Your the Most Important Nut to Tighten in Your Vehicle

Transportation safety regularly relates to the drivers skill & attention level, focusing on safety & being polite, respectful, careful & observing rules of the road, obeying transportation laws & regulations! Most vehicle accidents are caused by human error, made worse by tiredness, intoxication, anger or stress. People make driving mistakes when they are distracted, when their focus broken or diverted by looking at their phone screen or making radio adjustments or looking in the back of the vehicle!

Pay attention when operating a motor vehicle. The situation around & in-front of your vehicle can & probably will change suddenly without warning. Think situational awareness & focus on driving safety, riding safety or operating that motor vehicle safely! You as the driver are in control of whether or not an accident happens, if you are predicting & thinking ahead & anticipating potential hazards so that your can respond & react fast enough to prevent an accident by steering around the hazard or braking soon enough to stop before impacting a person, other vehicle or infrastructure! 

While advanced driver assist or ADAS functions present as base model features of many new automobiles from most automakers in the world today, as of late 2022, the majority of vehicles on the worlds roadways are not brand new with the latest versions of these compute module based driver assists, like VSC or vehicle stability control, ESC or electronic stability control, AEB or automatic emergency breaking, CP or collision prevention, LKA or lane keep assist, or many other autopilot or autonomous vehicle computer innovations safety enhancing & traction assisting technologies, features & functions. 

While self driving vehicles are rapidly developing, it will be a long time before human drivers are removed from their roles as control operators of common vehicles. The vehicle lifecycle from new from manufacturing to end of life scrapping or recycle takes somewhere around 20 years. This means the compute in cars has to be much more durable, temperature extreme tolerant & vibration resistant than common consumer electronics like smartphones or smartwatches or other IOT wearable technologies, frequently powered by small lithium polymer batteries with chipsets made using ASML's latest deep UV lithography for 5nm power efficient CMOS fabrication lithography manufacturing technologies, at TSMC in Taiwan for example, the worlds largest IC or integrated circuit manufacturer, like Intel in many ways! 

Given the functions, features & value offered by these compute assist elements in modern automobiles, the global chip shortage made it so that many vehicle manufacturers had to stop production, without the critical computer chips & compute modules, of which many modern cars have more than 100 onboard custom android like solid state heatsink passive cooled compute modules, the automakers could not build their new cars, trucks & SUV's. Huge national grands & government financial assurances packages were given to Chip Makers to stimulate increased volume production so that automakers like GM, Ford & others could resume making their products, vehicles, specifically passenger vehicles that sell by the millions annually worldwide! There are more smokers in China than people in the USA, and the car market in China similarly the largest in the world. As china continues industrializing, the people in China are becoming wealthier & want to buy their first car! The head of GM manufacturing in China said the world would run out of steel before they ran out of Chinese car buyers looking to buy a new car! 

So with so many new drivers in the world, how do we improve traffic safety? With each person! Each person must be trained & educated & rigorously tested & certified to be a safe driver. So many people die or a badly injured with life long debilitating injuries from automobile accidents, most of which are preventable if we improved driver fitness & driver skill levels with more training, testing & harder to pass certifications; written, oral, & driving tests in first person with a trained instructor who tests the divers skill levels & records their review & gives the driver a score! 

IR & UV & visible light imaging sensors, in the steering wheel, can be used with computers & software applications to determine if the driver is fit to operate the vehicle, by analyzing the blood flow patterns in the face, eye movements, head movements, breathing rate, skin temperature & other variables & comparing against a database of known models, to tell the driver "You are clear" or "You need more sleep before operating this vehicle" "The system has detected alcohol in your system" "You appear intoxicated by marijuana or similar psychoactive", there is "Too much caffeine in your body" or similar, to disable the vehicle from being piloted by someone who is not ready or fit to safely operate a heavy dangerous vehicle on public roads, where a slight mistake can cause a deadly or worse vehicle accident! 

I have been operating bicycles, scooters, motorcycles, cars, trucks, busses, and other vehicles on public roadways since I was 10 years old. I got my diverse license & motorcycle open class endorsement at 16 years of age. I started driving an old cheap used car with a learners permit at 15.5 years old. Now I am 39, with more than 2 decades & over a million miles of driving experience! I am a professional driver with a CDL who previously worked as a school bus driver! I ride Segway self balancing scooter regularly for sport fun & enjoyment! I love bicycles & love riding bicycles! I love motorcycles & motor scooters & have one of each & ride them on public roads- with motorcycle & scooter insurance, wearing safety protection gear, operating them safe, sober & safely, which is why I am still around to talk about it, or write about it here! 

I am highly biased on the topic of transportation safety. My sister Erika Lynn Schwarz was killed by a teenage driver trying to drive a car with bald tires up a steep hill during a winter snow storm. She was making a snow angel in the front yard, when the car slid backwards jumping the curb, the car's bumper striking her head. She was in the hospital on life support for a while, but my parents were forced to pull the plug. I had to write this section through tears because of how it still hurts to talk about it! I don't want anyone, especially children, to die because of vehicle accidents that can be prevented by making sure your vehicle in good working order, with tires in good condition with the correct operating pressure & paying attention so you do not hurt yourself or other people or kill yourself or other people with a preventable vehicle accident, that could have been avoided if you were paying attention to safe driving as the driver of your vehicle! 

The young man who was responsible for the the accident that killed my sister, Bart, never forgave himself, telling my family that his life has been ruinous because of it & that he hated himself for killing Erika through carelessness. I the holy name of God & in accordance with the Holy Name of Christ Jesus I forgive Bart of his mistake & deadly accident. After all, he was only trying to get home from work, at Albersons in Eastgate, South Bellevue, Washington State, USA. He was only 16 years old & the vehicle with bald tires was his first car. His parents are mostly negligent of not making sure his car had good tires, as a teenage boy could not possibly, in most cases, be an expert about vehicle safety! 

I was riding my bicycle up a steep mountain as an adolescent when a diesel truck drove past fogging me with toxic stinky exhaust. I thought "Here I am exercising full out riding my bicycle up a steep mountain to get home, and this man here in this dirty antique truck burning diesel is seated not breathing hard, while his vehicle emits toxic tailpipe particles or PM that are damaging to lung tissue, oxides of nitrogen that are toxic & bad for the environment & copious amounts of CO & CO2- that he was likely only mildly aware of or cognizant of. 

I see other motorists doing dumb things in traffic all the time & it really upsets me. I do not think driving is a right, I believe driving is a special privilege & that not all people are fit to be drivers or parents. I think only high quality people should be allowed to operate motor vehicles on public roadways & that the state should be inspecting these vehicles to make sure they are in safe working order, so that an equipment failure very unlikely to be the main causal factor behind an accident! Sometimes equipment failures, part failures, tire blowouts, wheel bearing failures, steering linkages failures & brake failures do cause accidents, but 99% of roadway accidents between vehicles due to driver error. 

That is why you as the driver are the most important nut to tighten in your vehicle, for public safety. Its the same reason that pollution is evil, because pollution harms public health & its bad for the environments of Earth where our air, water & food comes from! Everything on Earth is connected, including all people, all nature, all life on Earth connected in the biosphere. That is why we need to phase out carbon combustion & make an electric society & electric transportation energized by nuclear breeder reactors & renewable energy + energy storage!