Consumer Electronics Show (CES) 2011 show report.

CES 2011

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08/18/2014 07:11 AM
The escalating "arms war" in car "safety".
There's an interesting (and faulty) assumption that too many drivers make today : that you need a big car to be safe. In the US especially, super-sized SUVs are regarded as being super-safe because of their size. The problem is that when manufacturer A builds a slightly bigger one, then manufacturer B has to follow suit and then the car buyers see the bigger vehicle and assume that it must be safer. Never mind gas-mileage. Never mind practicality and usability, forward or rear visibility. Never mind that an increasing number of people are so dwarfed by their vehicles that they can't safely operate them. No - size is king, and when it comes to mothers with kids on the school run, absolute size rules at the expense of actual safety, common sense and logic.
This is going to come across as sexist, but it's a simple matter of geometry. Women, generally speaking, are smaller than men. When a decent-sized man can't get in or out of their SUV without adding steps and handles, and has to push the steering wheel down and the seat forwards just to be able to operate it, explain to me how a shorter woman who can barely see over the steering wheel is going to be able to safely operate the car. They can't. But they compensate by having the mental attitude that because it's bigger, it must be safer.
I have, sadly, two direct examples where the bigger vehicle lost out in a good sized smash. The first one was a Ford F-150 that hit my wife in her Toyota Yaris. Both vehicles were written off, so right there the 'bigger is better' mantra is undone because the damage to the F-150 turned out to be much more severe than the damage to the Yaris. Both drivers were injured. My wife only mildly - airbag and seatbelt burns. The F-150 driver was hospitalised for two days and had a broken leg. Again - bigger does not equal better.
The second example was when my own car - my Evoque - was pit-manuevered by a woman in an oversized SUV who didn't see me because she couldn't see around the blind spots and/or was more concerned with her children in the back than she was with the act of driving. The end of my spinout resulted in me hitting a parked Nissan Armada. Both the woman's SUV and the parked Nissan Armada were written off - they folded up like newspaper. It was shocking to see. My Evoque needed repairs, but was not written off because structurally it survived without any faults. The most surprising aspect was exactly how badly the Armada was damaged. The front of my car had a pushed-in bumper, a bent frame-end hangar (where the bumper is mounted) and then obviously radiator and headlight damage. The Armada exploded it's front wheel and tyre, bent the frame on both sides, folded the hood into the windshield, bent the passenger side door so badly it couldn't be opened, and utterly destroyed the roof. The headlight and radiator were done for, as was the a/c compressor, the water pump and most of the other ancilliary items on the front of the engine.
But yeah - bigger is better, right?

Original post date: January 9th 2011
I've just returned from CES, or Nerdopolis as I like to call it. The Consumer Electronics Show is the single largest gathering of technology for 4 days a year, held annually at the Las Vegas convention centre. It's never open to the public, yet they turn over about 130,000 attendees a day purely from trade. I was there for my own personal reasons but also to scope out what was new and up-and-coming in the world of cars.

The only two car manufacturers to have an official presence at the show were Ford and Audi. Ford were showcasing the new Fiesta and Focus, or more specifically the technologies behind the two new cars including their Sync system for hooking up digital devices directly to the cars. Audi were showcasing their latest generation heads-up display technology (HUDS), virtual dashboards, entertainment systems, and full-electric vehicles (under their e-tron moniker). There was an e-tron Audi A2 and an R8 to drool over.

Plenty of other manufacturers were there in spirit though because their vehicles were being used by car audio manufacturers to showcase their latest wares. Plenty of Lambourghinis, a couple of Ferraris, some Fords, one or two Japanese JDM cars and a single Chevy Volt - oddly enough on the Verizon exhibit. Go figure.



In terms of accessories, the north halls were full of all the small vendors - the home-brew types who typically nearly bankrupt their startups simply to get booth space at CES. I browsed all these stands - many from China - and turned up three items that I think the average car nerd would be interested in. The first two take two different approaches to the same problem - mounting your smart device inside your car.

The Convex Pad Company (Korea) had about the best solution I've seen. You know how most of the suction cup mounts require you to stick a plastic pad to your dash so their suction cup can use that? It's because suction cups don't work on textured dashboards. CPC have solved this problem by surrounding the suction cup with a slightly padded, tacky doughnut (for want of a better description). The stick material is a stronger version of what you find on PostIt notes and it means that the suction pad can create an airtight seal even with a textured surface. When you unstick it, it leaves no residue behind. They had clips and holders for just about every cellphone and GPS on the market, and a 'universal' design which was also clever. It was simply a non-specific bracket that you could rest any device in, with two tabs at the bottom to support it, and a blob of the sticky stuff on the back to grip the device in the bracket. I get the impression that CPC really are a startup - I think both of the guys behind the company were at the show, and of all the hundreds of mounting options on show at CES this year, theirs was far and away the best of the show. CPC car mounts.

Second best were Tetrax (Italy) who took a slightly different approach. Their version has a miniature twist-clamp that you can attach to one of the vanes in a dash vent (EGO and GEO mounts). The little claw is tightened by screwing the collar and the back of the collar has 4 high strength magnets in it. You stick a little button to the back of your device, and it then sticks into the dimple in the magnets. They also had a hard, rubber x-shaped frame (XWAY) that would fit around the outside of the magnet collar to provide four extra contact points at the back of your device to stabilise it so you could use it in-car (rather than simply using their system as a holder). Textrax gadget mounts.

The final gadget is for GM and Ford tuners. Everyone who's fiddled with their cars knows about the OBDII port and there are plenty of devices out there that allow you to retrieve codes, have realtime readouts and such but they all require a cable - normally an OBDII-to-USB connection to a laptop. SCT Performance have the solution for i-devices - their OBDII plug is a two-way bluetooth transceiver. You plug their device into your OBDII port, pair it over bluetooth with your iPod, iPad or iPhone and your device then has (via their app) realtime readouts from your car. Because of the accelerometers built into iPods etc, you also have the ability to do far more accurate acceleration and performance testing (because it is streaming data from the onboard system at the same time). And finally, their system allows you to performance-tune your fuel and ignition maps on-the-fly. They claim that they keep a copy of the "raw", unchanged maps at all times so if you cock something up, you can return to a known good state. But the idea is that you fiddle with some settings, then use their system to go and do a quarter mile run to see if it made any difference. Fiddle again, race again. etc until you end up with a mapping that suits your racing or driving needs, or you've cocked it up so badly that you need to re-install the stock maps. SCT Performance iTSX wireless vehicle tuning.