Taking a cue from a recent recommendation by the National Transportation Safety Board, a legislative proposal in California would require that new vehicles be equipped with “intelligent” speed restrictive technology to limit speed in specific locations.
If it were to pass, the bill, put forward by San Francisco state Sen. Scott Wiener, would require cars and trucks of the 2027 model year or later that are built or sold in California to include speed governors that would prohibit motorists from driving more than 10 mph over posted speed limits.
The speed “governor” technology relies on GPS data or car cameras to cap vehicle speeds based on where the car is driving. For instance, vehicles wouldn’t be able to drive faster than 80 mph on state highways with a posted 70 mph speed. In residential neighborhoods, for example, motorists would have to keep their speed below 35 mph on streets with 25 mph limits.
Several auto manufacturers, such as Hyundai, already offer speed governor features in their newest models, which some motorists utilize as a form of cruise control, according to the San Francisco Chronicle.
“We have speed limits, and they exist for a reason. And it’s perfectly reasonable to say you can’t travel more than 10 miles over the speed limit,” Wiener said. “That’s what this bill will do. It’s very reasonable, and it’s an idea whose time has come.” The bill exempts emergency vehicles, such as ambulances and fire trucks, and the California Highway Patrol would have the discretion to disable speed governors on their vehicles.
One factor motivating the passage of the bill are reports that speed factors into about a third of traffic deaths across the country, according to the National Safety Council. The National Highway Safety Administration estimated more than 40,000 traffic fatalities in 2022.
Last November, the National Transportation Safety Board, prompted by a multi-vehicle crash in North Las Vegas that resulted in nine fatalities, recommended that the federal government “at a minimum” require speed limiters in cars that warn drivers when they’re speeding.
I was leaving the local butcher shop the other week when a bigger carnivore blocked my path: The driver of a Ford pickup was struggling to park his rig. It was the most-super of Super Duties — a crew cab long-box dually — so it took him a couple of minutes and several cuts of the wheel to ease the beast into a prime spot near the store entrance. He was holding up a lot of traffic.
That’s a tight parking lot, with spaces 8-8½ feet wide. And the width of that dually at the hips? Also 8 feet. What was he thinking? Other than, “I’d rather do this than go find an easy spot on the back row and walk 50 yards.” Maybe he had a bum knee. Doesn’t make his truck any smaller.
Granted, this was over the holidays, when parking lots get a little nuts. But why do drivers of big pickups or jumbo SUVs try to park among the normies?
We’ve all been in this situation: You return to your vehicle to discover somebody parked too close. You have to crawl in through the back hatch, or enter on the passenger side and clamber over the center console. Sometimes this is simply because of a bad parking job. Sometimes, a vehicle has been jammed into a space where it honestly doesn’t fit.
A Sienna and Escalade in 8½-foot spaces, about 18 inches apart. The minivan was there first; somehow the slender driver managed to slip out of the Escalade. But hey, she scored a spot close-in.
A typical parking space is 8 feet, or 96 inches. Sometimes 8½-9 feet. Perhaps not surprisingly, lots are not always striped very precisely. I’ve measured spots ranging from 7 to 10 feet wide in the same lot. Also, there might be regional differences — perhaps they’re bigger in Texas. A sedan or small to medium SUV fits a typical spot just fine: A Honda Accord is 73 inches wide, a Toyota Corolla 70; CR-V and RAV4 are 73ish. If you’re dead-centered in an 8-foot space, that leaves about a foot of that space on each side. Assuming the same thing of the car parked next to you, you have 2 feet of room to exit. That’s comfortable.
Those are the cars these spaces were made for.
But the trend toward bigger vehicles has made things uncomfortable. Full-size pickups are notoriously bigger than they were just a few years ago. They’re around 80 inches, with Silverado at over 81. That’s body width; some truck mirrors can span a full parking spot. Extreme examples are duallies, Cybertruck “Cyberbeast” at almost 87, Raptor at 87 inches, GMC Hummer at 87, Ram TRX at 88. Let’s hope you rarely encounter those at a mall.
A Ford Maverick at under 73 inches, though, provides a welcome bit of cognitive dissonance: It’s a pickup, yet look at all this room! You can park it anywhere.
Midsize to large SUVs are 78-80 inches. Suburban/Tahoe/Escalade, 81. Jeep Grand Wagoneer is 83.6”, surpassing most pickups. Minivans are 80ish, but God bless sliding doors.
You’d think 6-8-10 inches wider than a sedan shouldn’t make much difference, but for, ahem … some of us … who are trying to squeeze out a door, it matters.
There’s a Golden Rule aspect to all this. Crowding your big truck into a too-small spot feels like the controversy over whether to recline your seat on a packed plane.
One of my personal vehicles is a Volvo XC90, 79 inches. Let’s do that math: 96 minus 79 leaves 8.5 inches on each side. If next to a Civic or something, that’s fine, your door can open into their space. But alongside another big vehicle — and odds are, it will be — you’ve got 17 inches between. As a frame of reference, the first detent on the Volvo’s front door is 21 inches; the rear door’s first detent is 23 inches. So, 17 is a tight squeeze. In the XC90, I pass up a lot of spots.
None of this is a knock on big vehicles; people have their reasons for buying them. But they park in suboptimal spaces because that’s what’s available. A study last year concluded that we bigger Americans in bigger cars need bigger spaces. In an ideal world, rather than maximizing the number of spots, retailers and those who design parking lots and garages would address the big-vehicle trend. Yeah, right.
This Washington state government guideline suggests 9 feet wide for diagonal spots, 10 feet for perpendicular. Nobody here seems to be doing that. I’ve stepped off an isolated 10-footer or two where the painters simply didn’t divide the spaces evenly. But it’s more common to see 7.5 than 10. Which brings up those spots labeled “compact.” Drivers desperate for a space will ignore that guidance and jam anything in there. A medical building garage near here has a row of 14 spots marked “compact” on each of four floors — they’re just 7 feet wide. That’s not a mistake, that’s a concerted effort to cram cars in and maximize parking fees. The same goes for pay lots in downtown city cores.
However, this next thing is great: Occasionally you’ll see thoughtfully painted buffer zones between spots. Praise be to any merchant who does that, let’s give those businesses our patronage and dollars. In this Safeway lot, the spaces are 8½ to 9 feet, with a foot of DMZ between them. It’s such a comfortable space that some cars were parked lazily crooked, but it wasn’t a problem. Love the DMZ:
There’s a Golden Rule aspect to all this. Crowding your big truck into a small spot feels like the controversy over whether to recline your seat on a packed plane. Some airline passengers think it’s their right; those on the other end of that situation are furious that they can no longer use their laptop and are forced to stare at your bald spot for the rest of the flight. Now, if you ask and receive permission before leaning back, fine. Otherwise, it’s not very nice. And while you can wedge a big vehicle into a spot that was marked off decades ago for passenger cars, should you?
Sometimes there’s no choice. The blame is on lots and garages. They might be following some zoning guidance on number of stalls, but you can be sure they want to maximize customers. Meanwhile, the urban upfitting movement would like to limit parking. But until/unless stalls are supersized to match our supersized vehicles, discretion is valor and I prefer a nice, isolated spot way out on the fringe. Take up a position on an outer circle of retail hell. You’re protecting your own paint. And it’s usually quicker to park out there than to circle endlessly for a spot close-in.
A staple of news reporting is 100th birthdays. In one of those stories a few years ago, the lady celebrating her centennial said she had two secrets to her long life. First, she still worked part-time at some little job, a hardware store IIRC, which gave her a reason to be with people. Her other longevity tip: She parked (yes, apparently she still drove!) at the far edge of the lot. The walk kept her young, she said.
We haven’t always been getting along as a polite society recently. Doing small kindnesses for one another can help. So park centered and true, and scatter to the fringes. The walk would do us all good.
Road rage is no fun for any of the parties involved, and it can veer into dangerous situations. People often underestimate the risks they’re taking when darting through traffic or aggressively tailgating another driver — the consequences can be deadly. Car subscription service Finn recently compiled data from AAA, the IIHS, and others to determine the states where road rage is the worst and the places with the highest concentration of deadly accidents, finding that some of the nation’s most sparsely populated states are among the most dangerous for drivers.
While Arizona was Finn’s “top pick” as the worst state for road rage, Montana took the top spot for the most fatal car accidents per capita. South Carolina and Wyoming were second and third, respectively. Finn noted that Montana saw a 16 percent increase in deadly crashes in 2021, with just over half attributed to impaired driving. An alarming 39 percent of the state’s fatal crashes were caused by speeding. And that’s in a big state where the posted limits are quite high.
That said, looking at the number of deaths involved with those crashes shows that Mississippi is the deadliest state. It had 697 fatal accidents in 2021 that caused 772 deaths, followed by South Carolina, which had 1,198 deaths from 1,112 accidents, slightly lower per capita than Mississippi. Most of Mississippi’s deaths were due to single-vehicle crashes, and most occurred in rural areas of the state.
If all of that sounds frightening, the good news is that there are several states where road rage is somewhat of a nonissue. Minnesota, Hawaii, and New Hampshire were the three best states to avoid road rage in 2021, while Massachusetts – the state known for people yelling at each other in the streets – came in fourth. Even if you live in a road rage-heavy state, avoiding confrontation and remaining calm are great ways to stay out of trouble.
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There is a lot of disagreement in society these days, but one thing we can all still agree on is that there’s nothing quite like that “new car smell.” After a few weeks, months, or years of driving, though, your car will lose that initial aroma and become at best neutral and at worst, well, kind of stinky. Nobody wants a smelly car, so we recommend picking up an air freshener to keep things smelling clean. There are multiple different kinds of air fresheners available on the market right here and we’ve listed some of our favorites below. Don’t worry, these are going to be a lot more effect than the traditional “green pine tree” on the rearview mirror.
“New car smell” air fresheners are hit or miss, but Chemical Guys seems to have nailed the formula. The brand’s air freshener spray has tens of thousands of mostly positive reviews, and the company says its enzymatic formulation eliminates odors instead of covering them up. Chemical Guys says the spray is concentrated and can be diluted, but many say it works best straight out of the bottle. That said, there’s a fine line between too much and too little here, as people sometimes say they’ve overdone it, and many say the aroma faded after just a couple of days.
Sometimes, the best option available is the one that’s easy to get. You’ll find Scent Bomb air freshener sprays at all kinds of car parts stores, hardware stores, and gas stations all around the country. Scent Bomb offers more than just sprays, too, with scent cans, vent clips and little circles that hang from the rearview mirror. The brand also offers an odor eliminator product. Pretty much all of Scent Bomb’s fresheners get good reviews, and they offer a lot of different scents.
Febreze built its house on eliminating odors, so it’s no surprise that its Vent Clip air fresheners are among the best products to freshen up your car. They’re available in various scents, last a long time, and stay out of the way thanks to the easy-to-use clip. People note that the scents aren’t overpowering, and most say that the scents are true to their names.
The company claims up to 40 days of use from the clips, but many reviewers state that they were able to get up to two months of scent before they ran out. If you’re a person that enjoys more subtle smells, the Febreze Vent Clips offer adjustable output settings that let you dial in the level of aroma.
This isn’t a spray or a scented pine tree to hang on your mirror. This is a bamboo bag filled with charcoal. Seriously. The charcoal in these bags absorbs odors, moisture, and other particles in the air. Leave one under the seat of your car, and people say it’ll be odor-free within a week. There are no chemicals and no scents, so the only thing you should notice using these bags is less odor overall.
The company says the activated charcoal in each bag is potent enough to last for up to two years and recommends placing it in direct sunlight for a few hours each month to “rejuvenate the charcoal block’s filtration capabilities.” Many buyers say they replace their bags more frequently than the company recommends, but even if they only last a year, that’s a significant value upgrade over traditional air fresheners.
Things to consider
We’re not asking you to over-analyze your car air freshener purchase. We just want you to keep a few things in mind.
Scent
No matter what you’ve heard, no car air freshener can replicate the smell of a brand-new car interior. Automakers use many different materials, chemicals, and adhesives to build cars, and each brand is unique. Car companies also employ teams of engineers to focus on details like the interior scent, so it’s unlikely that an air freshener company could match the effort. Just pick a scent that smells good to you and don’t try to reclaim your car’s glory days.
Type of air freshener
Most air fresheners are small and easy to hide, but some have to be installed in air vents and other easily visible places in the cabin. Think about how the air freshener will look once you place it in the car, especially if it’s stuck in the air vent or hanging from the rearview mirror.
This also impacts how well an air freshener works in your car. Sprays and other liquid products work well but don’t last as long as “hard” air fresheners. If your car has leather, suede/Alcantara, or other unique upholstery, you may not be able to use spray or liquid products because they can stain and discolor some materials.
Strength
The strength of an air freshener should be directly correlated with the size of the space it’s used in. For example, it takes far less air freshener in a Mazda Miata than it does in a Ford Expedition. If you want a super intense aroma and don’t mind that burning sensation in your eyes, feel free to go heavy on the scent. In most cases, though, it’s best to choose an air freshener that is just strong enough for the size of your car.
Clean your interior
No amount of air freshener is going to cover up a giant mess in your car. Leaving food and drinks, dirty clothes, and other junk in your interior will make it stink, and an air freshener isn’t going to fix it. Instead of temporarily masking the odor or worse, creating a new good-bad-weird super-scent, clean out your car before you start spraying or hanging an air freshener. You might be surprised to learn that the smell goes away or is drastically reduced with a simple cleaning.
Cover it up
Car seat covers and protective gear aren’t the most attractive interior upgrades, but they can be a big help with preventing odors and stains. If you frequently carry pets, kids, or messy cargo, investing in a seat cover or cargo tray can help prevent lingering smells inside your car. It’s a lot easier to take a seat cover out for washing than it is to try scrubbing a smell out of a car seat.
Frequently asked questions
Do used car dealers use scents in their vehicles?
Many do, especially if there’s something off inside. A company called Original Factory Scent makes a product it claims helps sell more used cars by bringing back “that new car smell.”
Can I make my own car air freshener?
You can! There are dozens of “recipes” for car air fresheners online, many of which use everyday household products and ingredients you probably already have.
Do car air fresheners actually work?
They do! Even so, you’ll likely see the best results with an enzyme freshener like Febreze or Chemical Guys’ New Car Smell. Eliminating odors is better than covering them up with a strong scent.
Can I spray Febreze into my car?
Yes. It’s best to spray into the air, however. Don’t spray the freshener onto seats, leather, or other surfaces without first making sure it won’t stain or discolor the material.
If you’ve spent any time in traffic lately, there’s a great chance you’ve experienced (or been) one of many angry drivers on the road. Road rage is a fact of being behind the wheel, but it’s much worse in some states than in others. Finn, a car subscription service, recently combined data from several sources to create a list of the states with the worst road rage, finding that people in Arizona need to take a deep breath before getting behind the wheel.
While Arizona, Montana, and South Carolina were the worst offenders in the country, a few states stuck out on the opposite end of the spectrum. Minnesota drivers experienced the least road rage, followed by Hawaii and New Hampshire.
Unsurprisingly, Arizona also had the largest number of confrontational drivers. Rhode Island, West Virginia, Virginia, and Oklahoma were among the top five.
Hawaiians being nice behind the wheel makes sense, as it’s probably hard to be angry in paradise despite the constant train of tourists clogging up the roads. Initially, it would seem reasonable to assume that New Hampshire would get some spillover anger from the “Massholes” in Boston due to its proximity, but Massachusetts ranked right behind the state for the least road rage.
Finn also looked at the states with the most fatal accidents. Montana, South Carolina, and Wyoming were the “top” three, while Mississippi, South Carolina, and Arkansas had the most total deaths due to car accidents. The total includes pedestrians and people not directly involved with the crash.
Some states have hefty penalties for aggressive driving, such as California, where drivers can face up to four years in jail. Arizona, the worst state in the study, has a maximum jail sentence of six months. Georgia, Indiana, New Jersey, North Carolina, and Delaware take no licensing actions.
People seemingly became worse drivers during the pandemic. Even though there were fewer people on the roads, drivers continued dying in preventable accidents due to speed and irresponsible behavior. Road rage certainly plays a role, but a recent study showed that anger behind the wheel is much worse in some states.
Car subscription platform Finn conducted the study, which found that Arizona had the worst road rage in America, scoring 8/10. Finn said the state had the most confrontational drivers and ranked at No. 12 for the most accidents. A significant majority of Arizonans reported having been yelled at, insulted, or threatened while driving — and 22.5 percent said they’d been forced off the road.
Interestingly, the sparsely-populated state of Montana came in second. It had the most car accidents and came in at No. 11 for confrontational drivers. A surprising 41.5 percent have been cut off on purpose, and 33.5 percent reported being blocked from changing lanes. South Carolina ranked third, with 46.5 percent saying they’d been yelled at in traffic. Montana ranked first for most fatal car accidents, while Mississippi was first for total deaths due to car accidents.
Finn noted that only 15 states have aggressive driving laws on the books, and only 11 have defined aggressive actions. Fines, jail time, and other penalties vary by state. Delaware has the lightest jail time associated with aggressive driving, with up to 30 days for offenders. Angry drivers in Arizona face up to six months in jail, while drivers in California can receive up to four years.
It’s worth noting that Finn’s data came from several publicly available sources, so you can dig deeper into any part of the conclusions it formed. Finn used Forbes’ Confrontational Drivers Ranking and Car Accident Statistics, along with the Insurance Institute for Highway Safety’s Fatality Facts 2021 and AAA’s fact sheet on aggressive driving laws.
