At least, that seems to be the safest route, if some amazing test results from a study into teen driving and accident prevention are any indication.

The test involved an in-vehicle data recorder (IVDR) system that monitors unsafe driving events, such as sharp turns, heavy acceleration and abrupt braking. Originally developed by GreenRoad, a San Francisco firm that specializes in trucker safety, the system takes this information and "grades" the driver. Red, yellow and green lights inform drivers how well they are driving at any given time.

The system sounds pretty simplistic, but the data suggests something remarkable. In those cars with the system, dangerous driving events were cut in half.

Impressive, but we imagine angsty teens will still find some way to complain about "the man" and mom and dad's snooping. Fortunately, there's an app for that. The system is accelerometer-based, and the software could easily make the jump over to smartphones, said Swedish engineer Per-Olof Svnesk in an article at New Scientist. You're already secretly looking at your kid's cellphone anyway, parents, so why not install a safety app in there while you're at it? They may even think it's cool, so no snooping necessary. [New Scientist]

And half think it should have the same penalty as drunk driving. Steeeep.

What's fascinating is that while 80 percent think phones should be a no-no, they deem it kosher if you're going hands-free. Newsflash, morons, a bunch of studies show it's just as distracting if you're using a Bluetooth headset. It's the conversation that's distracting, not your hands being up near your head. Personally, I think we should also ban eating, drinking, using combs or makeup, overly talkative passengers, any kind of music, talk radio, GPS navigators, and small children from being in cars, period. Only then can we drive completely safely, since then we won't ever be distracted by anything ever again. [NYT]

If the hat determines the driver's condition to be risky, it relays a warning signal to a computer screen in the cab (and possibly cellphones as the image above illustrates) recommending rest. Apparently, trials of the hat are being credited with reducing fatalities for drivers at CRC Mining from 40 in 2007 to 27 in 2008. Now CRC is hoping that their technology can be made available to all drivers sometime in the near future. [Metro]

So is half the world absolutely insane or is this survey—done with just a 2,881 driver sample—inaccurate? It seems to me like an awfully high number, but knowing that everybody has a phone now, I'm not surprised. If true, this is something a bill won't fix. It seems more like an education matter. And with education I mean "if you text while driving you may end up dead, you idiot." [PR Newswire]

Several different teams have done research showing that texting while driving is at least as dangerous as drunk driving and significantly more dangerous than talking on the phone while driving. The most interesting conclusion found that someone texting while driving is about eight times more likely to cause an accident than someone not texting, while a driver with a blood alcohol percentage of 0.08%, the legal limit, is only four times more likely than a sober driver.

The bill would force each state's highway department to institute a ban on texting within two years, or lose 25% of their federal funding each year, which is enough to cripple a highway department. Some weren't thrilled, pointing out that nobody's figured a way to enforce this kind of law, but we'll have to see if the Senate passes the bill to find out if anyone has real objections. [NY Times]

Developed with the University of Tokyo, Nissan says that their new Forest AC air conditioning system "is designed to recreate the refreshing climate, fragrance and natural breezes of relaxing forest settings." How? Let's review:

• The system's Breezy Air feature actually creates a "natural breeze" effect by randomly changing the air volume through all vent outlets, according to external sunlight and external temperature. The system can change the air pattern in the breeze depending on which side of the car you are seated, increasing volume if you are seating on the sunny part or decreasing it if you are on the shade.

• The aroma control system is even more curious: The University of Tokyo's research team studied the effects of fragrances, air flow, and humidity in mental activity, concluding that two aromas can "alleviate boredom and stimulate the driver's brain": Borneol and leaf alcohol. According to Nissan, Borneol "combines a compound made from fragrant Kapur wood, lavender and other essential oils to promote calm and focus, while leaf alcohol is found in most plants and is thought to have a calming effect and reduce fatigue."

• Everything is combined with humidity control—which in theory keeps the car interior in perfect conditions—automatic outside and inside odor control—that will prove useful more than one time, I'm sure—and a plasmacluster ion generator... which may a) disintegrate you, b) teleport you to another place, c) "maintain cabin air quality, kill germs through strengthened bacteria deactivation and minimize odors clinging to the cabin air and interior surfaces," or d) all of the above.

I like option D, although right now I just want option B. [Autoblog via Ubergizmo]

Wait. What happened to West Pacheco? Why does it say I'm still on it?! And how did Google Street View know I loved the Colonel's delicious fried chicken?!

And now the Street View driver is helping me park, all while continuing to screw with my directions by saying I'm still cruising peacefully down West Pacheco.

Well, we're parked and ready for some finger lickin' goodness (and still "on" Pachero). Let's just hope no one actually uses Street View for, you know, legitimate directions—it's no wonder that people are "directed" of a cliff every now and again. [Google Street View - Thanks, Eric]

Image: timcaynes/Flickr

The simulation is simple. Students grasp the motion sensitive wheel in one hand, and a cell phone in the other. Then, just like in a real live driving situation, they fire off a blue shell before bounding over spongy mushroom jumps while a mustachioed plumber hurls bananas and high-pitched Italian-esque insults in their general direction.

See? Totally serious.

Now, silly as it sounds, this program apparently did educate the students about the dangers of driving in the Mushroom Kingdom while texting. "I ran into a lot of things and it was very stressful," said 13-year-old "it's-a me!" Alli O'Brian.

Good on her, and good on Eagle County, seriously, for educating these kids early on. As we saw here in Boston recently, texting's no joke. In fact, as Chen pointed out, it's getting pretty frickin' ridiculous.

[9 News - Thanks, Phil]

The thing comes loaded with a 6-axis motion unit for shaking your chair all over the place as well as blue LED illumination just for looking cool. You can customize your setup with various screens, and it all looks very expensive, as tends to be the case with things like this. But still, come on. Awesome. [X6 Simulator via Ubergizmo]

You have ridiculous cases like the Trolley driver rear ending another train because he was texting his girlfriend, and train conductors causing a 25-fatality crash because he was texting teenage boys telling them that they're "gonna run the locomotive."

There's two commonalities to these accidents. First is that texting while you're supposed to be paying attention and in charge of other people's lives is a bad idea. Second, guys seem to be intent on texting people, no matter how inappropriate the time, if it's going to get them laid.

But there's nothing better than an anecdotal account of how bad texting while driving is, courtesy of reader Trevor, who has been rear ended three times this year by people texting on their phones.

Anyways, I live in Idaho. And everyone who lives in this state FUCKING SUCKS at driving. The last thing we need is people using their cell phones simultaneously, but of course I see everyone from the 15 year old girls to 50 year old guys typing out emails on their Blackberries. It sucks ass to have to deal with these fucking morons on a daily basis.

Anyways, on to the first incidence of getting hit:
I was driving through stop and go traffic outside of a high school moment after they got out of school, and I am completely stopped when I see a brand new Hummer H2 coming up on my ass at ferocious speed. I knew I was going to get hit, and right before he made contact, I was able to discern a fucking cell phone in his hands through my rear view mirror. The officer on the scene estimated he hit me going roughly 30mph, and had not even applied the brakes before hitting me. Completely totaled my beloved Toyota Tacoma, and gave me a wicked case of whiplash. By the way it was a roughly 17 year old guy driving his parents Hummer to school. Spoiled prick...

Second time was just 6 months later in the winter. It was a touch icy on the roads and I was stopped to make a left turn onto a side street and I look in my rear view mirror (after the Hummer incident I have been made paranoid about being hit), and see a little Dodge Neon moving way too fast towards me and start sliding sideways right into the back of my new truck. I jumped out and asked if she was ok, and the first thing she says to me is "Oh my god, I'm so sorry. I was texting and didn't even see you there until it was too late." This time the damage wasn't too bad, but I ended up being without my vehicle for 2 weeks, during which I had a shitty little rental car, so it still was quite the inconvenience.

Third time was about 3 weeks ago and I'm still feeling sore from it. I was sitting at a stop light and a big Ford F-350 with a huge trailer full of lawn mowing equipment plowed into me at about 25mph, once again totalling my vehicle, and absolutely wrecking my back. I felt like I got hit my a freight train this time. I had my foot on the brake, and he made my car skid forward so hard that I pushed the car in front of me into the car in front of him. An eyewitness to the accident said that the man in the truck was using a phone when he hit me, and it was just verified to me the other day that his phone record shows that he sent a text message seconds before the accident occured. At least this guy was able to apply a little bit of brakes before making contact, but still, I got hit really hard. I'm going to have to see a chiropractor, and I now am searching for another vehicle.

So yeah. That's my record for getting hit. It really sucks. I can't quite say I would mind the banning of texting while driving after all of this as I'm 100% sure at least somebody has lost their life in an accident caused by texting while driving. Hell, I used to do it before I got the iPhone which is fucking impossible to do without looking, but after seeing how poorly most others handle it, I can definitely understand why people are wanting this kind of a ban.

I don't know what we need to do about this, and encoding restrictions on devices themselves to not allow texting while moving is not the solution. I don't know what is.

Thanks Trevor!

The idea is that teenagers are both bad drivers and stupid, so they are the most likely group to text while driving over the speed limit. This may be true! But is this the best solution? I mean, aren't there times where you'd want your kid to have access to their phone in the car? Like if they get into an accident? Or get kidnapped? Or need directions? Or any number of other situations? This system gives the kids access to 911 and a preset number, like the parents' phone number, but still.

It just seems too extreme for me. How about raising smart kids and teaching them to drive well? Too much work? Ah, screw it, we'll just invent our way out of decent parenting. [PhysOrg]

Well, that is the idea behind this concept from designers Jae-yun Kim & Jong-Su Lee. According to the description, the bump would rely on "retractors that open up if the impact on them is small enough." In other words, if you are driving slow, the weight of the car would flatten the bump. Drive too fast and the bump would stay active. I don't know how smooth the transition would be, or whether it would be to expensive to produce, but at least the idea is fairly plausible. [Yanko]

The Tesla dealership is quiet as a cage of sleeping panthers. A pack of the electric Roadsters, in varying degrees of gray, are strewn across the show floor looking like 120mph standing still. I imagine most of them are waiting for a venture capitalist to pick them up and take them from meeting to meeting for the rest of their uneventful lives. But outside is a bright blue one ready for the 10 minutes Tesla and God have handed me. This is my long awaited drive in the Tesla Roadster.

Studying her lines, it is clear to me this car has Lotus DNA, even though the car is much cleaner and classically beautiful-looking than any bug eyed Elise or Exige, and more technologically advanced than the submarine Lotus James Bond drove in The Spy Who Loved Me. The British car maker helped to design the aluminum chassis, which weighs less than 200 pounds, and they handle early stage manufacturing. Tesla stresses that the Roadster is not just an electric Lotus, and it shares no more than 10% of the parts. Much more thought went into this car to simply dismiss it as such. But Tesla's engineers did choose to work with Lotus for a reason, the same reason why most auto journalists consider the Elise one of the last pure sports cars around and a great deal. The low-power, lightweight car is simply one of the best handling and thrilling drives out there, described as some as a street-legal go-kart, and I'd agree that it's one of the best driving experiences I've ever had. With shared genetics, this is perhaps the best way to judge the limits of electric performance as compared to their gas counterparts.

It's rare that Tesla lets people drive the car without a company copilot, so we'd be tailed by a Lexus chase car since I'm sitting copilot to Tim Ferriss, the guy who set up this ride, for the first shift. Starting the car is silent, and we kept trying to turn it over because we're idiots. If you don't step on the gas accelerator, there is no idle; the car does not move forward even when your feet are not on the brakes. When Tim takes off from the lot, before I hear road noise and wind, I hear the odd purring of the transmission, which can almost be described as turbine-like. With one gear and no engine noise, it's surprisingly hard to gauge speed except by the pressure applied to the headrest by the back of your skull, the churning in your stomach or the unintended roller-coaster face of your passenger. Looking at the speedometer would be idiotic at these rates, in local traffic, but somehow we make it to about 60 for brief bursts on our way to the highway.

Zero to 60 is rated at 3.9 seconds by virtue of the electric motor's 248 HP and 280 torque. By comparison, it bests the fastest road-legal Lotus by a 10th of a second, but the power-to-weight ratio is on par with the standard Elise because the battery pack brings it to 2700 pounds (over 700 pounds heavier than the Elise). The key here is that the car doesn't have to take the time to switch gears, and electric motors deliver 100% of their torque at start. That power curve caused some problems earlier in two previous transmissions, which were being destroyed after a few thousand miles. To overcome that problem with the latest, more durable single-gear tranny, Tesla wisely used a motor with a 14000-RPM redline that could keep rotating faster in a low gear to achieve a top speed of 125 MPH while improving on the earlier transmission's zero-to-sixty time of 5.7 seconds.

Behind the wheel, I found that the entire system works together to deliver power like thick gobs of thick yogurt, with no drive lash on throttle or lift, but not too buzzy either. I have to admit it's the perfect amount of torque for a car of this weight, somewhere in between Detroit muscle and a peaky four banger in a rice rocket. With traction control off, something I was prohibited from doing, I hear you can do doughnuts in the car, something not too easy in many roadsters. That's what I heard, anyhow. In some ways, it feels automatic, without the third pedal, but when you lift off the throttle, the car's regenerative systems seize power through engine braking. It feels like you're lifting off after revving high in second or third gear in a manual transmission sports car. Tim often didn't have to use the brakes, preferring to wind down to almost nothing by engine braking alone. I'd test the brakes later. We'd entered the highway, and the car's acceleration to 80 was great, but power tapered off closer to 110 as aerodynamics of a open top car caught up to it and torque fell. Hypothetically.

I knew the acceleration was appropriate for a car of the future, besting many gas vehicles out there. But one thing I'd never heard about was what all the battery weight (again, 2700 pounds vs sub 2000 pounds) was doing to the car's handling; the Tesla would not likely turn and brake like a space-age wonder considering similar chassis, brakes, wheels and suspension. There's no escaping the laws of physics. Even magical electric cars want to stay in motion, when in motion.

I snaked the car through a set of S turns, but behind other cars, so I was not able to find much data other than that the car does not oversteer easily. Through a banked onramp to highway 280, the ghetto skidpad, I wasn't light on the gas accelerator, and on the smooth, 270-degree banked circle, I could feel the car's rack-and-pinion wanting to push a bit. I wasn't sure of my speed, so it's impossible to say when confidence was starting to fade. The chase car driver later implied they had to slow down to 60 on the ramp, but I doubt I was going much faster than that. I'll conclusively say that the car handles less confidently than an Elise, but will destroy many road-going sedans and coupes.

Back off the highway, with the chase car still catching up, I got a chance to try the brakes, quickly rounding a corner and heading towards traffic. With a second lane opening up, I slammed them. Warm tires chattered across the rough, slightly downhill road and I was forced to take the other lane or eat SUV. I felt the weight, and expected the car to stop shorter.

But here's something to chew on. I have no conclusive data of how fast we were going, given the single-gear, quiet propulsion of the vehicle. I could have been going 35, I could have been going 60, so it's not fair to judge the car's handling or braking. And neither Tesla nor the internet have any skidpad, slalom or braking distance test results for the car. Conspiracy? I can't say. None of this really matters. The Tesla Roadster is unique as a performance-oriented electric car and deserves heaps of praise for what it is. Its efficiency from battery to wheels hovers between 80% and 90%. Most gas engines sit at about 20%. Provided your public utility has some measure of efficiency in their electric production, you can do a lot of good in this car.

I wouldn't be describing this car properly without discussing the interior. The Roadster's insides look similar to its sister cars from the UK, but have been improved. Door sills have been lowered to make entrance easy (although still requiring some level of acrobatics), the leather seats are more comfortable and heated, and the premium stereo is a single-DIN JVC KD-NX5000 which features DivX and DVD playback as well as navigation, a 40GB HDD and an iPod dock. The position of the stereo is sort of low on the dashboard. The stereo's imaging is superb and there's a sub somewhere in the tiny cockpit thumping away. There's an electric touch LCD on the left managing battery charge, tire pressure monitors, etc. Your ass is dragging probably 8 inches from the ground.

I can't afford this car. If I wanted something similar to this in shape, feel and performance, I'd probably buy a used Elise for $30K, if I could get over the bug eyes. But I can assure you that a Tesla is still a hell of a car, by electric or gas terms, even if it's just a bit more portly and more expensive than a comparable Lotus. I mean, it's fast. It's electric. It's efficient. It's sexy. And you can actually buy it if you're rich. And while Tesla as a company may have had some problems in manufacturing at first, they didn't wait for old industry to get off its ass and build something revolutionary. Like Google's Android challenges the cellphone establishment, I hope the Roadster catalyzes the traditional fossil-fuel-dependent makers into a game of catchup, with cars that are just as fast and efficient, and hopefully a lot cheaper. And if that doesn't leave you somewhat impressed, then you belong with the dinosaurs.

Note: Impressions from a 10 minute drive are going to be impressions from a 10 minute drive, nothing more.

Special thanks to Tim Ferriss for facilitating this drive and donating half of his drive time to me, and for photographer Monica Laipple for the better shots above. Check out more videos over at Tim's site.

This could be a proper birds-eye view to help you slide into a parking space more easily, or an adaptive perspective view for maneuvering in a tight spot, a 360º wraparound view for improved situational awareness when driving through a crowded urban area, and so on.

Amazing stuff, seeming like its turning driving into a partly video game-like experience. The system is condensed to a system-on-a-chip device which Fujitsu is testing, able to process the video images within 30milliseconds for real-time information. Just don't expect it in your car anytime soon: Fujitsu's planning on releasing tech like this slowly and incrementally, as they verify the effectiveness of this additional driver situational awareness tech.

As some of you have pointed out, Infiniti have had a vaguely similar-looking system for a while. But it doesn't offer the same degree of real-time, selectable multi-angle image processing power as Fujitsu's—this new system's specialty. [Fujitsu via Akihabaranews]