Category: cars

Posted on

A Woman Warned Against Propping Your Feet on a Dashboard After Ending up Without a Forehead

When she was 22, Gráinne Kealy got into a car accident in 2007. Her boyfriend at the time was driving, so put her feet up on the dashboard to relax.

Then the couple slipped on some ice and collided with a wall.

She wound up with an uncommon injury because of her seemingly inconsequential decision.

Kealy says,

“My feet were on top of the airbag and, I know now, they inflate at 200mph. The force of that meant my knees were sent back into my face really powerfully. I broke nearly every bone in my face. I had a brain leak [called a CSF (Cerebrospinal Fluid)] and I lost two teeth.”

Kealy and her boyfriend were taken to the hospital for medical attention. They were both okay, but one day she woke up with an infection on her forehead that caused it to slowly sink.

Me with no forehead – wow those eyebrows though ??

Posted by Gráinne Kealy on Thursday, August 10, 2017

Adjusting to life without a forehead was difficult, but necessary because Kealy was without a forehead for two full years.

“For a long time, I was afraid to leave the house. I became a bit of a hermit. I didn’t want to go out and then when I did go out, I would get looks. I bought hats to cover it. I was also worried about banging my head.”

The day before I got my new Italian ceramic forehead…

Posted by Gráinne Kealy on Thursday, 10 August 2017

Doctors were able to construct a replacement for her out of ceramic, but Kealy still suffers from health complications – it isn’t easy to get over brain and head injuries. She now speaks out about her accident so that others won’t end up in her condition.

Posted by Gráinne Kealy on Wednesday, July 24, 2019

Because loads of people put their feet up…

This breaks my heart to think of how many millions of people have seen these celebrities with their feet on the…

Posted by Gráinne Kealy on Sunday, March 31, 2019

So thank you, Gráinne – keep up your advocacy!

Let us know what you think of Kealy’s campaign to raise awareness of this potential safety issue. Share your thoughts in the comments section.

The post A Woman Warned Against Propping Your Feet on a Dashboard After Ending up Without a Forehead appeared first on UberFacts.

Posted on

This Guy Makes Some of the Most Amazing Minibikes You’ll Ever See

I need one of these!

Brent Walter builds all kinds of amazing motorcycles that you have to see to believe.

Walter uses the fenders from classic Volkswagen Beetles to build his custom Volkspod minibikes, and they look sick. He said, “I wanted a scooter to take to VW shows. These fenders were left over from building my car. I also wanted to practice welding the thin sheet metal panels.”

Looks like he hit this project out of the park! Take a look.

1. Look at that beauty!

2. Still a work in progress.

3. That is a nice looking bike.

4. The Volkspod in action.

5. Another one of Walter’s restoration projects.

6. I’d love to have one of these.

7. Beep! Beep!

8. Stripped down to the bones.

View this post on Instagram

Big guy on a little scooter. #minibike #volkspod

A post shared by Brent Walter (@walter_werks) on

9. Here comes trouble.

View this post on Instagram

Cold day for a ride. #volkspod

A post shared by Brent Walter (@walter_werks) on

10. These are so cool.

Walter’s work is amazing, isn’t it?

I’m a huge fan!

The post This Guy Makes Some of the Most Amazing Minibikes You’ll Ever See appeared first on UberFacts.

Posted on

This Is How Far You Can Actually Drive After Your Gas Tank Reads Empty

There are two types of people in this world: people who get gas when the gauge drops below half a tank, and people who wait for their gas light to come on, drive a while longer, and then stop to fill up at the last minute.

As someone who falls into the latter category, I’ve long argued that the light is just a warning, and if you’ve got 20 or 30 miles left after it lights up, why hurry?

https://www.instagram.com/p/B4msShGjG–/

But am I right? I don’t know about you, but I’m dying to find out.

Well, lucky for me (and everyone else who likes to push the needle all the way past E, auto repair service YourMechanic has put together a handy chart that will let you know – based on the make and model of your car – how far you can go after your light comes on.

Image Credit: YourMechanic

You’ll definitely want to check, too, because it ranges from over 100 miles (the Chrysler 200) to less than 30 in a Chevy Silverado.

My Honda can go another 60, so you’d better believe I’ll be wagging my finger at my overly cautious fella the next time he says we definitely need to stop!

That said, there are like, sensible reasons to not push it so hard. Your car’s fuel pump burns hotter near empty than it does on a full tank, so if you do it all the time, you’ll burn your pump out faster.

So, YourMechanic recommends you use their chart for emergency situations only.

The post This Is How Far You Can Actually Drive After Your Gas Tank Reads Empty appeared first on UberFacts.

Posted on

A Teenage Girl Invented a Simple and Innovative Way to Get Rid of Your Car’s Blind Spots

The creative spirit and innovation of young people is so refreshing! Sometimes, they have the best ideas because they’re thinking forward while a lot of us older folks are set in our ways. In other words, when a young person has an idea about something, listen up, because it might turn out to be a game-changer.

That’s what happened with a 14-year-old named Alaina Gassler, who came up with a project called “Improving Automobile Safety by Removing Blind Spots” for the Broadcom MASTERS competition, which features science and engineering projects from middle schoolers.

Gassler built the system with a webcam, a projector, and other 3D-printed materials, and together it all works to fill in the space that a car’s frame blocks from drivers’ view.

Gassler hails from West Grove, Pennsylvania, and she took first place in the competition and won the $25,000 Samueli Foundation Prize. Her invention works like this: she mounted a webcam outside the passenger side of the car, which steams a live video onto the inside pillar of the passenger side from a projector attached to the sunroof above the driver’s seat.

Gassler also resurfaced the interior frame with a retro reflective fabric to make the projection clear. She said the material “only reflects light back to the light source, which is the projector in this case. Since the driver’s eyes are next to the projector, the driver can see a crisp, clear image, and the passengers only see a black piece of fabric.”

Take a look at the video below to see it in action.

This is quite impressive, I must say. Great work, Ms. Gassler, and we’ll be looking for more work from you in the future.

These kids today, I’ll tell ya…

The post A Teenage Girl Invented a Simple and Innovative Way to Get Rid of Your Car’s Blind Spots appeared first on UberFacts.

Posted on

Google Maps Is Adding Alerts for Speed Traps and Other Road Incidents

Are you one of the drivers out there who sticks to Waze for navigation purposes because it lets you know other useful info, such as where police cars are hiding in wait to give you a speeding ticket? Well, you can soon switch to Google Maps and enjoy the same perks.

Google Maps is finally adding this feature to its own navigation system. Users will be able to report speed traps, crashes, road closures, construction, slowdowns, disabled vehicles and objects on the road. Some of those updates are already available on Android devices, but they’re now being rolled out globally to Apple users as well.

Photo Credit: iStock

“This feature has been one of our most popular on Android, and we’re excited to expand it to iOS,” Google Product Manager Sandra Tseng wrote in a recent blog post.

“Google Maps has always helped people get from point A to B in the easiest way possible. Today, we’re adding more tools that reflect real-time contributions from the community so you can stay even more informed when you’re behind the wheel.”

Photo Credit: Google

Submitting a report through Google Maps is simple and streamlined. You simply tap on the + sign and then click “Add a report.”

Unlike on Waze, there’s no option to add comments or photos to your report, so there’s less detail available — but also less clutter.

This is exactly the sort of thing I like in an update. It’s easy, it’s useful, and it makes me actually want to bother to go through with downloading new software.

The post Google Maps Is Adding Alerts for Speed Traps and Other Road Incidents appeared first on UberFacts.

Posted on

The miniskirt is named after…

The miniskirt is named after the Mini Cooper and not the skirt’s size. The designer, Mary Quant loved Mini Cooper cars and named the garment after them, saying that car and skirt were both “optimistic, exuberant, young, flirty,” and complemented each other.

Posted on

Tailgating the Car Ahead of You Through Endless Lights Won’t Help You at All

Gridlock is the worst, isn’t it? You’ve already sat though one light cycle, and with this long line of cars also waiting to get through, it looks like you may be sitting through another one. But although it’s tempting to ride the guy’s bumper in front of you through the light, science says that won’t help you at all.

Photo Credit: Flickr

Tailgating is never a good idea. But when you’re desperate to make it through a red light, doesn’t it make sense to minimize the space between you and the next car?

With all the collisions that happen at intersections, researchers from Duke University and Virginia Tech wanted to put the desire to squeeze through a traffic light on someone else’s tail to the test. Their study, which wound up showing some surprising results, was published in the Journal of Physics in November of 2017.

For the test, researchers had volunteers sit in 10 Chevrolet Impalas lined up at a red traffic light on a test road. The cars were at varying distances from each other. When the light turned green, drivers were told to accelerate at a “normal and comfortable fashion.” Meanwhile, a drone recorded their speeds.

Photo Credit: Needpix

When researchers analyzed the film, they found the tailgating cars took as long to get through the light as the cars stopped up to 25 feet behind the car in front. How does that work?

To explain, the researchers compared the findings to melting ice. The extra energy, or “latent heat,” it takes to get ice to begin melting is like the amount of time it takes a car to accelerate from a full stop. Cars close to the bumper of the car in front of them have to wait until the entire line of cars begins to melt to accelerate safely.

In the words of the researchers, “the ‘temperature’ (kinetic energy) of the vehicles cannot increase until the traffic ‘melts’ into the liquid phase.”

Photo Credit: Flickr

Which means that it takes more time for a tailgater to accelerate, while a driver who stops further back can accelerate faster – and they both wind up moving at the same pace.

Who knew? So stop tailgating and enjoy the ride. We’ll all get to where we’re going eventually.

The post Tailgating the Car Ahead of You Through Endless Lights Won’t Help You at All appeared first on UberFacts.

Posted on

A Person Using Google Earth Spotted a Car in a Florida Pond and Solved a Dark 22-Year-Old Mystery

This is a tragic story with an sad ending, but at least the family members involved can now have some closure after 22 whole years.

No one had heard from William Earl Moldt, a 40-year-old man from Lake Worth, Florida, since November 7, 1997, when he called his girlfriend to tell her he was leaving a nightclub and would be arriving home shortly.

North America: United States The mystery of a missing Florida man has been solved 22 years on, thanks to Google…

Posted by TSC International News Channel on Friday, September 13, 2019

Then, Moldt disappeared.

On August 28 of this year, a Lake Worth man was looking at Google Earth images of his neighborhood when he noticed something unusual in a pond. Upon closer inspection, the man noticed that the object was a sunken vehicle that was not visible from ground level.

Authorities were alerted and the car turned out to be a 1994 Saturn SL with skeletal remains inside and they were later identified as belonging to Moldt. In a statement, the Palm Beach County Sheriff’s office said, “The vehicle’s exterior was heavily calcified and was obviously in the water for a significant amount of time.”

The pond where Moldt’s car ended up was under construction when he disappeared in 1997, and it’s unclear how his car ended up in the water.

Although the story sounds outrageous, it is a fairly common occurrence for cars to end up in waterways. In Florida alone, there were 168 water-related deaths from car accidents between 2011 and 2016. According to the missing-persons website NAMUS, Moldt “was not a frequent drinker but did have several drinks at the bar” the night he disappeared.

The post A Person Using Google Earth Spotted a Car in a Florida Pond and Solved a Dark 22-Year-Old Mystery appeared first on UberFacts.

Posted on

When Toyota introduced its first…

When Toyota introduced its first model in the USA, the Crown, in 1957, they attempted a common American advertising stunt – an endurance run from Los Angeles to New York. However, the car barely managed to reach Las Vegas.