The über-wealthy have many fascinating ways to speed on America’s highways, from night-vision goggles to convenient spotter planes overhead. But those of us who toil in the middle class have to earn our velocity by hard graft. Freeway speeding is the crack cocaine of fast-road driving—cheap, easy, addictive, and deadly—and nighttime freeway speeding is both more glamorous and annoying than its daytime counterpart.

Once the sun goes down, we can do a lot more of that left-lane passing which is so near and dear to the hearts of wannabe Europeans, thanks to a trick I call “Poor Man’s Takedown.” Cop cars have “takedown” lights: high beams which flash alternately. We can simulate the effect as follows: While coming up behind traffic in the left lane, switch to parking lights only. When you are a few hundred feet back, flash your brights three or four times, producing the “takedown” effect. As Billy Dee Williams would say, “It works every time,” primarily because it startles Toyota drivers into yielding the lane before their natural territorial instincts can assert themselves.

We don’t use the shoulder at night unless we have to. Confused deer, abandoned cars, and discarded retreads tend to hide out there. In the event that a lane-changing fellow motorist leaves us with no safe lane choice and no time to slow the car, it’s occasionally possible to simply split the lane on the side away from the lateral direction of the lane change. If you are swift enough with it, you might even keep your mirrors.

The time will come when, despite our best efforts to look ahead, watch brake lights, and use our Valentine Ones, we will be clocked. At this point, we have two useful options. We can pull over and wait for the nice policeman, right there across the road from his clocking point (this will sometimes earn us some goodwill), or we can run.

It isn’t really “running” until the cop is directly behind us with his lights on. That’s a felony, and I advise against it. Until then, it’s merely additional speeding, spiced up with some unwarranted direction-changing. When we decide to perform said additional speeding, we need to absolutely abandon the idea of getting where we were going. That’s no longer important. Instead, we need to perform three important tasks.

Task one is breaking visual contact. As long as the cop can see us, we are toast. So it’s time to boogie. Most police sedans with light bars can’t break 120 mph, so we want to get to that speed or better immediately. We look ahead, not behind, or we will surely drive right into the back of a lane-wandering minivan full of multicultural children stroking crippled kittens and singing “Kumbaya.” We can check our mirrors in the gaps between traffic.

With Task One accomplished, it’s time to multiply possibilities. The police handbooks indicate that fleeing drivers almost always turn right. So we get off the freeway and turn left. If we have enough clear air and we aren’t driving something like a lime green Audi S5 or other memorable car, we can cross the median and join the lawful traffic heading in the other direction. If that’s too much to ask, get off the freeway . . . but do it quickly. We keep our speed up, using the techniques I’ll cover in Part III, and we make multiple direction changes.

After a few of these, it’s time to abandon the whip. We get out of the car and walk away. A gas station is fine for this, a restaurant is better, a car lot is best of all. If you have, ahem, a new Ford Flex, why not drive into a Ford dealership and park in a line of them?  Then get away from the car. Guess what? If they can’t prove we were driving the car, we have a fighting chance in court.

If the police manage to catch us, we say we didn’t see them and that we always drive like a maniac. This abject confession of putative stupidity saved, um, a friend of mine from a beating after he led the Ohio Highway Patrol on a 120+ mph chase down Route 71 in a Lotus Seven clone. Sorry, officer! Didn’t see you back there! Gimme the ticket, I’ll sign it!

In cities, we return to the scene of the crime. Police search in an outward circle that expands with time. The one place they won’t be is the place where the search started, so we go there, using left turns. Needless to say, we don’t go speeding with weed, Ecstasy, firearms, or illegal immigrants in the car, because one felony charge at a time is enough.

In Part III, we will learn how to drive back roads at outrageous speeds.

[Click here to read Part I or Part III of the series. Note: as these editorials have triggered some strong emotions, I've turned off our no-flaming the website/author policy. Ish. I reserve the right to douse particularly egregious examples, in an entirely first amendment friendly sort of way]

Let us begin with this: it is possible to go much faster on North American public roads than the law allows. Much faster. If you are interested in exploring the upper limits of this possibility, read on. If you find this idea morally, legally, ethically or spiritually repugnant; please return to your regularly scheduled bailout coverage. If you’re a member of law enforcement, please consider this a work of fiction.

In theory, I’ve been driving “too fast” on public roads for more than twenty years. In that time, I may have learned a lot about what works and what does not. I will share this hypothetical knowledge—bought and paid for in terror, twisted steel and sleepless nights—with you. Or not.

Before we begin, a caveat. The fast-road driver needs more than skill, more than training, more than a fast car. He (and it is almost always he) needs luck. Luck eventually runs out. When that happens, people get hurt. Sometimes innocent people get hurt—if any of us are truly “innocent” in this world. Sometimes the driver will go to jail or beyond that to the penitentiary. Sometimes people die. You have been warned.

To drive truly quickly, you will need a level of preparation and skill roughly equivalent to what is found in NASA’s Time Trial class. Your car needs to have its fluids at the appropriate levels, its tire pressures checked and its suspension components torqued. Your tires need full tread, no plugs, no camber wear.

You, as the driver, need to be alert, sober, rested, and ready to look all the way down the road. The trained fast-road driver scans the horizon and looks to the end of his available vision. That’s where the cops are, that’s where the accidents happen, that’s where you start to intuit the movement patterns of your fellow drivers. Practice identifying cars in the oncoming freeway lanes as soon as they are visible. At any time, you should be able to close your eyes and recite the makes and models of the cars around you.

We’ll use a limited set of the race driver’s toolkit in our pursuit of maximum street speed. Trail-braking is out, deliberate contact is out, drafting is out. Instead, we follow the old Bondurant curriculum. All braking is done in a straight line, every time. If you have ABS, don’t be afraid to engage it. We never steer and brake simultaneously, particularly on the freeway. We don’t accelerate out of turns with the steering wheel “pinched” and we use formula-car hand positioning on the wheel. No shuffle-steer. Ever. This isn’t autocross. Get the wheel straight and put your right foot all the way down.

Traction control is left on at all times, with the exception of when we need a Jarno Donut (to be covered later). Turn the radio down or off. Sit close enough to the wheel that your wrist falls naturally on the rim of the wheel. If you have a CG-Lock, you can left-foot brake. If you don’t, don’t, because when you panic-brake from high speeds you will have nothing to keep your body in the seat. Get your heel-and-toe together, pronto. And for God’s sake, put your seatbelt on because you’ll eventually need it.

We’ll start with freeways. Speeding on the freeway is easy. Anybody can do it. The trick is in maintaining a consistent pace of twice the pack speed or higher. To do this we extend our vision to the horizon as mentioned above and watch the cars ahead. Look for lane changes, look for shifts in traffic, look for drivers who are slow, distracted or wobbly. Most of our passing is done to the right. This offends wanna-be Autobahn drivers, but we don’t care.

Cops expect you to speed in the left lane and they tend to look down the left lane. Stay to the right. Truck convoys are the exception. They will punish you for right-lane passes.

Our passing method is simple. We come up on a car-to-be-passed from directly behind. We do this to attract the driver’s attention into his rear-view mirror. When we are two hundred feet behind, we change lanes (to the right, if possible) and pass as far away as possible. While we prepare the pass, we look at the adjacent lane and we have a backup plan in case the car we are passing wobbles.

If there is no lane, evaluate the shoulder for heavy marbles, dirt, obstacles. If we see those, we dial back the speed to 100mph or less. Get in the habit of driving on the shoulder. We learn to drive on the shoulder because we’ll have to do it many times in the future, both to avoid panic-swerves and to pass recalcitrant lane-blockers.

In Part II, we’ll discuss night freeway driving and basic evasion techniques.

I oppose driver cell phone usage bans on principle. It is already against the law to drive while distracted in every State of the Union. Even so, several states and many cities have enacted wholesale bans on the use of hand-held cell phones by drivers. Other states and local governments ban teenagers from using the devices or prohibit their use in school zones. So what’s the harm? The additional legislation is surely no worse than wearing a belt and suspenders—by itself either will keep your pants up, but it’s nice to know that there’s a backup in case one of the modesty preservation systems fails. Comforting, isn’t it? NO! It makes my liberty loving soul retch. I say, down with the tyranny of the Nanny State! Nonetheless, the more time I spend outside of my ivory attic and driving America’s highways and byways, the harder it is for me to maintain this ideal.

I must confess that I occasionally talk on the cell phone when I drive. I commute nearly twenty miles to my office each day. I probably average one brief cell phone conversation a day while at the helm. Doing so has never impeded my ability to maintain my lane, react to slowing traffic ahead, or otherwise lose track of where I am or where I’m going. How can I be sure that I’m not making a nuisance of myself while I obliviously chat away on my phone? Call it the finger test; I don’t see any more of them with the cell phone than I do without.

I’m not alone. Four out of every five drivers surveyed by Nationwide Insurance in 2007 admitted to driving distracted. Their list of 26 distractions includes fiddling with the radio (82%); drinking a beverage (80%); operating a cell phone (73%); snacking (68%); and eating (41%). Personally I’m guilty of doing everything on the list except smoking (21%); applying make-up (12%); driving with a pet on my lap (8%); reading (5%); driving while intoxicated (4%); and shaving (2%).

Lest we lose perspective, some of the Nationwide Insurance survey’s write-in responses make it clear that drivers can become seriously distracted even without a cell phone.  “Peed out the window while going down the road. Well, you asked.”—Baby Boomer male, Sacramento [Ed.: Welcome to Sacramento!]. “I wear sandals or slip on shoes 90% of the time. So I always take my left shoe off and put my foot up in the seat. I have a drink in one hand, smoke in the other hand, and drive with my left foot.”—Gen Y female, Memphis. “Shaved legs, eaten a taco, put on make-up and drank alcohol at the same time.”—Gen Y female, San Antonio.

Yet somehow cell phone distracted drivers seem to be causing all of the noticeable problems. I used to presume that people were drunk when I saw an idiot driver cut cross two lanes to turn right from the left lane, meander off the road, drive obnoxiously slow, or make any number of obvious driving errors. Now I think (sometimes out loud), “I’ll bet that jackass is talking on his cell phone!”  I can’t remember the last time I was wrong.

Science bears this out. Multiple studies show that reaction times in drivers using cell phones are as much as a quarter second longer than non-distracted drivers. Hands free phones aren’t much better. The worst results are among elderly cell phone users and multitaskers who try to drive, talk and do something else like eat or paint toenails. A driving simulator study at the University of Utah found that test subjects with 0.08% blood alcohol content performed better than sober subjects yapping on cell phones.

So, there ought to be a law . . . Right? If only it were as simple as passing a law to create our own nirvana. Just when I am ready to break with my libertarian proclivities, I find this headline in the Dallas Morning News: “Study: Cellphone bans in school zones have no effect on drivers’ behavior.” Speed Measurement Laboratories, in a study commissioned by “several law enforcement publications,” monitored school zones in the Dallas-Fort Worth metroplex. They found that as many drivers, about 1 in 10, used their cell phones in school zones during banned hours as they did during non-banned hours. They also found no difference in drivers between these school zones with bans and zones without them. Still, Speed Measurement Laboratories’ front man Carl Fors maintains his support for the National Safety Council’s recommendation for a comprehensive ban of all cell phone usage by drivers, including hands free devices.

Unfortunately, laws can’t always fix things. A constitutional amendment banning booze could not excise America of the moral turpitude of alcoholism. If drivers are going to ignore cell phone driving prohibitions, what’s the point?

The Insurance Institute for Highway Safety (IIHS) recently performed a series of crash tests to garner widespread MSM coverage to justify their enormous operating budget to the insurance companies that pay for the “don’t tell anyone we’re not from the government” organization’s existence—I mean demonstrate the heretofore unimaginable fact that small/lightweight cars get the snot kicked out of them when they collide front-to-front with medium size cars, despite the fact that the small cars involved received the IIHS’ best possible frontal crash ratings. All this came as no surprise to Mike Dulberger, founder of InformedForLife.org.

Mr. Dulberger is an engineer with an OCD vehicle safety thing. He reckons the IIHS and National Highway Transportation Safety Administration (NHTSA) safety ratings are “confusing, conflicting and incomplete.” Amongst other criticisms, Dulberger slates the two heavyweights for failing to adequately consider the contribution of a given vehicle’s mass to its overall safety. So Dulberger developed has own analysis—SCORE (Statistical Combination Of Risk Elements)—to rectify this and other shortcomings.

As you might expect, the small/lightweight cars crash tested by the IIHS fared badly under Dulberger’s SCORE system. Of the three small vehicles tested, the Smart Fortwo held special significance for Mr. Dulberger. Sherman, set the wayback machine for October 2008 . . .

On that fateful date, Dulberger was asked to share his SCORE analysis with Forbes (magazine), as part of their annual “2009 Most Dangerous Vehicles” article. Dulberger duly fingered the Smart (that doesn’t sound right) as a bit of a . . . well . . . you know.

“Not only does the smart have a high risk due to its low weight (1800 lb),’ Dulberger asserts, ‘it also has the lowest NHTSA frontal rating (three stars, passenger side) of any 2009 vehicle. And because of its top heavy design, the smart has almost twice the rollover risk of the average passenger car.”

In fact, the Smart received one of Informedforlife.org’s lowest ever SCOREs: 130. According to Dulberger, the number represents more than twice his system’s “acceptable” fatality risk. All this he told Forbes.

Unfortunately (for the consumer), Forbes forgot to publish Dulberger’s smart conclusions. He believes the sin of omission was the direct result of objections raised by Smart USA’s President, David Schembri.

Before Forbes ran its piece, Schembri somehow got a hold of Dulberger’s phone number and gave him an earful. The Smart guy declared flat out that his car was safe. After all, the IIHS had rated it “GOOD.” Schembri told Dulberger any assertion to the contrary was wrong, irresponsible and, how shall we put this? Actionable.

And so Dulberger’s smart safety slam was spiked. This is what they published instead:

What’s most important for buyers is finding cars that are safe but also suited to their individual needs. The 1,808-pound, $11,990 Smart Fortwo, for example, is the smallest car on the road and received solid safety ratings for both crashes and rollovers–it didn’t come close to making our list. But that doesn’t make the car the safest or best for a large or tall person.

“The NHTSA data simply does not support that conclusion,” Dulberger insists. “Three stars for passenger side frontal impact is the lowest rating by NHTSA for any vehicle, and three stars rollover is the lowest rating by NHTSA for any passenger car.

“It’s hard to believe that this misrepresentation is a mistake given the fact that I pointed these same issues out to them. . . I guess Forbes believes that ’safety first’ means testing a manufacturers reaction to its editorial content before publishing.”

Or not, when everyone else goes first. And even in that case, well, it’s hard to read this excerpt from Forbes‘ coverage of the recent IIHS smart debacle the same way, knowing Dulberger’s tale.

In the crash test between the C-Class and Fortwo, for example, the Smart bounced off the C-Class and turned 450 degrees before landing and displacing the instrument panel and steering wheel through the cockpit. The C-Class had almost no intrusion of the front gears into the passenger area.

Granted, the IIHS tests are much more severe than government safety standards mandate, as small-car proponents often note. The Smart Fortwo meets all U.S. government crash-test standards, including a five-star side-crash rating, notes Dave Schembri, the president of Smart USA. It also earned the highest scores for front- and side-crash worthiness from the IIHS itself.

As for the pressure that Smart may or may not have been brought to bear on Forbes, that may or may not have involved advertising, what did you expect? The truth about cars?

In a recent editorial on TTAC, Jack Baruth described a harrowing incident that nearly led to the demise of his beloved Volkswagen Phaeton. The editorial claimed the incident was the masturbatory fantasy of every “driver training” and “active safety” advocate. He concludes that he lived to write another day not because of his driver training, but rather dumb luck. Not so fast, Mr. Baruth.

From his story, we know that Jack was operating a vehicle capable of .82 g’s lateral acceleration at a rate of 123 MPH in the left lane of an AASHTO-compliant interstate highway. As a crash was unfolding in front of him, he recognized that his only avenue of escape was partially blocked so he rapidly decelerated to a speed of 70 mph and then executed his first steering input.

By his own admission, Baruth’s only inputs: hard braking and slow steering. What we don’t know is whether solving this particular problem in the way that he did required the skills of a highly trained driver, the technological wizardry of computer aided driving systems or whether the outcome can be attributed to just plain luck. To see if we can’t figure that out, we’ll have to take a closer look at the three critical components of this and every other behind-the-wheel emergency: the driver, the vehicle and the environment.

Because the crash took Jack by surprise and presented a relatively complex set of problems, it most likely took him 1.2 seconds to understand the problem and come up with a plan to resolve it. It likely took him another .3 seconds to get from the throttle to the brake pedal. By the way, that’s not me saying that; it’s Dr. Marc Green, the world renowned psychologist whose 34 years of research into driver reaction time is universally accepted by accident reconstruction experts around the world.

By then, Jack VeeDub had traveled 271.22 feet.

Based on Jack’s recounting of the tale, the first steering input was made at 70 mph. At that speed, the tightest radius his black panzer would be able to tolerate before it began to slide or lift was 398 feet.

For argument’s sake, and given that Jack had to drop two wheels off the road surface in order to get his 6.24 foot wide car around the problem, let’s say there was 5 feet of clear pavement for him to work with. That means Jack would have had to turn the wheel at least 255.5 feet from the crash in order to safely execute the maneuver in question.

That’s assuming he was capable of operating the vehicle at peak efficiency under significant stress, which is the sort of stuff Lewis Hamilton and Michael Schumacher are made of. While that’s not likely the case, we’ll give him the benefit of the doubt and say he was capable of operating his vehicle at about 85 percent of peak efficiency, in which case he would have had to turn the wheel no less than 277.5 feet from the crash.

Because we’re a little short on hard data, we’ll make a generous assumption in favor of jack’s marvel of German engineering. We’ll estimate that it required 230 feet to bleed off enough energy to drop from 123 mph to 70 mph. So, to hear the story as Jack tells it, and to solve the problem in the manner he described, he would have needed nearly 779 feet—or close to 46 car lengths—of distance to make his decisions and take the actions he did without overreaching the existing driver/vehicle capability envelope.

With that much room between himself and the problem, had he simply slammed on the brakes when he first noticed the crash he would have come to a stop more than 300 feet from the crash site and have avoided all the other theatrics.

Based on that fact, I dare say that on that fateful day in question, Jack did not find himself in a life or death situation. Nor was it one that required advanced driver training, the technological wizardry of ESC, or any amount of luck to resolve.

All things considered, this story told by Jack, from the dramatic fashion in which it unfolded to the conclusions he draws from it is not the masturbatory fantasy of some “driver training” or “active safety” advocate. This fantasy is his and his alone.

Having said all that, there is some indication that advanced driver training played a role in this scenario, even if it did originate in the author’s fertile mind. After all, weren’t we told that he immediately recognized that “at his current speed the right lane was unreachable”?  Now that’s a skill you just can’t get from a basic drivers ed course.

In response to Jack Baruth’s editorial, Mike Stone writes:

I have been making the same 60-mile round trip commute for many years, my route consisting of rural 2 lane roads and expressways. During the course of every winter, regular as clockwork, I see 5 to 10 vehicles that have run off the road in icy, snowy or wet conditions. Some of these are clearly a result of excessive speed but on two occasions, I have been behind a vehicle that was travelling at or below a safe speed when it simply lost control. What could cause such a thing? A clue lies in a well-documented statistic that 93% of all traffic accidents are the result of human error.

Although cars have been with us for more than 100 years, driving a motor vehicle is an inherently foreign environment because the human brain was not designed to travel faster than running speed. Our “fight or flight” mechanisms become overloaded in panic situations when behind the wheel because we are not equipped to handle the rapidity of events. The result is often a situation where the brain is unable to process the inputs and send the appropriate messages to the body quickly enough and we “freeze” or we make an instinctive, possibly inappropriate, response.

The “brain freeze” condition is well known in military organizations where long periods of boredom can be punctuated by short spells of terror. The counter is to instil a series of automated responses (conditioned reflexes) so that individuals are able to respond appropriately to a given threat. The New York Police Department has 36,000 officers and in 2006, the force encountered 60 instances where officers had to fire their weapons in response to a threat.¹ This means that each officer has a 1 in 600 chance that he/she will be involved in a shooting incident in a given year. Despite this low probability, officers undergo regular firearms and threat response training in order to reinforce their conditioned reflexes and override brain freezing. Airline pilots carry out the same type of conditioned reflex training to meet emergencies that most will likely never encounter in their entire careers.

Driving a motor vehicle has some similar characteristics to the high-risk professions noted above—long periods of boredom and mundane tasks occasionally punctuated by short periods of unexpected stress. Yet the training that most drivers receive tends to concentrate on the mundane, mechanical aspects of operating a vehicle and we develop conditioned reflexes that may be completely inappropriate in emergencies.

In 2006, there were 250.8 million passenger vehicles² in the U.S. and 5.2 million³ were involved in a collision of some description. This means that each vehicle had a 1 in 48 chance of being in a collision—12 times more likely than a NY police officer had of firing his/her weapon! Viewed from this perspective, it seems almost reckless that the average driver can only count on brain freeze and possibly inappropriate conditioned reflexes to deal with unexpected or stressful situations.

Advanced driver training is designed in part to instil revisions to our conditioned reflexes under certain conditions so that we are better able to handle emergencies and to refine our typical driving behaviours. A note of clarification here, advanced driver training in this context is limited to defensive driving and winter driving courses. I specifically exclude autocross, high-performance and track courses because the skills learned have almost no application to everyday driving.

Advanced driving courses teach situational avoidance and embed the continual, almost subconscious use of “what if” scenarios while driving. A driver has the opportunity to “feel” the dynamics of a vehicle in a controlled environment. How does a vehicle behave just before it loses adhesion with the road and how is adhesion restored? What does it feel like when two wheels on the same side leave the road or lose their grip? It is infinitely better to answer these questions in the safety of a course environment than on a public road. Once these situations have been experienced, the driving input corrections readily become conditioned reflexes and much of the potential for panic is removed if/when they occur in real world driving.

There is a suggestion that driver training can lead to overconfidence and more aggressive driving. This abstract is difficult to prove or disprove although a countervailing argument would be that a naturally aggressive driver who attends a course might simply become a more knowledgeable aggressive driver.

If airline pilots invest hundreds of hours training to handle a statistically unlikely situation, it is plain common sense for the average driver to invest a relatively short time preparing for a distinct possibility.

It’s a bright Thursday morning on Interstate 95. I’m hammering my black Phaeton down the left lane at an indicated one hundred and twenty-three miles per hour. In the back seat, my brother and sister-in-law are sound asleep. Next to me, my wife idly flips through the pages of a month-old magazine. “I think the Wilderness Lodge is the worst hotel at Disney… of the acceptable ones, you know,” she says. Before I can respond I notice that we’re closing in on what looks like a high-speed multiple-car freeway accident. In progress.

There are five lanes. The middle three are occupied by a tractor-trailer which is slewing sideways in true action-movie fashion. The right lane is unreachable at my current closing speed, so I dismiss it. The left lane and most of the shoulder is filled with cars swerving left and right before colliding into the mass of stopped traffic. The “pop-pop-pop” of the hits arrive through the double-pane glass just a moment after I see each set of rear wheels leave the ground upon impact.

With a solid shove of the left foot, I’ve engaged the ABS and there’s a scream from behind me as my sister-in-law is simultaneously awoken by the sudden deceleration and choked by her safety belt. Down to 70mph or so, foot off the brake, and now we’re in the thick of things. I choose to drop two wheels off the left shoulder and thread the gap. There’s a solid SLAM that fills the cabin as the tractor-trailer finally makes contact with something.

A blue Buick LeSabre ejects itself from the mess backwards and crosses our path in an eyeblink. The driver’s mouth is open; his hands are off the wheel. In a flash he’s upside-down and tumbling across the grassy median. Back on the throttle to lift the nose, climb the shoulder. I pick up the phone to call 911 and report what’s just happened.

This incident was the masturbatory fantasy of every “driver training” and “active safety” advocate: a mildly skilled vehicle operator avoids a deadly accident in a [conveniently European] sedan while SUVs drive mindlessly into a steaming pile. A couple of problems with the scenario…

First, my car, passengers, and cargo totaled well over 6000 pounds. The only inputs I applied were hard braking and slow steering. I could have done the same thing in an Escalade. The second is that it wasn’t skill that got me through; it was luck. I happened to find the empty spot, but that spot wasn’t empty a moment before and it wasn’t empty a moment afterwards. Only timing and the hand of Chance/Fate/insert your chosen Deity saved me from hitting stopped cars at seventy miles per hour. Had I closed my eyes and slammed the brakes, I might have made it through just as well.

There is no convincing evidence that skill-based driver training reduces automotive-related fatalities in this or any other country. While a recent IIHS study claims that mandatory ESC will reduce fatalities, the biggest benefit appears to come from reducing the risk of oscillation-based rollovers. Put it another way: if the reaction of every driver in this country to a potential accident were to simply stand on the brakes and prepare for impact, fatalities might well be reduced.

The Active Steering now available in BMW and Audi products recognizes this. When a panicky driver saws at the wheel, Active Steering drastically reduces the size of the input, thus ensuring that the car hits nose-first rather than with a far less well-protected door or B-pillar. Nor is this technology aimed exclusively at bumbling untrained Americans; the oh-so-superior European market apparently orders it as often as we do.

No amount of stricter licensing, pre-license training, or post-license testing can adequately prepare the average person for the wide variety of dangerous situations he or she is likely to face in a lifetime of driving, nor can a few open-lapping days or skidpad sessions significantly increase a driver’s readiness to cope with an on-road challenge which may happen years or decades afterwards.

If training doesn’t save lives, what does? Drive less, drive slower, drive sober, take the bus, ride the train. But if you must drive, don’t kid yourself that being a racer, autocrosser, or self-proclaimed “good driver” will save you. Had I been unlucky that sunny day in Florida, I had the comfort of knowing that I, and my family, would have met that impact in a 5200-pound, multiple-airbag, comprehensively crash-engineered premium automobile—precisely the type of car derided by others as a “rolling padded cell.”

When your family’s life in on the line, it won’t be the reflexes of the moment that decide who lives and dies. Instead, it will be that dimly remembered moment of purchase, months or years previous.

[Ed.'s Note: If you disagree with Mr. Baruth's views, we extend to you an invitation for a counterpoint editorial. Please keep it to fewer than 800 words and keep it professional. If we receive more than one article, we will condense the most salient points into one article. Send it to editttac@gmail.com, sil vous plait. Carry on.]

Ah, the first snow of the year.  The frozen blanket transforms even the ugliest landscapes into crystalline sanctuaries. Crisp air fills the lungs and the inevitable homey smell of a wood fire tells of a distant warming hearth. Earth’s annual metamorphosis triggers a few moments when we get to live a dream stolen from the cover of an old December issue Saturday Evening Post. But for too many, this winter wonderland fantasy is abruptly cut short by the sickening sound of exploding metal, glass and plastic, because the first snow of winter also invites a rash of traffic accidents.

I spent ten winters in northern Utah. Every year, highways ground to a halt from hundreds of traffic accidents on the first day that snow accumulated on road surfaces. I thought, these are Utahans, they should know how to drive on snow. What’s the deal?

Driving on snow and ice requires a recalibration of our timing. By the end of the summer, we don’t think about how long it’s going to take us to brake for an upcoming stop sign on naked pavement; we feel it. Our ingrained habits betray us when water, snow and ice rudely come between us and the road surface. We need practice.

Coming from Texas, I feel disadvantaged driving through white-capped Wasatch Mountains. As George Strait crooned, there’s no Snow in San Antonio. So at the first accumulation of snow, I hop into my old Camry and head for empty parking lots and sparsely traveled back roads for a little automotive me-time.

With no other cars around, I experiment to find out how fast I can corner and stop. I also test to see how steep a road I can safely climb or descend. I re-learn how to finesse both brake and throttle. Back in traffic I’m rightly adjusted to slow-up and allow for proper intervals.

Each year, I repeat this practice ritual at first snow fall. it’s kept me accident-free through rough Rocky Mountain winters.

But despite the drill, getting caught in a blizzard in my trusty old front-wheel drive Toyota still took its toll. I vividly remember white knuckling my way through several snow storms on the road home from grandmother’s house (literally) with my wife and small kids, as I struggled to keep the car on the road and avoid hitting or being hit by other drivers. While the greatest winter driving safety device is the lump of fat and knot of neurons floating between a driver’s ears, equipment also plays a role.

First and foremost are the right tires. On snow and ice, a good pair of snow tires can make even the worst rear wheel-drive (RWD) car a significantly more competent machine. Conversely, the most advanced all wheel-drive systems are rendered impotent with summer meats or worn treads.

Traction control (TC) has emerged as a great equalizer for RWD cars. TC uses either the Anti-lock Brake System or electronically controlled clutches to transfer engine torque to the wheel with the best traction. Last winter I drove a convertible Mustang (top up) through a Chicago snow storm. Despite the superabundance of torque, the pony car’s rear-end stayed safely behind me at all times, without so much as a slip or stall. With the TC off, I turned enough doughnuts to feed the entire Chicago PD.

It would seem that AWD or four-wheel drive cars and trucks are less safe than FWD. Very often we see that the first drivers to slide off the road when the weather turns bad are at the wheel of these “super capable” cars and trucks. But overconfidence is a form of driver error, not equipment failure.

This is an important distinction. When Jack Frost catches a cold, technically the best-equipped cars and truck for safely driving are AWD and 4WDs with appropriate tires.

In low-friction environments, being able to put power to all four wheels can provide up to four times greater traction while acceleration or pulling through a corner over a RWD or FWD car without traction control. To an extent, 4WDs also help in braking due to increased power train drag that allows drivers to moderate their speed without hitting the brakes.

On the down side, these systems add weight and neither improves braking or cornering (except while accelerating). And that’s where lame brain drivers get in trouble. The ability to accelerate on the slippery stuff seems to drain IQ points from drivers.

And so we come full circle. While equipment can help aid drivers, the greatest factor is the man or woman gripping the steering wheel. I love the change in seasons and look forward to winter sports, or just messing around in the snow. But when it gets icy and dicey, nothing beats proper snow tires steered by a calm, practiced, alert and sensible driver.

I live in a hilly area of high-crowned, barely two-lane back roads. There are no center lines, lots of blind corners, hills and crests; and not much traffic. You could say it’s an enthusiast's paradise. But then… stupid drivers. It happened to me last week, for the third time in a year. A driver without the slightest situational awareness put me into a ditch, leaving me yelping moronically and bleating my horn while they sped off. This has got to stop.

In the last couple of years, the four o'clock rush has provided a perfect illustration of vehicular inattentiveness. That’s when the contractors and service guys in vans and pickups and the boys in the local U.S. Military Academy cadre jump in their big trucks and race home. Fortunately, I get to view the show from the opposite-direction traffic. It’s an inbound kamikaze squadron. Negotiating our only four-lane, I can almost hear Darrell Waltrip: “Lookit, lookit, they’re three wide into the corner and somebody’s gonna wreck!”

On the back road shortcuts, I meet guys in compact cars coming the other way. A simple, mutual flick of the steering wheel to move aside and we're by each other. But the pickup-and-SUV crowd hews to the crown of the road.  It’s move off the road or be killed.

Folks, I'm not talkin' Alzheimered grandmothers or soccer moms on cell phones. These are NASCAR dads with toolboxes in back who imagine that on a good day they could give Junior a run for his money. And yet they’re obviously unable to put their enormous right front fender any closer to the edge of the road because they haven't the faintest idea how much clearance is available.

To me, this lack of spatial awareness (SA) is the clearest sign of a national diminution of driving skills. And yet America’s driving instruction (and tests) still teaches new motorists that their safety depends on maintaining a “safe margin of distance”– rather than focusing on SA and car control. That’s two kinds of stupid.

Once upon a time, positioning skills– rather than simple speed– were the mark of an excellent driver. Ken Purdy’s classic book Kings of the Road contains a wonderful chapter about the Italian racecar driver Tazio Nuvolari. Though I’m working from 40-year-ago memory here, the author relates how Nuvolari accepted a dare to drive through an ancient stone arch. The passage provided his monoposto Alfa-Romeo with two inches of clearance on each side.  Nuvolari did it at a triple-digit speed. With ease.

In Germany, Autobahn-repair rubber cones sometimes funnel two lanes into a space earlier taken by one. Everybody slows, positions and keeps moving. In New York, Michigan or California, traffic comes to a standstill whenever they cut the flow down to a single-lane merge, since nobody could deal with such proximity. I always wonder what Europe must be like for the American rental-car drivers who can’t make it down their small-town streets without clipping side mirrors.

It’s hard to know which came first: American cars without enough road feel for proper positioning or American drivers’ lack of interest in cars with enough road feel for proper positioning (never mind cornering). In any case, the result is truly frightening. 

I’m an EMS volunteer. Our ambulances can’t even use our town’s quite ordinary Main Street when we’re in a hurry; we’re too likely to come up against somebody in an SUV who has to fearfully get out of our way and inch past, even with a foot of clearance on either side.

At the risk of offending someone with the truth, it’s  often a woman who has no more business driving a 6,000-pound truck with fingertip light power steering than she does piloting a Lear. But she likes the visibility and her husband insists. (My own doctor’s wife tells me that she loathes her towering Toyota Land Cruiser, but her better half feels better knowing his wife is encased in so much metal.)

If you don’t count my time aboard a Farmall tractor, I learned to drive in 1952, and the olden days were a time when you worked on your own skills and pretty much assumed everybody else on the road was reasonably competent.   These days, I spend far too much of my driving time looking out for the other guy– whether it’s the duallie Ram half in my lane, the Expedition bearing down unchecked in my rear-view mirror at the stoplight, the woman who looked left and right and then pulled out 20 feet in front of me awhile ago (in EMS, we call them “looked but didn’t see” crashes) or somebody inexplicably crossing from their lane into opposite-direction traffic.

Drunk? Distracted? Simply lost control? We’ve seen ‘em all, and they’re usually fatal for somebody. All too often the other guy,

I’ve said it before, I’ll say it again: the only realistic hope for increasing public safety on our roads is the automated car. Personally, I can think of nothing worse than surrendering control of my vehicle to a microchip. But then, like you, I’m not the problem.

Each year, automobiles kill more people than malnutrition, war and stomach cancer. That’s not including drivers and passengers. Obviously, the automobile – pedestrian toll is greatest in developing nations, where road safety is a strictly Darwinian affair. But the industrial world’s pedestrian “ksi” (killed or seriously injured) statistics are also pretty grim. Legislators in Europe, Japan and Korea have decided to take action. They’ve all developed legislative initiatives to force car makers to introduce new technology for reducing pedestrian deaths and injuries. America has no plans to get with the program. Should it?

The stats say yes. Over four thousand American pedestrians are killed in accidents with motor vehicles each year; some seventy thousand are injured. That's roughly eleven percent of all traffic fatalities. The percentage is on the rise. For obvious reasons, children and old people are the most likely to get in harms way. Children account for roughly 10 percent of all pedestrian deaths; that’s about 400 per year in the U.S. alone.

While American safety campaigners focus on law enforcement and driver training (good luck with that), the European Union has launched a technology-based campaign. By 2015, the EU demands that automakers’ products make collisions survivable when they occur between a pedestrian and a car moving at 40kph (24.9 mph). It’s a lofty goal that would save thousands of lives– that depends entirely on technology. 

The EU would like to see brake assist technology as a standard feature in all vehicles. When a computer senses that a driver is using the brakes too hesitantly, the system increases brake force. Experts claim that Brake Assist decreases the number of pedestrian accidents by about five percent. They’d also like to see widespread use of radar or infrared-sensor-based collision avoidance systems. From there, the changes become more radical, and obvious.

To comply with the EU requirements, automakers are already adapting the design of their cars’ fronts— ground zero for pedestrian fatalities. Obviously, a smooth, soft front end is the way forward. That's why the styling of many European cars (e.g. Jaguar’s new XK) has already been changed, with higher, more easily deformable hoods. Much can be achieved by attention to details, within a comprehensive testing procedure.

To quell disquiet over post-accident repair, the U.K. insurance industry's Thatcham Institute recently tested various models to assess the expense of restoring deformed hoods. After a 10kph impact, they found that most SUVs incurred expensive body damage (in addition to having poor pedestrian ratings). In contrast, the Toyota (Euro-Corolla) Auris was both safer for pedestrians and relatively cheap to repair.

European automakers are already taking the next step: hoods with active safety devices that “pop up” the hood to reduce the severity of an impact with a pedestrian's head. Euro-NCAP crash tests have awarded the new Citroen C6 and Jaguar XK four out of five stars for pedestrian protection. Both models were the first to be equipped with “active hoods.” Sweden's Autoliv AB is developing hood airbags to make even inherently dangerous SUVs more pedestrian-friendly.

I recently attended the CTI Car Training Institute’s 2007 Pedestrian Protection Forum at Sindelfingen. It was quite touching to see nerdy auto engineers stand up and say things like "we have the technology, so let's get up off our backsides and do what we can to stop this killing of people.” U.S. officials were noticeably less keen.

In a phone interview, a NHTSA (National Highway Traffic Safety Administration) spokesman told me that America’s vehicle mix-– more trucks and SUVs— isn’t as conducive to pedestrian-friendly technology as cars in the Eurozone. NHTSA research suggests that there are unexplored trade-offs involved. “You can make a car front better for children, but then it may get worse for adults.” Why not publish pedestrian-safety ratings and let the consumer decide? “Again, we don't think you can find a one-size-fits-all solution”.

According to Prof. Florian Kramer at Germany's Dresden Technical University, those are weak arguments. “Of course it is difficult, but in constructing cars, everything is a compromise”, he says. “The point is, there is very much room for improving the pedestrian-safety of cars”. Kramer continued: “Actually, our European NCAP system was inspired by the U.S., and it's difficult to understand why the U.S. is not following up on their own idea, by including pedestrian protection.”

While American pedestrians will benefit from European action on pedestrian safety (given international trade), NHTSA’s reluctance to grasp the nettle and set standards for automakers doing business in the U.S. is likely to backfire in the long term. As was the case with fuel economy innovations, it's no good to pass the ball to foreign competitors if you lose your ability to compete technologically. And anyway: if plane crashes caused the death of 400 children each year, would legislators hesitate to enforce stricter regulations on the airline industry?