The Good Oil: Nissan on the ball with safety

NZ Herald

7 Nov, 2014 10:05 PM5 mins to read

Nissan's Note has gone Zorbing in Rotorua. Photos / Supplied

While The Good Oil is sure most of us have owned cars we would quite happily have thrown down the side of a mountain, we never really expected a manufacturer to do it with one of its own cars.

But Nissan has ... with a slightly different angle.

The Japanese manufacturer recently sent one of its cars Zorbing for a promotional video.
Zorbing - putting yourself inside a large inflatable ball and rolling down a hill - originated in New Zealand and is what foreigners do when they go to Rotorua.

Nissan decided to stick a Versa Note inside a giant Zorb and roll it down a hill to "highlight how technology can keep cars safe".

Sadly this doesn't mean that the company is working on a system that encases the car in a giant inflatable ball just before it hits something - which would be awesome.

Rather it is to showcase Nissan's "Safety Shield" technology, fitted in the latest generation of Nissans.

We are the world

• Smoking is bad for you. It can cause several nasty diseases. And it also seems it can make you run over your own head. While that last one isn't quite so common, it did happen to a man in Aurora, Colorado, recently. Apparently the man dropped his lit cigarette down the front of his jacket, causing him to jump out of his van to remove it.

Sadly, he failed to put the handbrake on and the van rolled backwards, knocking him over and running over his head. He has some pretty serious injuries, but doctors say he will survive. Might want to kick that smoking habit though.

• Police in Michigan, in the United States, have outdone themselves with a recent "high-speed" chase - a total of 11 police cars were involved in the pursuit of 28-year-old Richard Shear after he used a knife and a sledgehammer to threaten his mother and girlfriend, before attempting to set a house on fire. Shear's getaway vehicle of choice? Um ... a scooter ...

Going off-road in the lap of limo-style luxury

While Ford is naturally focusing on the Mustang at this year's SEMA show, it hasn't forgotten the other end of its vehicle spectrum, with the company also showing a range of customised vans, including what is possibly the most excellent Transit of all time.

That would be the incredible Vegas Off-Road Experience (VORE) Transit that is part van, part off-road race truck, part luxury limo.

The VORE Transit features chunky off-road wheels and tyres, as well as custom LED interior lighting, five LED flat screens, a 60-inch LED flat-screen partition, a large-screen TV for external viewing, a video gaming station, touch-screen tablet controls, LED light bars and HID headlamps.

After being displayed at the SEMA show, VORE will use the luxury Transit van to transport guests at its off-road events in Nevada.

Quick and the dead - it's super-hearse

The world's fastest hearse is now even more powerful.

In 2008 Arne Toman, who is vice-president of a company called AMS Performance, saw that the Guinness record for the fastest hearse was a 13.72-second quarter mile (402m).
While most people would think "What? Why? I just ... I don't ..", Toman saw it as something he could beat.

So he bought a hearse - a converted 1996 Chevrolet Caprice - and turned it into a drag car named "Madness".
The Madness Hearse has a 6-litre turbo LQ4 Chevy V8 that pumps out 746kW at 23psi turbo boost, and it quickly destroyed the record by nailing a quarter-mile run in 9.94 seconds.

But what makes it even more impressive is that Toman insisted that the car be kept as a fully usable, street-legal hearse - that means it still has a stereo, air conditioning and the rear deck and roller system for loading coffins.

Roman says the hearse can easily be driven anywhere comfortably, with the A/C and stereo blasting.

Since setting the record, Toman has reworked the engine and put in a new transmission and rear differential that will give 970kW.

He is now aiming for a 9.5-second quarter mile and a 200mph (322km/h) run on a closed runway.

Madness indeed ...

Broadening horizons

As Americans continue to grow fatter the automotive industry has adapted to suit.
While this usually means bigger cupholders, wider seats and stronger suspension, one part of the industry has had to tackle the issue in a more head-on sense. Quite literally, in some cases.

Humanetics, a company that has been developing and manufacturing crash test dummies since the 1950s, has produced a prototype that weighs in at 124kg and has a body mass index (BMI) of 35, five points higher than what the US National Heart, Lung and Blood Institute classifies as obese.

"Obese people are 78 per cent more likely to die in a crash," Chris O'Connor, head of Humanetics, told CNN in a recent interview. "The reason is the way we get fat. We get fat in our middle range. And we get out of position in a typical seat."

While the firm is also working on a crash test dummy for the elderly, it would seem that the era of the crash test dummy is on its way out.

Instead, the industry is now going more towards computational modelling.