Safety

We thrash two identical cars on Jebel Jais, with one big difference

We thrash two identical cars on Jebel Jais, with one big difference

You must’ve heard of Jebel Jais by now. Located in the outskirts of Ras Al Khaimah, it’s the tallest mountain in the United Arab Emirates, at about 1,910 metres. Saudi Arabia has an even taller mountain called the Jabal Sawda, at nearly 3,000 metres, but Jebel Jais has become a tourist spot for a reason — it has a perfectly-paved road leading up to the top. Wide, twisty and clear on a weekday morning, we decided to drive up and down that road in two identical cars. Well, identical in all but one aspect.

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Cars getting hacked is major news now, but don't worry just yet

Cars getting hacked is major news now, but don’t worry just yet

Cyber-security researchers Chris Valasek and Charlie Miller were in the news earlier this week after a Wired magazine story showed the two programmers access critical vehicle controls on a Jeep Cherokee that allowed them to remotely control critical vehicle functions. The Fiat-Chrysler group had already been alerted to the issue and were quietly offering a software fix to customers in a bid to not alert malicious hackers. However, Chrysler is not the first brand to be vulnerable to hacking, as Chevrolet and BMW were in the news for the same reason this year.

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Michelin celebrates 125 years as we thrash Toyota Camrys in tyre-safety demo

Michelin celebrates 125 years as we thrash Toyota Camrys in tyre-safety demo

Michelin is celebrating their 125th anniversary this year, and as part of that, they held a media event at Abu Dhabi’s Yas Marina Circuit. Aside from a massive amount of information about company history, tyre safety and manufacture, as well as a chaperoned stint with some supercars around the race-track, the highlight of the day was the thrashing of Toyota Camry sedans in a tyre-safety demo.

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Mini-cars do poorly in "small overlap" crash test

Mini-cars do poorly in “small overlap” crash test


The Insurance Institute for Highway Safety in the United States runs a unique “small-overlap” crash test where they make all test-subject cars to crash into an immobile object with only part of the frontal area of the car. It is supposed to replicate what happens when the front corner of a vehicle collides with another vehicle or an object such as a tree or a lamp-post. In the test, 25%t of a vehicle’s front end on the driver’s side strikes a rigid barrier at 64 kph. And the 11 mini-cars tested performed poorly, although it’s not a huge surprise.

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Four die as woman stops on highway after flat tyre

Four die as woman stops on highway after flat tyre


Four people were killed when their car rammed into a 4×4 parked in the middle of the road on Sheikh Zayed Highway after it got a flat tyre. Normally we don’t report on accidents caused by the ignorance of people, but we figured we’ll take a look at what you should really do when you get a tyre puncture on the highway.

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"Car-Baked Cookie" campaign highlights dangers of leaving kids locked in cars

“Car-Baked Cookie” campaign highlights dangers of leaving kids locked in cars


AW Rostamani Group, parent company for one of the Nissan dealers in the UAE, have started a campaign to highlight the dangers of heat-buildup for children left in parked cars. Called ‘Car Baked Cookies’, the campaign highlights the temperatures a car’s interior can reach when parked in direct sunlight, by cooking biscuits on the dashboard. They claim it can reach as high as 80° Celsius in there. Their tagline is ‘If it’s hot enough to bake, it’s hot enough to cause death’.

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