The Gravity of Safety

As my piece of my son’s never-ending Mazda Miata story draws to a close I’d like to share a couple of things that have occurred to me along the way.

1st – I really like our household name for the car much better: the Mazda Piñata. Sure, tongue in cheek and maybe slightly irreverent, but due to the mismatched, multi-hued body panels, it captures the essence of this particular car much more accurately.

2nd -  Although this car is now approaching 25 years old and is as simple as a sandbox (honest, a great training vehicle for auto-wrenching!), the vehicles of the period were already showing legislative obesity.

My son is an all or nothing sort of guy, so he is now a veritable fount of technical data related to the Piñata and its peers of that period. It was based on his continual spewing of facts and figures that I got inspired to look at this weighty (pun fully intended) topic.

America’s love affair with cars has always been as fickle as the rest of our cultural pursuits. WWII GI’s coming back from service in England brought with them the memory of such classic British cars as Jaguars, Morgans and MGs. The 2-seat roadsters definitely had their appeal to returning GI’s, likely owing more to the pipedream of the blonde with blowing hair sitting next to them than the actual roadster.  Regardless of the reasoning, the interest was there so it wasn’t too long before dealerships here started importing and selling those same cars.

These cars were typically more pedestrian versions of factory race cars, so while they weren’t really equipped to do serious blacktop battle, casual club-sponsored racing developed around them. They came to be known as sports-cars. The term sports-car had no firm definition, but the cars all shared a few major attributes. They were small, low to the ground, built to be very light for quick handling, but were often otherwise remarkably low-tech. And so America starting driving these gnat sized cars into the new post-war boom.

Americans are notorious for wanting too much of a good thing. Going back to the Ford Model T many barns across the country were filled with disassembled engines and young men scratching their heads figuring how to get more power. After Oldsmobile and Cadillac launched their overhead valve V-8’s in 1949, veterans with government-issue mechanical training were souping these cars up along with the familiar Ford Flathead V-8.

The newer engine designs were already more powerful than their pre-war brethren, but they also responded so well to simple modifications that hot-rodding became a common term. Detroit, never remiss in capitalizing on a trend, saw opportunity and started developing factory hotrods. By the late '50's/early 60’s the factory horsepower wars were well underway. Stock-car racing and eyeball-flattening acceleration where taking the attention away from the little imported roadsters.

It was Washington DC that dropped the anchor. Largely as a result of scathing review of the auto industry's safety engineering by Ralph Nader in his book “Unsafe at any speed”, the Federal Motor Vehicle Safety Standards were implemented in 1967. This act was followed in 1968 by adopting auto emissions standards. By the early 1970's cars were impacted with reduced performance, increasing weight and drivability problems. Tiny imported sports cars were hit particularly hard. What were marginal engines before this legislation’s impact really couldn’t cut it now. The buying public noted the poor performance of post emissions sports-cars and moved on, preferring to enjoy the twilight of domestic performance in the last of the muscle cars. The little roadsters were left to die a slow, agonizing, 0-60 in one afternoon death.

The 1980’s saw technology start to develop in a way which made smaller engines and sporting vehicles viable again. There was a resurgence of interest in the roadsters too (Nostalgia? Antiestablishmentarianism? Wishful thinking about the blonde?), so it wasn’t long before a new generation of tiny topless imported 2-seaters were showing up at the party again.  The Miata arrived late in the trend. It debuted in 1989 and appeared to be a near plagiaristic visual copy of the early 1960’s Lotus Elan.

The Elan had been one of the premier giant slayers through the 1960’s. Light, nimble and quick, the Lotus was one of those cars that consistently won on the track and could throw a punch way out of its class. Mazda's choice to build an Elan clone proved very wise, as these little cars flooded the streets, often propelling 50-60 year-olds through mid-life with fond memories (the blonde factor?). 

The original Elan sat on an 84” wheelbase, had a 1.5 liter engine and produced 100HP, which allowed it to scoot 0-60 in about 7.1 seconds. The 1990 Miata sat on an 89” wheelbase, had a 1.6 liter engine that made 115 HP and clocked 0-60 in 8.1 seconds. So why the 1 second lag? Physics. The first generation Miata weighs around 2100 lbs. while the Elan was a 1500 pounder.

The original Elan couldn’t be sold today due to the lack of emissions and safety equipment all cars must wear. Any equipment weighs something; there is no free ride. So while small cars used to weigh in at 1500-1900lb, it isn’t unusual to see them scale at 2700-2900lb now. And with this weight comes slower handling, poorer economy and poorer acceleration than the same platform could deliver without the excess baggage.

Manufacturers continue to raise the bar on horsepower, handling, economy and structural safety. Cars today are very good and can outperform similar cars of the past in a big way, while still meeting legislative requirements. But this weight factor only makes me wonder what kind of a rocket an original Lotus Elan could be with a 252HP 2-liter Ford Ecoboost from a Focus underfoot. Makes my palms sweat to think about it. No blonde required.

© 2015 D.W. Williams

Driverless Cars-Part Deux

I and a church acquaintance were killing time in the coffee-shop (evangelical watering hole) last Sunday and happened to be discussing the driverless car concept. We considered sociological ramifications, dystopian outcomes and ultimately ended up solving the crisis in the Middle East. But early in the process, during the dystopian part, some thoughts were shared which I believe bear some consideration before we jump into our driverless vehicle with both feet.

I try not to watch much prime time TV; sometimes I succeed more than others.  But there is one show I go out of my way to not miss:  Person of Interest.  Lovingly known around our house as the “box show” because of the opening scene, it shows city streets crowded with pedestrians who have target acquisition boxes superimposed over them as they go about their business, all seemingly unaware that they are being tracked and monitored.

The show features two perhaps sentient artificial intelligence computers (never seen, always implied) which utilize human agents to do their bidding. Both were originally developed at the request of the federal government for purposes of tracking and locating “Persons of Interest” for counter-terrorism responses.  The original machine, Northern Lights, was programmed to keep people safe through this mechanism and had stop-gaps built into its programming to keep it from “evolving” into other directives.

The second, Samaritan, having had its software penned by a different author, has no such inhibitions and now only acts in its own self-interest, masterfully hiding its motives and carnage under the guise of interventions for the greater good. Long and short, a mechanism built to protect the public ends up being used against it.

Now that I’ve belabored the background, allow me to circle back around to the point of our hazelnut-cream laden dystopian discussion. We talked about accident avoidance, and more specifically, how that could play out in a world of driverless cars.

In our new Mockingjay world, two cars approach on an undivided highway. Car number one, its optical sensor on front obscured by squashed bug, fails to respond to a piece of demolition debris in the road and hits it, blowing the left front tire. The computer tries to respond, but the steering corrections cause the car to slide into the oncoming path of car number two due to the rain-soaked pavement.

The satellite network that ties all this technology together for routing purposes is monitored by a supercomputer that sorts out the data for driverless cars. This computer has received data via seat-sensors that car number one has four occupants, whereas the car minding its own business has only one. The computer runs its algorithm and determines based on speed that if they collide head-on, all five people will likely lose their lives, so in the name of accident avoidance it has to make a determination. Which of the cars does it hurl off the roadbed and into an area wooded with two-foot diameter oak trees?  Solve for X.

The stuff of an opening scene to a science fiction thriller? Maybe. But remember that history is riddled with stories of people giving up social freedoms, only later to have these same concessions turn dark and then be used against them.

Looking forward to my next caffeine laden revelation…

© 2015 D.W. Williams

The Municipal Joys of Car Ownership

In December of last year, my oldest boy purchased a fairly ratty Mazda Miata for himself. I had explained the titling and sales tax part of the purchase process, so he wasn’t shaken by those things or the DMV visit at the time. The proof of insurance and property tax receipt that Missouri makes you produce to license a vehicle weren’t relevant then because we weren’t licensing it yet. We had some wrench-time ahead of us because the car didn’t run. And so he contented himself with knowing that he had a project in the driveway and a title in his name.

Around the first of February, when we received our property tax declarations, I realized that:

      A.      He would need to declare his car.

      B.      He had never done this, didn’t have an account in the county tax system and would need a waiver to tag the car.

Unfortunately, in our county there is no online mechanism to set up a tax account, so the only way to get it done is a personal visit to the county courthouse. We scheduled a day to go, looking forward to the quality male-bonding time.

On the morning we slotted for this adventure, I was hemming and hawing about where to go. You see, unlike many counties, ours has two separate courthouses, one downtown and one in an adjacent community.  I thought back to my brush with jury duty at the downtown branch and recalled a less-than-stellar experience locating parking. 

An online search to locate available courthouse parking landed me on Yelp’s website, and after being sidetracked into reading a few individual reviews likening the downtown tax division experience to visiting another dimension, being thrown into a lake of fire, a run through the Inquisition’s dungeons and other equally colorful similes, I thought we’d visit the other one.

The day we went, the #2 courthouse’s T-1 line was down, and with it their network. The clerks were franticly faxing paper hard-copies to the downtown courthouse for entry and waiting on faxed responses. In spite of these technical issues the process was quick and painless, only consuming three unrecoverable hours from each of our lives. 

But the experience for the kid was priceless.  Where to start…

The 1” bulletproof Lexan with the 1960’s bullet shaped brushed-stainless George Jetson intercoms punched through it? Maybe the waiting line reception-guy dancing around like he was peddling circus sideshow tickets and shouting back and forth to his supervisor about how he was going to get sick and go home early? “You can’t tell me I can’t get sick. It’s my sick-time. I can get sick if I want to”?  He made good on the promise later.

 Adding to the carnival-like atmosphere was the potpourri of humanity in line, each owning a unique semi-intelligible dialect. If I concentrated hard on the conversations, I could almost understand the gist of what was said. Maybe county tax-departments are the Ellis Islands of the 21^st century.

About an hour after we had turned in the info and reconciled ourselves to the wait, the clerk that the circus-barker had assigned left for her lunch-break. I approached another window to make sure they still had someone working on this account. We’d heard nothing indicating that it was done, or even still in process. This other clerk was preoccupied and unaware of my approach.  

I spoke, but without his headset and the miracle of the Jetson intercom he was unable to hear me through his 1” Lexan, so I spoke through the paper-slot underneath the window. He jarred to attention and looked positively stricken, reacting as if he’d never heard English before. He glanced hopefully to his peers but they offered no help. After gathering his composure, he reluctantly slid on the Brittany Spears headset as if he was expecting an electrical shock. He told me he would have to defer to the floor supervisor, slipped the headset back off and went back to his quiet place.

Over the next 1½ hours we were offered three assurances it would “only be a few more minutes.”  Before he became sick, the circus-barker had started telling people as they walked in, “They’ve been here foreeeeever” (gesturing in our direction). And so we were. I guess he was cautioning these folks not to board the USS Titanic… His own small philanthropic contribution.

In spite of the surreal experience, we eventually succeeded and left with a tax-waiver in hand and assurances that the account was set up.  But I’m really looking forward to my son receiving 2-tax bills on 2-separate accounts for the same car.

Mass transit anyone?

© 2015 D.W. Williams

Driverless cars

On February 11, 2015 the UK committed to development of driverless car technology in a big way. Outside of the O2 stadium in London, 4 driverless-car prototypes were unveiled which will actually be milling around on public streets. For its part, the Department for Transport committed $29M (US) to the development of 4 centers to accommodate the R&D. British Business Secretary Vince Cable estimated that the driverless car industry will be worth $1.4 Trillion (US) by 2025. Based on their financial commitment, the British government is interested in carving out their share of the mother-load.

On this side of the puddle (it had been a pond, but the world keeps getting smaller), we are seeing that players such as Chevrolet and Mercedes-Benz are jumping into the driverless-technology fray. No great stretch as some cars here have already been parking themselves. For its part, Google jumped in with both feet about 3 years back and started developing a driverless system called Google Chauffeur. Likely part of their ongoing commitment to incrementally take over the world.

In other news, while cruising through the career sections of various auto manufacturer’s websites recently my eye was caught by a position Ford Motor Company is trying to fill. The positions title? Infotainment System Engineer.

So, my prognosis is as follows: Twenty years from now, your basic young/urban professional awakens to an egg frying itself on the range and toast already on the plate, lightly buttered. After downing his automated repast and chasing it down with his equally automated frappalatté-da (the machine did get his name right!), he springs out the door with his cellular phone/PDA/tablet in hand and jumps into his electric driverless-car. Although it is already late November, the car is warm. Having sensed the owner had finished his breakfast, it turned on its heater 45 minutes earlier. After a brief series of voice-recognition commands, the car boots-up and unplugs itself from it modular charging dock. Putting his heated cup into its powered receptacle and docking his cellular PDA/tablet thingy into an i-Pod’ish slot on the carnival-ride restraint bar in front of him, he proceeds to watch the morning news and crunches his PowerPoint slides while the car quietly and efficiently takes him to work.

The plus side? The traffic segment on the news is gone… The once obligatory attractive traffic-girl has segued into recording on-demand integration-app reviews and can be watched on an auxiliary screen on the dash. The apps may be downloaded real-time via the cars’ built-in 40G data-connection with the purchase costs being automatically appended to the car-lease.

I am conflicted.

Based on some of the driving behaviors I’ve seen recently, I’d swear some cars were already driverless. The operators were still behind the wheel though, but so enraptured in their smart-phone that they were oblivious to the traffic around them.  And so it appears that there is indeed safety to be had, deaths to avert and additional “productivity” to be gained by this automotive technological onslaught.

So is it irony or insanity that allows us to say “damn the torpedoes, full speed ahead!” and develop even more technology to avert the looming disaster that developing technology has caused us in the first place? Have to keep that ball rolling I guess.

                                                                                                                                                               © 2015 D.W. Williams

Bony Monroney

No, not misspelled, although I can hear those of you who are familiar with post doo-wop oldies start to hum in the background as I type. Ok, let’s back up. Ever wonder where the now ubiquitous new-car window stickers came from? Was it always called just a window sticker? Just why do we need all that information anyway?

Well, hold on for the ride as we venture into government oversight 101. It may get a little bumpy.

Like many (if not all) pieces of federal legislation it started because folks with financial interest lobbied for a change. Way back in 1955 the senate’s Interstate and Foreign Commerce Committee was tasked to examine automobile manufacturer’s pricing practices. It seems that various dealerships were grieved and vocal about manufacturer’s lack of pricing disclosure, and alleged that manufacturers were being abusive with their franchising policies, giving preferential treatment to some dealerships and forcing others into red-ink. And so the Interstate and Foreign Commerce committee underwent political mitosis and formed another in its likeness, the Automobile Marketing Practices subcommittee.

Like most issues that fall under federal scrutiny the resulting legislation may not have been what was originally sought. While dealerships did get their day in court, literally and figuratively, they also got the camera turned on them. Typically in Washington, once allegations start getting slung around everyone is invited to the food-fight.

On the retail end of marketing, it had become common practice that more inscrutable dealerships would fudge sale prices up by including varieties of erroneous charges. These artificial costs allowed these dealerships to appear to either mark the sale down or offer more for your trade-in, both of which can look very attractive to a retail customer. Dealerships that were forthright and worked off of actual margin couldn't compete.

Ironic, as the actual final cost would be about the same either way.

As a result of these concerns being tabled, motioned and seconded, a subcommittee senator from Oklahoma named Almer Monroney drafted and sponsored a new bill in 1958. The bill required that auto manufacturers attach a price-sticker to their product which included suggested retail pricing and the itemized cost of options and transportation. This would, it was believed, level the playing field for consumers so that they could really see what their money bought and dealerships couldn't hide behind artificial trade values. A two-bird, one-stone solution. Monroney’s bill passed, and in January of 1959 the American public started seeing the now infamous window sticker, originally known as the Monroney sticker in honor of its founding father.

Legislation can only address what it can foresee, and eventually OE’s and dealers did the financial shell-game and started working around these restrictions with varying tiered dealer-refunds, which we now call holdback. The net outcome is that once again nothing to do with pricing is as it appears, so with most domestic cars if you get fabulous “at invoice" retail pricing, you can rest assured that there are still several hundred, if not several thousand dollars left on the table.

So the Monroney sticker eventually evolved and assumed different, yet equally irrelevant disclosures such as average fuel economy and estimated annual operating cost. And that my friend is the condensed version of Almer Monroney and his ever-present window sticker.

© 2014 D.W. Williams

Maiden Voyage

My most recent fleet gig was managing the rolling stock of a regional natural gas utility. It had a history of being spun off, sold and absorbed by several owners in rapid succession before I showed up with my notepad and camera. Field management was gun-shy, and justifiably so. Fleet, when it existed at all, had been only a disembodied voice on the end of the phone. No face-time, no visits, no return calls and apparently no responsiveness. So when I first came onboard I was viewed with suspicion.

Many I met with were not only surprised I was out and about and meeting with them, but to a man they told how they had tried to get things done through prior management, but broken trucks stayed broken and mismatched equipment was never changed-out. Most of them had given up and took on the responsibility themselves. As a result, every supervisor had developed the habit of pigeon-holing trucks and equipment “just in case” a breakage occurred. Only half of the spares ran.

Change occurred as an evolution, not revolution. I developed programs to cull out the bad, update the old, maintain the existing, and eliminate the surplus equipment. When the inventory stabilized cash flow was significantly down and a 685 unit fleet was over 100 units lighter. But probably the biggest change the company folks noted was that when they spoke, someone listened. It was only after I’d heard “Thanks for listening” several times that I had an epiphany about the flaws of traditional/established fleet departments. They assume and presume. They rely only on known patterns, history and spreadsheets; they choose to not be proactive and they cause themselves a lot of harm though this choice.

Don’t misunderstand. When it comes to specific equipment lifecycle costing, past performance is still the best predictor of future success. Maintenance records, capital history and category spend all have their place as part of the fleet operations equation. But they are only part. Fleet management should be staying in front of evolving work and operational need, not simply reacting to it with tab-A-into-slot-A responses.  

I was lucky to a great degree. What I inherited was only fairly vague financials and a bad taste left in the collective workforce mouth.  I didn’t assume the baggage of systems already in place or prejudice against new processes.  I wasn’t battling “we’ve always done it that way”, so I had every opportunity and no choice other than to jump in with both feet and get something built.

And so to the point of this ramble. If you operate a fleet I would encourage you to keep historical information historical. It is information, not dogma. Your operators have needs and concerns that are constantly changing, so unless you can change with them, you become the quagmire they get stuck in. Fleet management offers enough challenge without making more along the way.

© 2014 D.W. Williams

Our Shiftless Society

I still remember the first time I watched it. It was approaching midnight on a late August evening, and I was a passenger on a two-birds-with-one-stone trip to Minnesota. I was onboard a very old Freightliner cab-over fleet-truck, sitting on a barely-there bench seat, hugging the doghouse. The Freightshaker had been made into a potato hauler by having the frame stretched and a self-unloading bed installed.

I don’t recall how many shifts I watched as we jolted along abandoned highway in North Dakota that cool night, but they were all double-clutched, smooth as glass and accompanied by the bellow of an 8V Detroit through a straight-pipe behind my right ear. He was a second cousin and had a hard lifestyle, but the man was an artist with that Roadranger. Now there are videos of the art-form on Youtube, so you can spare your back and your hearing if you want to learn about it.

Through high school and college we all played with cars. I honestly didn’t know anyone who couldn’t stir their own gears. The hotrodders among us still preferred a stick. The automatics were getting better and faster, but a sharp hand on the end of a Hurst T-handle could bang gears so fast you’d swear it was an automatic, and the sticks seemed quicker. That may have only been perception, but in, errr-ummm, street racing, perception is half the battle.

Into my Autocrossing days, stick shifts once again reigned supreme. On the track the stick allowed the car to respond instantly to your throttle foot. There was no lag; you thought it, and it happened. It helped the melding of man and machine. The stick-shift was also a must in the tow vehicle. While even then an automatic could fail less frequently than a clutch, a burnt clutch was a whole lot easier and cheaper to repair:   $125 and 3 hours under the truck in the driveway.

As I became seriously involved in business transportation, I started becoming aware of how few light-duty drivers really could grasp the stick-shift (pun fully intended). Not a formal survey by any stretch, but it seemed out of every 100 operators 20-30 could shift their own gears in a pinch, but of them only 15 seemed proficient enough that I would trust them daily with a stick.

In a light duty fleet, stick-shifts are anathema to dependability and trends are heading that way in heavy trucks. Every fleet manager understands the repair bills and downtime he is committing to if he deploys stick-shifts. I eventually saw the stick-shift drop off of our preferred manufacturer’s available options list about 2008-2009.

The domestic manufacturers toyed with continuously variable transmissions (CVTs) for a while, but the American buying public avoided them like the plague. Buyers couldn’t “feel” shifts like they had for years.

Today even pickups have a button on the gear-stalk that firms up the shifts and raises the shift-point. Manufacturers call this a “tow” setting, but as the same technology is turning up in cars as a performance setting, it sort of throws a bone to old-school hotrodders. These automatics have higher power-input ratings and more gears than they’ve ever had before. They are more efficient, longer lasting and offer better performance and economy than ever in history.

We joke in my neighborhood that you don’t need an alarm on a car with a stick. You can even leave the keys in it, because no one knows how to drive it anyway.

My son just bought his first car with his own money, using his own legwork. A 1991 Mazda Miata. It has a 5-speed stick.

© 2014 D.W. Williams