The Importance of Safe Driving Habits: A Safety Soapbox

Approximately seven percent of drivers are impaired, speeding, and not wearing their seat belts. This is surprising, as it's largely due to three main behaviors that are detrimental to road safety. Impaired driving, excessive speeding, and reckless behavior all contribute to a significant number of crashes and fatalities on the roads. The statistics are alarming, with speeding-related crashes increasing by 11 percent.

To combat this issue, concerted efforts have been made across the safety industry, including global initiatives like Global Road Safety Week. This campaign aims to bring down speed limits to 30 kilometers per hour or 20 miles per hour in urban areas, reducing the number of speeding-related crashes. The idea is that by lowering speed limits, we can reduce the risk of accidents and make our roads safer for everyone.

However, there's a growing trend of states raising speed limits, despite data showing that it increases crashes and fatalities. In fact, studies have shown that each 5-mile-per-hour increase in the speed limit results in an 8 percent increase in fatalities on interstates and highways. This is a staggering statistic, highlighting the importance of maintaining safe speed limits.

The Technology Gap

There's also a reliance on technology to mitigate the risks of driving. While autonomous emergency braking systems can prevent or reduce the severity of crashes, they're not foolproof. These systems are designed to slow down the vehicle in response to an imminent crash, but they won't always be able to prevent it altogether. Moreover, over-reliance on these systems can lead to complacency among drivers, who may rely too heavily on technology rather than their own abilities.

The Limitations of Autonomous Vehicles

Autonomous vehicles are often touted as a solution to improve road safety, but we're not yet at the point where they're capable of driving on highways without human intervention. In fact, even the most advanced autonomous systems still require human oversight and control. While trains and airplanes can be safely navigated by machines, cars in traffic pose a unique challenge that requires human judgment and skill.

A Safety Perspective

The importance of safe driving habits cannot be overstated. As our society continues to evolve and technology advances, it's essential that we prioritize road safety above all else. By reducing speed limits, increasing awareness about the dangers of impaired driving, and relying on technology in moderation, we can create a safer environment for everyone on the roads.

The Future of Road Safety

While there's no single solution to improve road safety, there are steps we can take today. We can support initiatives that promote safe driving habits, advocate for stricter laws and regulations, and push for more investment in road safety infrastructure. By working together, we can create a safer, more responsible driving culture that benefits everyone.

Questions and Answers

If you have any questions or concerns about road safety, we'd love to hear from you. Send your queries to [talkingcars@icloud.com](mailto:talkingcars@icloud.com), and we'll do our best to provide you with a thoughtful and informative response. Whether you're a seasoned driver or just learning the ropes, we want to engage in a conversation about road safety that's productive, respectful, and enlightening.

"WEBVTTKind: captionsLanguage: enwhat happens if an ev runs out of battery power while you're driving should you drive your truck in four-wheel drive mode full-time during a storm and do advanced safety features mean we can raise speed limits we answer those questions and more next on talking cars hey welcome back i'm keith barry i'm emily thomas and i'm alex knight and you know we get some great questions to talking cars at icloud.com and we have so many of them in the hopper that we just we just want to get through some of them and answer your questions before it turns into you know i i'm thinking of buying the new 1999 ford explorer uh so we got it we're gonna gotta answer these in a timely fashion and sometimes that means an all questions episode uh so that's what we're doing today isn't that great uh this is this is exciting so it's great it's great it's great let's do it our first question is from kurt from kansas city and kurt says uh what happens if you're in an ev an electric car and you run out of power does roadside assistance have generators to charge you on the side of the road or do you get towed to the nearest ev charger alex i you looked into this right yeah uh so i don't really have great news i suppose for kurt um really it's kind of the same thing as running out of fuel in an uh you know engine internal combustion-powered car so uh and really your only option is to get towed to the nearest charger um i did find that uh more towards when evs started becoming popular like 2010 it started to pick up a little bit triple a kind of ran a program where they had some trucks that had uh level two and even level three chargers on them and they would come out to you and uh you know provide enough charge to you could get to the nearest charger but so few people used it and it just didn't really it wasn't a practical solution so um from what i found that program phased out so really your only option uh is to get towed to um you know the nearest charger and i think it isn't really that big of an issue because of the range anxiety that a lot of people have with evs is it just kind of necessitates a little bit more planning than maybe if you're just going to hop in your gas-powered car and take a road trip so typically people you know tend to scope out where the chargers are and um plan their route accordingly so uh i would suggest doing that of course and then if you do happen to run out of charge yeah getting a toe is really your your best option yeah and you don't want to be stopped on the side of the road for that long anyways because that's that's not safe i mean their their goal is to get the car out of out of where where there's danger you know tubes right and if it was like uh winter time which i would think is the most susceptible you know time of the year for this to happen if it's if the car is dead you might not be able to run the heat or whatever so it's not a great situation to get yourself in you ever gotten stuck in an ev on the side of the road you ever ever you ever overestimated capabilities i've come close but i'm thankfully not not yet what about you it hasn't happened to me but partially because i'm so scared that it's gonna happen that like i planned very very small exactly like i have this fear of running out of juice that i'm just like no i'm going to either make sure that like it never ever happens or i just don't even remotely get close and that's what makes a plug-in hybrid so great oh yes because you can drive around town in electric and then you know make those long trips and not worry about it yeah do you keep your gas tanks always like at three quarters full or or is that or is it just evs no i live more dangerously with the gas but my with my first car my parents when i was in college were always just like they were like you never let it get below halftime they were just like never and they would freak out like what if you get stranded somewhere and i'm like i'm really not going that far gas station like i know where it's at but yeah it's probably a good thing to just be aware of i'll be interested to see you know maybe as more as evs become like the norm more than they are now maybe something like that aaa program becomes you know it resurfaces i don't know yeah as people kind of get over the range anxiety chargers are you know more out there so they're just thinking about it less so maybe that you know makes an appearance in the future but yeah i'd be interesting the first time i ever drove an ev this is this is back in this is back a while ago it was the first nissan leaf and i that week i had agreed to be the designated driver for a friend's bachelorette party and i had i knew exactly where everyone lived who everyone had to go to i i charged it i knew exactly what the mileage and the range was and there was one extra seat in the car and one of the friends said well can't you just drop me off on the way and everyone was you know everyone had a nice night and was a little relaxed and uh and and i said what well no i i i can't i i literally can't i don't have enough rain budget yeah and she started screaming at me it's like like what is wrong with you you're gonna leave me out here and i said no i can't like otherwise we'll all get stranded can't you just go to a gas station and i'm trying to explain to someone whose judgment might be a little bit impaired at you know three in the morning why i can't i can't drive home and it was um that was uh that was that was my first memory of of of ranging anxiety but here's hoping that that becomes uh something of the past so barry has a question no relation uh any idea how many miles the average windshield lasts before it becomes cracked how cracked is too cracked to be safe and when should it be replaced are windshields getting damaged more frequently or am i just having a run of bad luck um you might be so we looked into this a little bit and and we've gotten we've gotten a lot of questions like this and many of them are from owners of kias and subarus and there are some class action lawsuits around particular models from kia and subaru with their with their windshields and those manufacturers have agreed in certain cases to at no charge replace certain broken windshields now those vehicles uh include so the 2015 subaru outback and legacy and the 2016 outback and legacy they have an extended warranty on the windshield um kia some 2020 models they ikea admitted that the windshields were defective and that they'll just replace them as part of a goodwill campaign even though they aren't included in the warranty so but we have seen some faulty windshields and and again you know this is part of a settlement they're not saying why but they're saying that yeah there are some bad windshields out there you know i grew up in a state where where windshield coverage was comprehensive and it was and it was no deductible and that's in massachusetts where i first started driving and it was great you broke your windshield you just swim got replaced it was it was it was free it was i mean it wasn't free you paid for it but it but but it wasn't it was more of a time inconvenience than someone driving around with a broken windshield and driving around with a broken windshield's a bad idea right yeah i mean that makes sense too to have it covered like that i mean the windshield's like your first line of defense against things on the road so having a you know a cracked or discouraging people from getting it replaced is certainly not not a great thing yeah i imagine it affects your visibility too you know depending on the location of the crack and how severe it is so it's something you want to take care of quickly enough and hopefully maybe you live in massachusetts and your comprehensive coverage makes it easier for you oh it's it's great and and everyone can everyone who grew up in the boston area can still sing the the jingle for giant they're no longer around so i can say it because it's not promoting anyone but for giant glass who do you call when your windshield's busted anyhow so before we move on with all that money you save if you live in massachusetts and you've just realized how much money you've saved replacing windshields maybe you want to donate some of them i mean feeling generous well we wanted to take a moment to let you know about the talking cars donation program if you're not aware consumer reports we're a non-profit that means the the work that we do it's it's it's funded by memberships and donations um we're not on here telling you uh you know to to buy mattresses and put in a promo code so we get paid you know so if you're able to give it helps us keep doing this work we do uh including including this show so you can find more at cr.org slash give talking cars cr.org give talking cars and thanks to those who who already have we've got some uh a lot of folks have have have pitched in a little bit and it's it's really cool so so thanks so much feels feels like a nice little community of talking cars fans and i hope we get to see each other soon someday but now back on audience questions galena has a question the 2022 kia carnival seating configuration shows that the second row seats can be turned to face the back of the vehicle well this is an interesting concept i wonder about its safety while going down the road could you tell us about how this impacts the safety of passengers in those seats what about turning the seat then using a car seat for a toddler that positions them to face the rear of the vehicle should seats always face the front of the vehicle or is this rear-facing configuration safe to use emily i i kind of see you taking a very deep breath before you answer this one right yeah so i was really intrigued because i hadn't seen the press images of the second row turned around i was like wait what and we have one too you would have noticed exactly we have one and yeah i when i did car seat fits in them i feel like i would have i would have seen those pages so that's kind of what um i did first galena's i checked the vehicle owner's manual for the carnival and i could not find any information in our manual about being able to turn the second row around which kind of led me to question okay is that in the manual can this really be done and so i reached out to kia and one of those spokespersons um told me that that is not a feature that's available for the us market it's available elsewhere but not in the u.s so that being said i think a few key things right if it's out there in your you know vehicle owner's manual telling you how to safely do it and you know with all the sort of precautions and disclaimers of um what you need to bear in mind don't do it you know we've seen videos on youtube of people that are like hey if you have a us model this is how you can make your seats turn around you you know take out these parts and you know ta-da it's all rear-facing which gave me a lot of anxiety some of the things that you know come to mind in terms of the safety is we don't have a means of testing doing like you know occupant protection testing for vehicle seats that are rear-facing in the us like that's not part of any of the regulatory standards stop hiring the consumer information programs so we wouldn't be able to tell you how safe that configuration is when you're turning the seats around that way you know how does it impact like the seat back integrity of the of the vehicle seats just there's a lot of different factors how does it you know affect the way that the occupant restraint system works like the seat belts and the airbags and such so there's a lot to it that um you could really be compromising and jeopardizing your safety if you make changes to your vehicle that it's not intended for and that you know certainly impact the way that a passenger is able to sit in the vehicle and sit safely that being said also in some of those videos i did see people put in car seats on these um vehicle seats that have been turned around yes so car seat manuals have specific pages that tell you that you are not allowed to install your car seat on the vehicle seat that is facing the side or facing the back and again has to do with how the seats are designed how the car seats are tested um there's no regulatory standard for testing car seats on rear-facing vehicle seats and there was even one video where the person was like hey look i found these car seats that let me do this because look it says that you can install the rear-facing and forward-facing to clarify that is talking about the orientation of the child's car seat not your vehicle seat so yes you can install your child's car seat rear-facing and forward-facing if it is that type of car seat it's a convertible car seat if it's an all-in-one car seat you can install it in both orientations it is not referring to the orientation of your vehicle seat vehicle seats should be forward facing for all child seat installations making those kinds of modifications to your carnival for the u.s right it would void your warranty with kia um and it really it just opens up a can of worms of you just don't know the impact of these changes that you're making you don't know all the unintended consequences that could come from it it's just not worth it that makes me think like why would somebody even really want to do this i understand like you said the novelty of it right especially like if it's a couple adults sitting back there or whatever might be kind of fun to face each other but at least in the you know the video that you're referencing why would the person even want to have all these car seats facing like that any any idea there for some of the ones that i saw it just seemed like the people were having larger families and they are going on long road trips it might be a way to kind of like keep the kids kind of engaged you know they can see each other talk to each other you know play together okay being um a sibling of four i think that would also make for a lot more opportunities for sibling fights you get it you get a direct uh direct hits yeah you could throw stuff yeah yeah exactly direct lines of access um you know i don't see and i know that this has been these these have been in cars since you know it's more popular in europe and asia uh but this is you know it's sort of a popular feature in in in in minivans and cars have had swivel seats going way back but i i i can't imagine wanting to sit like that and seeing seeing why why see where you've already been when you can see where you're going think about the old station wagons right they had yeah i remember sitting in one of those a family member had one in in hindsight knowing about literally now like that scares me so much sitting literally in the hatch facing backwards so don't do it don't do it please don't do it end the story um from minivans to pickups luke from lansdale pennsylvania says i have a 2019 nissan frontier during inclement weather should i just use four-wheel drive to get moving or keep it on for my entire 35-mile commute even when the road surface is clear alex what should you do yeah um so on a vehicle like this on the 2019 frontier um or any frontier really it has a you know kind of traditional mechanical transfer case in it and with a vehicle like this you pretty much just don't want to use four-wheel drive whether it's four-wheel high or low on dry hard pavement so you know on a dry road you just don't want to do that because it can cause binding in the driveline which could you know harm it and then also accelerates the tire wear and all these things um so for luke um if the road gets clear and dry on your commute i would suggest switching from four-wheel drive to two-wheel drive um because you can only go in your frontier 62 miles per hour maximum if you're in four-wheel drive so you just don't want to get yourself in a situation where it's actually less safe to be speed capped at 62 miles per hour than just being able to drive normally good advice uh chris has another question uh about safety on my commute this morning i twice saw deer about to cross the road it didn't seem like they knew i was coming until about 30 feet away given that they barely heard my gas engine where when more people are driving electric or hydrogen cars uh will there be more crashes involving deer i think i can answer this one i've done a little a resident deer expert i've done a little deer research for uh for for cr um i don't know if there's if there's video footage of that or or if somehow it was miraculously erased from the internet well the good i have it safe don't worry there's there's good news and there's bad news uh for you and for deer uh so the the the good news is the deer can hear a lot of stuff so they can hear that wind noise and the road noise and the tire noise of your car creeping up on them and deer are prey so they they they are they're always looking out for for something uh that could kill them uh unfortunately they're they have competing priorities and if they are hungry if they're looking for a mate also their eyes are really sensitive so if they're light shining in their eyes um it can make it really difficult for them to even be that aware of their surroundings so that's why a deer might just stop in the middle of the road uh in front of you at night so dear hearing the car isn't the problem it's what the deer does afterwards uh that that is that is the problem uh is is is what i've been told by by dear experts who i eventually i might be able to call dear friends um jason from newberg indiana moving right along i said we just purchased a 2021 chrysler pacifica hybrid other than a few road trips a year daily driving will be used for short errands and three to 15 mile trips using only battery power is that type of driving with the plug-in hybrid considered severe duty and severe duty is something that's referred to in owner's manuals where it talks about um if you're if you're basically going to be making your your engine work harder than uh than the average driver i assume the shorter trips would be easier with this type of powertrain compared to an internal combustion engine vehicle with that in mind do we need to adjust our maintenance schedule should i use a product like the stable or another fuel stabilizer when i fill up the tank or drive on gas only for a few times a month it's a frequent question where we're getting we have a lot of nervous uh plug-in hybrid uh drivers afraid they're gonna wreck their engine by not using it alex can we can we give them some some advice yeah this is i love this question because um jason's right this is a unique situation with a plug-in hybrid where you know owners of these vehicles may go thousands of miles and the engine either never kicks on or it kicks on briefly um in just certain situations so definitely an interesting situation um i wouldn't call it severe duty though for the for this plug-in hybrid um it's quite the opposite especially if you're staying in that ev mode um it's actually quite light duty for this vehicle um so when you don't really need to adjust the maintenance schedule per se uh so digging into the chrysler pacifica hybrids owner's manual um they have the regular information there whereas if you're driving um you know over 10 000 miles that's that's generally the uh oil change interval is 10 000 miles but they also say which is more applicable in this situation is basically at a year so after a year regardless of mileage um you want to replace that that oil that's because the oil ages over time even though this vehicle uses synthetic but also those short instances where the engine runs moisture can build up in the oil which can cause it to degrade so basically i would recommend stick to that yearly schedule so even if you've gone 100 miles with the ice on still you want to change the oil and the second part of the question with the fuel um this is interesting i didn't actually know this ahead of time so i looked into it and thankfully the engineers on this vehicle thought of this and the pacifica hybrid has this mode that it will go into um automatically and it's called fuel and oil refresh mode and when this happens you will see a little message on your gauge cluster that it's in this mode and basically the car determines that okay the fuel has been sitting in the tank for x amount of time and it hasn't been used i'm going to kick on the engine to use up some of that fuel and also move some oil around the engine to avoid any corrosion or anything like that so if you are driving your vehicle and from what i could gauge from people online it's about 90 days you might see this message kick on and the engine will try to run through some of that fuel and one way you can get it to go out of that mode is by adding fresh fuel to the vehicle and kind of refresh the fuel in there but clever though it is clever it's a nice solution and the good thing is that jason doesn't really have to worry about it too much so other than making sure he changes the oil as far as the fuel goes um i i don't think adding stable would hurt anything but it's definitely not necessary for their you know recommendations so what would or what does a fuel stabilizer do for those of us that might not know all the ins and outs of that i mean i don't know the the chemical uh you know details of it offhand but it basically just tries to prolong the life of the fuel right so you know if the fuel sitting in that tank for over a year or something like that it tries to make it still um you know have some life in it so like at the big middle of the quarantine when everyone was worried about their cars sitting in the driveway yes that would have been a good time yeah and also small engines too for things like if you have gas powered snow blower lawnmower those things which now you're supposed to drain them at the end of the season but you know if you have a couple of tanks of in your garage or in your shed of you know five gallon portable fuel tanks you can throw some stabilizer in there to make sure that right when you actually need it to run that generator or whatever um that that the fuel hasn't degraded to the point where where it's it's no good one last question from moshe who says i recently bought a 2018 toyota highlander it is a host of safety features including lane keeping assist blind spot monitoring adaptive cruise control and much more it got me thinking as these things become more common is it time to raise the speed limits on highways ooh no emily i i think you might have an opinion here or even a research uh backed opinion here i do um sorry moshe it's not time to raise the speed limits on highways so all those really great safety features that you're talking about are probably not available on most vehicles on the road the most recent study by ihs market which is like a market research firm showed that the average age of vehicles on the road is 12.1 years so as you can imagine they don't have that host of safety features that you and keith like to talk about um and really until the majority or if not all the vehicles on the road have those would we be able to really see like the you know optimal and full benefit of of them right like working in concert together um they obviously do a lot right now for limiting crashes and loading the severity of crashes but you wouldn't want to be increasing the speed limits when um not all the vehicles can respond that way also we don't want to increase the speed limits period which i'm sure is going to be a real bummer for some of you but increasing the speed limits tends to also drive up the behavior to drive even faster than the speed limit which is just really risky and in the past year with the pandemic we thought that okay you know in the safety world we thought that we would see fewer crashes because people weren't going to be on the road as much however even though the vehicle miles traveled decreased the number of crashes and the number of fatalities actually increased and increased by approximately seven percent which was surprising right and really it's because of three main behaviors so you had a lot more impaired driving a lot more speeding and a lot more people not wearing their seat belts um within those the speeding related crashes increased by 11 so people are not just adhering to the speed limit and being like oh yeah you know i'm i'm gonna just drive at this maximum no they're always exceeding that so there's a lot of concerted efforts across the safety industry and even globally like un um global road safety week had this whole campaign about bringing the speed limits down to 30 kilometers per hour or 20 miles per hour in you know in the u.s in places where people in traffic mix so like in your local towns your cities you know villages things like that to reduce speeding related um crashes so i think overall it's not a good time and i don't really know if there will be a good time to increase the speed limits because i don't think it's the safer thing to do i think it's more dangerous it tends to drive more dangerous driving behaviors and it's unnecessary adding to that that sort of course in addition to that there is data showing that as states raise speed limits that that that crashes and fatalities increase and and the difference between a crash at 65 and a crash at 85 is immense when it comes to survivability is that some of these systems while they are great as a as as as sort of a training wheel or a last resort or or a bumper or a guardian someone hold your hand if something potentially goes wrong you cannot rely on these systems and over reliance on these systems can can really really lead you into a bad bad bad bad situation um you know they're they're there to keep you an attentive active driver from making a mistake but if you rely on them to drive the car for you the technology is not there yet automatic emergency braking i think a lot of people don't understand even highway speed automatic emergency braking doesn't guarantee you that it can stop the car it it it says that it can maybe mitigate a a crash from a higher speed by bringing it bring the vehicle speed down to a lower speed crash but it's not going to prevent a crash we're not in a world there are no self-driving cars on on the road today and maybe someday when we have uh fully autonomous vehicles driving around they can go on the highway at you know 200 300 miles an hour but you know we already have these things called trains um that can do that uh and and airplanes that are led by you know they're conducted or piloted by highly trained folks with a great amount of technology and nobody else in the way of them so with cars in traffic it's it's no this isn't this isn't it but an important opportunity for us to get on our safety self box right yeah our very justifiable safety soft box everybody knows i like my safety soapbox but um there was a really interesting step that i read in this i uh ihs study that was released in 2019 and so one of the things that they said is that they found that a five mile per hour increase in the speed limit or like the maximum speed limit was associated with an eight percent increase in fatalities on interstates and highways and i was like that's pretty s that's that feels dramatic right like you're just you don't think much of it when you're just accelerating an additional five miles per hour but for that to equate to an eight percent you know increase in the fatality rate that's that's a lot and it's unless like i'm saying before you know it's unnecessary we don't need to have the ability to be going so fast cause like as keith said the faster you're going you know the greater the risk of injury and fatality um at those severe crashes you know you you can't control a lot of that but you can't control where you're keeping your speed and so bring it down guys yeah you don't say that number would have that number would have to be zero or negative for it to be justifiable right any increase there it's just a non-starter for increasing it yeah and you're not saving that much time even on a long road trip and as my father always used to tell me you'll get there a lot later if you have to go to the hospital first so true that's true that's productive yeah exactly so if you have any questions uh and if you want to argue with us if you if you if you argue with us we love it uh send your questions to talking cars at icloud.com uh we'll we'll try and answer them uh we will answer them and we'll might even just provide you with a different perspective so thanks so much hope to do another one of these all questions episodes soon and thanks for talking cars with uswhat happens if an ev runs out of battery power while you're driving should you drive your truck in four-wheel drive mode full-time during a storm and do advanced safety features mean we can raise speed limits we answer those questions and more next on talking cars hey welcome back i'm keith barry i'm emily thomas and i'm alex knight and you know we get some great questions to talking cars at icloud.com and we have so many of them in the hopper that we just we just want to get through some of them and answer your questions before it turns into you know i i'm thinking of buying the new 1999 ford explorer uh so we got it we're gonna gotta answer these in a timely fashion and sometimes that means an all questions episode uh so that's what we're doing today isn't that great uh this is this is exciting so it's great it's great it's great let's do it our first question is from kurt from kansas city and kurt says uh what happens if you're in an ev an electric car and you run out of power does roadside assistance have generators to charge you on the side of the road or do you get towed to the nearest ev charger alex i you looked into this right yeah uh so i don't really have great news i suppose for kurt um really it's kind of the same thing as running out of fuel in an uh you know engine internal combustion-powered car so uh and really your only option is to get towed to the nearest charger um i did find that uh more towards when evs started becoming popular like 2010 it started to pick up a little bit triple a kind of ran a program where they had some trucks that had uh level two and even level three chargers on them and they would come out to you and uh you know provide enough charge to you could get to the nearest charger but so few people used it and it just didn't really it wasn't a practical solution so um from what i found that program phased out so really your only option uh is to get towed to um you know the nearest charger and i think it isn't really that big of an issue because of the range anxiety that a lot of people have with evs is it just kind of necessitates a little bit more planning than maybe if you're just going to hop in your gas-powered car and take a road trip so typically people you know tend to scope out where the chargers are and um plan their route accordingly so uh i would suggest doing that of course and then if you do happen to run out of charge yeah getting a toe is really your your best option yeah and you don't want to be stopped on the side of the road for that long anyways because that's that's not safe i mean their their goal is to get the car out of out of where where there's danger you know tubes right and if it was like uh winter time which i would think is the most susceptible you know time of the year for this to happen if it's if the car is dead you might not be able to run the heat or whatever so it's not a great situation to get yourself in you ever gotten stuck in an ev on the side of the road you ever ever you ever overestimated capabilities i've come close but i'm thankfully not not yet what about you it hasn't happened to me but partially because i'm so scared that it's gonna happen that like i planned very very small exactly like i have this fear of running out of juice that i'm just like no i'm going to either make sure that like it never ever happens or i just don't even remotely get close and that's what makes a plug-in hybrid so great oh yes because you can drive around town in electric and then you know make those long trips and not worry about it yeah do you keep your gas tanks always like at three quarters full or or is that or is it just evs no i live more dangerously with the gas but my with my first car my parents when i was in college were always just like they were like you never let it get below halftime they were just like never and they would freak out like what if you get stranded somewhere and i'm like i'm really not going that far gas station like i know where it's at but yeah it's probably a good thing to just be aware of i'll be interested to see you know maybe as more as evs become like the norm more than they are now maybe something like that aaa program becomes you know it resurfaces i don't know yeah as people kind of get over the range anxiety chargers are you know more out there so they're just thinking about it less so maybe that you know makes an appearance in the future but yeah i'd be interesting the first time i ever drove an ev this is this is back in this is back a while ago it was the first nissan leaf and i that week i had agreed to be the designated driver for a friend's bachelorette party and i had i knew exactly where everyone lived who everyone had to go to i i charged it i knew exactly what the mileage and the range was and there was one extra seat in the car and one of the friends said well can't you just drop me off on the way and everyone was you know everyone had a nice night and was a little relaxed and uh and and i said what well no i i i can't i i literally can't i don't have enough rain budget yeah and she started screaming at me it's like like what is wrong with you you're gonna leave me out here and i said no i can't like otherwise we'll all get stranded can't you just go to a gas station and i'm trying to explain to someone whose judgment might be a little bit impaired at you know three in the morning why i can't i can't drive home and it was um that was uh that was that was my first memory of of of ranging anxiety but here's hoping that that becomes uh something of the past so barry has a question no relation uh any idea how many miles the average windshield lasts before it becomes cracked how cracked is too cracked to be safe and when should it be replaced are windshields getting damaged more frequently or am i just having a run of bad luck um you might be so we looked into this a little bit and and we've gotten we've gotten a lot of questions like this and many of them are from owners of kias and subarus and there are some class action lawsuits around particular models from kia and subaru with their with their windshields and those manufacturers have agreed in certain cases to at no charge replace certain broken windshields now those vehicles uh include so the 2015 subaru outback and legacy and the 2016 outback and legacy they have an extended warranty on the windshield um kia some 2020 models they ikea admitted that the windshields were defective and that they'll just replace them as part of a goodwill campaign even though they aren't included in the warranty so but we have seen some faulty windshields and and again you know this is part of a settlement they're not saying why but they're saying that yeah there are some bad windshields out there you know i grew up in a state where where windshield coverage was comprehensive and it was and it was no deductible and that's in massachusetts where i first started driving and it was great you broke your windshield you just swim got replaced it was it was it was free it was i mean it wasn't free you paid for it but it but but it wasn't it was more of a time inconvenience than someone driving around with a broken windshield and driving around with a broken windshield's a bad idea right yeah i mean that makes sense too to have it covered like that i mean the windshield's like your first line of defense against things on the road so having a you know a cracked or discouraging people from getting it replaced is certainly not not a great thing yeah i imagine it affects your visibility too you know depending on the location of the crack and how severe it is so it's something you want to take care of quickly enough and hopefully maybe you live in massachusetts and your comprehensive coverage makes it easier for you oh it's it's great and and everyone can everyone who grew up in the boston area can still sing the the jingle for giant they're no longer around so i can say it because it's not promoting anyone but for giant glass who do you call when your windshield's busted anyhow so before we move on with all that money you save if you live in massachusetts and you've just realized how much money you've saved replacing windshields maybe you want to donate some of them i mean feeling generous well we wanted to take a moment to let you know about the talking cars donation program if you're not aware consumer reports we're a non-profit that means the the work that we do it's it's it's funded by memberships and donations um we're not on here telling you uh you know to to buy mattresses and put in a promo code so we get paid you know so if you're able to give it helps us keep doing this work we do uh including including this show so you can find more at cr.org slash give talking cars cr.org give talking cars and thanks to those who who already have we've got some uh a lot of folks have have have pitched in a little bit and it's it's really cool so so thanks so much feels feels like a nice little community of talking cars fans and i hope we get to see each other soon someday but now back on audience questions galena has a question the 2022 kia carnival seating configuration shows that the second row seats can be turned to face the back of the vehicle well this is an interesting concept i wonder about its safety while going down the road could you tell us about how this impacts the safety of passengers in those seats what about turning the seat then using a car seat for a toddler that positions them to face the rear of the vehicle should seats always face the front of the vehicle or is this rear-facing configuration safe to use emily i i kind of see you taking a very deep breath before you answer this one right yeah so i was really intrigued because i hadn't seen the press images of the second row turned around i was like wait what and we have one too you would have noticed exactly we have one and yeah i when i did car seat fits in them i feel like i would have i would have seen those pages so that's kind of what um i did first galena's i checked the vehicle owner's manual for the carnival and i could not find any information in our manual about being able to turn the second row around which kind of led me to question okay is that in the manual can this really be done and so i reached out to kia and one of those spokespersons um told me that that is not a feature that's available for the us market it's available elsewhere but not in the u.s so that being said i think a few key things right if it's out there in your you know vehicle owner's manual telling you how to safely do it and you know with all the sort of precautions and disclaimers of um what you need to bear in mind don't do it you know we've seen videos on youtube of people that are like hey if you have a us model this is how you can make your seats turn around you you know take out these parts and you know ta-da it's all rear-facing which gave me a lot of anxiety some of the things that you know come to mind in terms of the safety is we don't have a means of testing doing like you know occupant protection testing for vehicle seats that are rear-facing in the us like that's not part of any of the regulatory standards stop hiring the consumer information programs so we wouldn't be able to tell you how safe that configuration is when you're turning the seats around that way you know how does it impact like the seat back integrity of the of the vehicle seats just there's a lot of different factors how does it you know affect the way that the occupant restraint system works like the seat belts and the airbags and such so there's a lot to it that um you could really be compromising and jeopardizing your safety if you make changes to your vehicle that it's not intended for and that you know certainly impact the way that a passenger is able to sit in the vehicle and sit safely that being said also in some of those videos i did see people put in car seats on these um vehicle seats that have been turned around yes so car seat manuals have specific pages that tell you that you are not allowed to install your car seat on the vehicle seat that is facing the side or facing the back and again has to do with how the seats are designed how the car seats are tested um there's no regulatory standard for testing car seats on rear-facing vehicle seats and there was even one video where the person was like hey look i found these car seats that let me do this because look it says that you can install the rear-facing and forward-facing to clarify that is talking about the orientation of the child's car seat not your vehicle seat so yes you can install your child's car seat rear-facing and forward-facing if it is that type of car seat it's a convertible car seat if it's an all-in-one car seat you can install it in both orientations it is not referring to the orientation of your vehicle seat vehicle seats should be forward facing for all child seat installations making those kinds of modifications to your carnival for the u.s right it would void your warranty with kia um and it really it just opens up a can of worms of you just don't know the impact of these changes that you're making you don't know all the unintended consequences that could come from it it's just not worth it that makes me think like why would somebody even really want to do this i understand like you said the novelty of it right especially like if it's a couple adults sitting back there or whatever might be kind of fun to face each other but at least in the you know the video that you're referencing why would the person even want to have all these car seats facing like that any any idea there for some of the ones that i saw it just seemed like the people were having larger families and they are going on long road trips it might be a way to kind of like keep the kids kind of engaged you know they can see each other talk to each other you know play together okay being um a sibling of four i think that would also make for a lot more opportunities for sibling fights you get it you get a direct uh direct hits yeah you could throw stuff yeah yeah exactly direct lines of access um you know i don't see and i know that this has been these these have been in cars since you know it's more popular in europe and asia uh but this is you know it's sort of a popular feature in in in in minivans and cars have had swivel seats going way back but i i i can't imagine wanting to sit like that and seeing seeing why why see where you've already been when you can see where you're going think about the old station wagons right they had yeah i remember sitting in one of those a family member had one in in hindsight knowing about literally now like that scares me so much sitting literally in the hatch facing backwards so don't do it don't do it please don't do it end the story um from minivans to pickups luke from lansdale pennsylvania says i have a 2019 nissan frontier during inclement weather should i just use four-wheel drive to get moving or keep it on for my entire 35-mile commute even when the road surface is clear alex what should you do yeah um so on a vehicle like this on the 2019 frontier um or any frontier really it has a you know kind of traditional mechanical transfer case in it and with a vehicle like this you pretty much just don't want to use four-wheel drive whether it's four-wheel high or low on dry hard pavement so you know on a dry road you just don't want to do that because it can cause binding in the driveline which could you know harm it and then also accelerates the tire wear and all these things um so for luke um if the road gets clear and dry on your commute i would suggest switching from four-wheel drive to two-wheel drive um because you can only go in your frontier 62 miles per hour maximum if you're in four-wheel drive so you just don't want to get yourself in a situation where it's actually less safe to be speed capped at 62 miles per hour than just being able to drive normally good advice uh chris has another question uh about safety on my commute this morning i twice saw deer about to cross the road it didn't seem like they knew i was coming until about 30 feet away given that they barely heard my gas engine where when more people are driving electric or hydrogen cars uh will there be more crashes involving deer i think i can answer this one i've done a little a resident deer expert i've done a little deer research for uh for for cr um i don't know if there's if there's video footage of that or or if somehow it was miraculously erased from the internet well the good i have it safe don't worry there's there's good news and there's bad news uh for you and for deer uh so the the the good news is the deer can hear a lot of stuff so they can hear that wind noise and the road noise and the tire noise of your car creeping up on them and deer are prey so they they they are they're always looking out for for something uh that could kill them uh unfortunately they're they have competing priorities and if they are hungry if they're looking for a mate also their eyes are really sensitive so if they're light shining in their eyes um it can make it really difficult for them to even be that aware of their surroundings so that's why a deer might just stop in the middle of the road uh in front of you at night so dear hearing the car isn't the problem it's what the deer does afterwards uh that that is that is the problem uh is is is what i've been told by by dear experts who i eventually i might be able to call dear friends um jason from newberg indiana moving right along i said we just purchased a 2021 chrysler pacifica hybrid other than a few road trips a year daily driving will be used for short errands and three to 15 mile trips using only battery power is that type of driving with the plug-in hybrid considered severe duty and severe duty is something that's referred to in owner's manuals where it talks about um if you're if you're basically going to be making your your engine work harder than uh than the average driver i assume the shorter trips would be easier with this type of powertrain compared to an internal combustion engine vehicle with that in mind do we need to adjust our maintenance schedule should i use a product like the stable or another fuel stabilizer when i fill up the tank or drive on gas only for a few times a month it's a frequent question where we're getting we have a lot of nervous uh plug-in hybrid uh drivers afraid they're gonna wreck their engine by not using it alex can we can we give them some some advice yeah this is i love this question because um jason's right this is a unique situation with a plug-in hybrid where you know owners of these vehicles may go thousands of miles and the engine either never kicks on or it kicks on briefly um in just certain situations so definitely an interesting situation um i wouldn't call it severe duty though for the for this plug-in hybrid um it's quite the opposite especially if you're staying in that ev mode um it's actually quite light duty for this vehicle um so when you don't really need to adjust the maintenance schedule per se uh so digging into the chrysler pacifica hybrids owner's manual um they have the regular information there whereas if you're driving um you know over 10 000 miles that's that's generally the uh oil change interval is 10 000 miles but they also say which is more applicable in this situation is basically at a year so after a year regardless of mileage um you want to replace that that oil that's because the oil ages over time even though this vehicle uses synthetic but also those short instances where the engine runs moisture can build up in the oil which can cause it to degrade so basically i would recommend stick to that yearly schedule so even if you've gone 100 miles with the ice on still you want to change the oil and the second part of the question with the fuel um this is interesting i didn't actually know this ahead of time so i looked into it and thankfully the engineers on this vehicle thought of this and the pacifica hybrid has this mode that it will go into um automatically and it's called fuel and oil refresh mode and when this happens you will see a little message on your gauge cluster that it's in this mode and basically the car determines that okay the fuel has been sitting in the tank for x amount of time and it hasn't been used i'm going to kick on the engine to use up some of that fuel and also move some oil around the engine to avoid any corrosion or anything like that so if you are driving your vehicle and from what i could gauge from people online it's about 90 days you might see this message kick on and the engine will try to run through some of that fuel and one way you can get it to go out of that mode is by adding fresh fuel to the vehicle and kind of refresh the fuel in there but clever though it is clever it's a nice solution and the good thing is that jason doesn't really have to worry about it too much so other than making sure he changes the oil as far as the fuel goes um i i don't think adding stable would hurt anything but it's definitely not necessary for their you know recommendations so what would or what does a fuel stabilizer do for those of us that might not know all the ins and outs of that i mean i don't know the the chemical uh you know details of it offhand but it basically just tries to prolong the life of the fuel right so you know if the fuel sitting in that tank for over a year or something like that it tries to make it still um you know have some life in it so like at the big middle of the quarantine when everyone was worried about their cars sitting in the driveway yes that would have been a good time yeah and also small engines too for things like if you have gas powered snow blower lawnmower those things which now you're supposed to drain them at the end of the season but you know if you have a couple of tanks of in your garage or in your shed of you know five gallon portable fuel tanks you can throw some stabilizer in there to make sure that right when you actually need it to run that generator or whatever um that that the fuel hasn't degraded to the point where where it's it's no good one last question from moshe who says i recently bought a 2018 toyota highlander it is a host of safety features including lane keeping assist blind spot monitoring adaptive cruise control and much more it got me thinking as these things become more common is it time to raise the speed limits on highways ooh no emily i i think you might have an opinion here or even a research uh backed opinion here i do um sorry moshe it's not time to raise the speed limits on highways so all those really great safety features that you're talking about are probably not available on most vehicles on the road the most recent study by ihs market which is like a market research firm showed that the average age of vehicles on the road is 12.1 years so as you can imagine they don't have that host of safety features that you and keith like to talk about um and really until the majority or if not all the vehicles on the road have those would we be able to really see like the you know optimal and full benefit of of them right like working in concert together um they obviously do a lot right now for limiting crashes and loading the severity of crashes but you wouldn't want to be increasing the speed limits when um not all the vehicles can respond that way also we don't want to increase the speed limits period which i'm sure is going to be a real bummer for some of you but increasing the speed limits tends to also drive up the behavior to drive even faster than the speed limit which is just really risky and in the past year with the pandemic we thought that okay you know in the safety world we thought that we would see fewer crashes because people weren't going to be on the road as much however even though the vehicle miles traveled decreased the number of crashes and the number of fatalities actually increased and increased by approximately seven percent which was surprising right and really it's because of three main behaviors so you had a lot more impaired driving a lot more speeding and a lot more people not wearing their seat belts um within those the speeding related crashes increased by 11 so people are not just adhering to the speed limit and being like oh yeah you know i'm i'm gonna just drive at this maximum no they're always exceeding that so there's a lot of concerted efforts across the safety industry and even globally like un um global road safety week had this whole campaign about bringing the speed limits down to 30 kilometers per hour or 20 miles per hour in you know in the u.s in places where people in traffic mix so like in your local towns your cities you know villages things like that to reduce speeding related um crashes so i think overall it's not a good time and i don't really know if there will be a good time to increase the speed limits because i don't think it's the safer thing to do i think it's more dangerous it tends to drive more dangerous driving behaviors and it's unnecessary adding to that that sort of course in addition to that there is data showing that as states raise speed limits that that that crashes and fatalities increase and and the difference between a crash at 65 and a crash at 85 is immense when it comes to survivability is that some of these systems while they are great as a as as as sort of a training wheel or a last resort or or a bumper or a guardian someone hold your hand if something potentially goes wrong you cannot rely on these systems and over reliance on these systems can can really really lead you into a bad bad bad bad situation um you know they're they're there to keep you an attentive active driver from making a mistake but if you rely on them to drive the car for you the technology is not there yet automatic emergency braking i think a lot of people don't understand even highway speed automatic emergency braking doesn't guarantee you that it can stop the car it it it says that it can maybe mitigate a a crash from a higher speed by bringing it bring the vehicle speed down to a lower speed crash but it's not going to prevent a crash we're not in a world there are no self-driving cars on on the road today and maybe someday when we have uh fully autonomous vehicles driving around they can go on the highway at you know 200 300 miles an hour but you know we already have these things called trains um that can do that uh and and airplanes that are led by you know they're conducted or piloted by highly trained folks with a great amount of technology and nobody else in the way of them so with cars in traffic it's it's no this isn't this isn't it but an important opportunity for us to get on our safety self box right yeah our very justifiable safety soft box everybody knows i like my safety soapbox but um there was a really interesting step that i read in this i uh ihs study that was released in 2019 and so one of the things that they said is that they found that a five mile per hour increase in the speed limit or like the maximum speed limit was associated with an eight percent increase in fatalities on interstates and highways and i was like that's pretty s that's that feels dramatic right like you're just you don't think much of it when you're just accelerating an additional five miles per hour but for that to equate to an eight percent you know increase in the fatality rate that's that's a lot and it's unless like i'm saying before you know it's unnecessary we don't need to have the ability to be going so fast cause like as keith said the faster you're going you know the greater the risk of injury and fatality um at those severe crashes you know you you can't control a lot of that but you can't control where you're keeping your speed and so bring it down guys yeah you don't say that number would have that number would have to be zero or negative for it to be justifiable right any increase there it's just a non-starter for increasing it yeah and you're not saving that much time even on a long road trip and as my father always used to tell me you'll get there a lot later if you have to go to the hospital first so true that's true that's productive yeah exactly so if you have any questions uh and if you want to argue with us if you if you if you argue with us we love it uh send your questions to talking cars at icloud.com uh we'll we'll try and answer them uh we will answer them and we'll might even just provide you with a different perspective so thanks so much hope to do another one of these all questions episodes soon and thanks for talking cars with us\n"