Out for a ride! 7-foot long pet snake safely rescued after it sneaks inside a BMW Mini

July 13, 2013 at 3:43 pm

(H/T THV11.com)

A Florida woman had an unusual request when she pulled into the Vista BMW in Coconut Creek on Monday morning. Her 7-foot-long pet boa constrictor had gotten loose in her Mini Cooper, and she needed help pulling it out. And the mechanics complied. Safely rescued the animal by removing a tail light, and gently extracting it without much difficulty.  Apparently, the mechanic who did the deed seems to have Ophidiophobia (Yeah, that’s the word for fear of snakes) but he still braved himself for the task just because it was someone’s pet and he knows what it means to the owner.  Good man. Read the full story here.

IIHS: New crash tests demonstrate the influence of vehicle size and weight on safety in crashes – Smart forTwo & Toyota Yaris score poorly

April 14, 2009 at 6:11 pm

Smart USA quickly responds to IIHS crash test results

(Source:  AutoblogJalopnik IIHS)

This morning’s IIHS report on the shocking finding that little cars don’t take well to colliding, at speed, with bigger cars.  Three front-to-front crash tests, each involving a microcar or minicar into a midsize model from the same manufacturer, show how extra vehicle size and weight enhance occupant protection in collisions. These Insurance Institute for Highway Safety tests are about the physics of car crashes, which dictate that very small cars generally can’t protect people in crashes as well as bigger, heavier models.

“There are good reasons people buy minicars,” says Institute president Adrian Lund. “They’re more affordable, and they use less gas. But the safety trade-offs are clear from our new tests. Equally clear are the implications when it comes to fuel economy. If automakers downsize cars so their fleets use less fuel, occupant safety will be compromised. However, there are ways to serve fuel economy and safety at the same time.”

 Now Jalopnik has some of these crash videos here.

The three tests we have are between the Honda Accord and the Honda Fit, the Toyota Camry and Toyota Yaris, and finally the Mercedes C300 and the Smart ForTwo. With each we get a full speed offset frontal crash with both cars traveling at 40 MPH, destruction and carnage ensue and rightly so, there’s a lot of energy involved here. These are hardly scientific tests, and they represent the absolute most extreme crash scenario for these speeds, especially for the smaller cars. Ratings got from “Good” at the top of the scale through “Acceptable” and “Poor.” Considering this is one car bashing into another, the evaluation is somewhat subjective, but it gives an idea of relative performance. Let’s take a closer look at each.

 Click here to read the entire article and to watch two other awesome videos.  Seen below is the IIHS report in PDF format.  To download the report, please visit the IIHS website

P.S:  According to AutoBlog, folks over at Smart USA were not pleased to see the results of the latest batch of crash testing from the Insurance Institute for Highway Safety. The IIHS did a series of frontal offset crash tests between small and mid-size cars, one of which included a smart ForTwo versus a Mercedes C300. While the results may have been what most people expected, they don’t correlate with the ForTwo’s results in standardized tests where the IIHS rates the smart as good in front and side impacts. The feds at the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration give the smart 4 stars on frontal impact and 5 on side impact. 

The problem, as Smart USA sees it, is that the IIHS devised a test that no automaker has designed to and that they claim only represents about one percent of real world accidents. Smart has even set up a site for customer testimonials about the crash safety performance of their ForTwo. Typically, in the past, Smarts have actually done quite well in similar vehicle-on-vehicle tests, such as the ones conducted by Mercedes and Auto Motor und Sport after the jump.