no need for a search warrant.

It is a dangerous decision — one that, as the dissenting judges warned, could turn America into the sort of totalitarian state imagined by George Orwell. It is particularly offensive because the judges added insult to injury with some shocking class bias: the little personal privacy that still exists, the court suggested, should belong mainly to the rich.

Read, and be amazed. As far as I know, this is no April Fools' joke. There's a bunch of other good privacy-themed articles on time.com as well.

Of course, the idea that where you drive in your car is in any way your business is increasingly becoming bankrupt in the West. With surprisingly little fuss, the UK has now installed a nationwide system of cameras that read number plates. You can read about it here.

The way Big Brother is sneaking up on us is frightening.

im in ur car

BBC: Hack attacks mounted on car control systems

The team of researchers, led by Professor Stefan Savage from the University of California-San Diego, and Tadayoshi Kohno from the University of Washington set out to see what resilience cars had to an attack on their control systems.

"Our findings suggest that, unfortunately, the answer is 'little,'" wrote the researchers from the Center for Automotive Embedded Systems Security.