Anyone who has ridden a motorcycle knows that it’s not the fall that hurts, it’s the sudden stop at the end. If you ride a bike, understand that eventually, you will fall off. For those of you who think it will never happen to you then you’re kidding yourselves. I’ve got loads of seat time on both the road and racetrack and I can tell you from experience that crashing on the street is much, much worse than a track crash. Odds are if you go down on the street, you and your bike have been hit or you have made a miscalculation and are going to hit something… it’s just the way it is.

If you have ever driven one of the more recent Corvettes then you’ve seen GM’s awesome heads up display. Currently it displays speed, RPM’s and g-forces right up there on your windshield. This is all very cool stuff, but what if it could do more? How much more you ask… well, how does this sound.

“We’re looking to create enhanced vision systems,” says Thomas Seder, group lab manager-GM R&D. His team is working with Carnegie Mellon University and The University of Southern California, as well as other institutions, to create a full windshield head-up system leveraging night vision, navigation and camera-based sensor technologies to improve driver visibility and object detection ability.

Want to learn how to heel toe shift? Better do it soon.

The Toyota unintended acceleration debacle has lawmakers pondering ways to keep our highways safe from flaming death. Most obvious is mandating a brake override system on all new cars sold in the United States, currently under consideration by the FHTSA. Just in case you’ve been living in a cave for the past six months and haven’t heard about brake override systems, they eliminate throttle any time the brake is applied. Put another way, the brake pedal takes priority over the accelerator whenever it is depressed.

A spectator at Saturday’s NHRA Arizona Nations was killed in a freak accident, when the left rear tire of Antron Brown’s Top Fuel dragster came loose and bounced into the stands. The woman was airlifted to a local hospital, where she was later pronounced dead.

Video after the jump.

Due to the fact that we up here in the North East are supposed to get about 26,000 feet of snow this weekend, I figured I’d throw up a piece that shows you, the drivers out there, how to combat the white stuff. The first and most obvious way to combat the snow is to simply stay home. If you don’t need to drive in foul weather than don’t. If you must go in the snow or for some reason get stuck in a storm, here’s some quick advice that may help you out.

Japan’s Ministry of Transportation has directed Toyota to investigate a series of consumer complaints related to the braking system on third generation Prius models. These complaints come from customer’s in both Toyota’s domestic market and the United States. While the U.S. National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) has yet to demand a recall of Prius models, the agency is investigating over one hundred complaints related to braking issues in the Prius.

Braking issues reported most commonly occur on rough or icy pavement, which has historically been a challenge for all anti-lock braking systems. Narrow, low rolling resistance tires as used on Prius models may offer increased fuel mileage, but at the expense of traction and braking ability. Could this latest blemish for Toyota simply be a case of operator error, or is it another example of cost savings with a disregard to safety?

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Traction control, anti-lock brakes, BAS (brake assist system), 4-wheel steering, advanced parking guidance system and of course, ESP (electronic stability control). Today’s automobiles have a host of built in safety features to help save us from our own worst enemy… ourselves. Systems that you may not even know about are in place to get you out of trouble and keep your car on the straight and narrow.

The accelerator pedal, right, in a 2010 Toyota Avalon is seen on the show room floor of Bobby Rahal Toyota in Mechanicsburg, Pa. , Wednesday, Nov. 25, 2009.

When the news of Toyota’s spontaneously accelerating vehicles first broke, it was in the form of a grisly accident in Texas involving a Lexus, a jammed accelerator pedal, and 3 unfortunate fatalities. In response to the outcry immediately following the accident Toyota released a 3.8 million vehicle recall, pinning the primary source of the problem on improperly secured floor mats. Suspecting something significantly more sinister at play, a class-action lawsuit sprung up in California alleging that the problem was not with wayward accessories but rather an intrinsic, and fatal, design flaw.

Today, just a few short weeks after the lawsuit was filed, Toyota has recalled the same group of vehicles affected by the flighty floor mats for a different issue: misshapen accelerator pedals. Apparently, Toyota reached the conclusion that jerry-rigging the floor mats was not enough to eliminate the problem entirely and although they have not admitted to any faulty engineering, they do appear to be treating the issue with considerably more severity. In addition to reconfiguring the shape of the accelerator pedal in all vehicles recalled (which includes the bulk of the current line-up), Toyota will also install a brake override system in Camry, Avalon, and Lexus ES 350, IS 350 and IS 250 models.

You knew it was only a matter of time.

In response to the floor mat scandal that’s been slowly gaining steam at the Toyota camp, a group of enterprising ambulance chasers from the California-based law firm of McCuneWright, LLP have filed a class action lawsuit against the Japanese automaker. Spearheading the lawsuit are LA residents and Toyota owners Seong Bae Choi (2004 Camry) and Chris Chan Park (2008 FJ Cruiser) who claim they, along with thousands of other Toyota/Lexus owners, have experienced multiple instances of sudden acceleration.

While it would be convenient to dismiss the lawsuit as opportunistic and the representing firm as precisely what has attributed to America’s embarrassing, “victimized” reputation, the raw data certainly paints a very grim picture. Toyota has maintained that the problem is due to improperly secured floor mats, but the NHTSA has reported that a total of 16 fatalities and 243 injuries have been confirmed as a direct result of sudden unintentional acceleration in Toyota vehicles, which seems more serious than an interior accessory flaw.

Taking a very well-worn page from their Swedish subsidiary’s book, Ford unveiled today the newest innovation in passive safety technology: the world’s first inflatable seat belt. Set to appear for the first time in the 2011 Ford Explorer, Ford claims the new belt combine the most important safety components of an airbag and a seat belt to create the ultimate exercise in overprotective motoring. When deployed, the discreetly folded airbag breaks through the belt and inflates across the passenger’s chest, increasing the diameter of the seat belt and allowing it to act more effectively as a restraining device. “It’s a very simple and logical system, but it required extensive trial and error and testing over several years to prove out the technology and ensure precise reliable performance in a crash situation,” said Srini Sundararajan, safety technical leader for Ford research and advance engineering.

Unlike the death trap for children both seat belts and airbags are often demonized as, Ford’s Inflat-o-Belt (we want credit for that Ford) is safe for use by young children or malnourished adults and supposedly fits more comfortably than a traditional belt. “Ford is pioneering inflatable seat belt technology to help enhance crash safety protection, while encouraging more people to buckle up with a more comfortable belt,” explained Paul Mascarenas, Ford vice president, Engineering, Global Product Development.