Safety

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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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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The recently-publicised distance-tracking radars on Dubai’s highways went online today to photograph tailgating behaviour by motorists who do not keep a mandatory minimum 5-metre space between vehicles when travelling over 80kph.

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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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The UAE Ministry of Interior has announced that people caught applying makeup or combing their hair while driving will be fined.

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An international crash-test agency called Global NCAP conducted the first ever independent crash tests for some of the most popular cars in India, several of which are also sold in the Middle East.

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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 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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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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This week, the Atlantis hotel in Dubai goes green with Mercedes-Benz hybrids, Abu Dhabi is thinking of reducing the mimimum driving age, some 2014 Cadillac CTS surface, and Bridgestone promotes tyre safety in Doha.

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