Road safety

Here’s a community service announcement and a shocking reminder about the imbeciles sharing our roads. They could be in the car next to you. Here’s hoping it’s not this bloke. NSW Police highway patrol officers this week charged a 20-year-old male learner driver with a number of offences stemming from a video that depicted him travelling at 223km/h on a freeway south of Sydney.

NSW Police and the Department of Fair Trading have dealt a crucial blow to businesses in western Sydney found tampering with vehicle odometers and issuing roadworthy certificates to unsafe cars. Odometer tampering was believed to be a thing of the past given the complexity of altering the total distance a vehicle has travelled on modern cars.

The 2021 Toyota Kluger has earned a five-star safety rating after scoring top marks in a series of local crash tests and crash avoidance assessments. Independent safety authority, the Australasian New Car Assessment Program (ANCAP) – which is funded primarily by state and federal governments – issued the 2021 Toyota Kluger with a five-star rating against the toughest testing protocols to date.

All Renault cars will be speed-limited to 180km/h from next year, the French manufacturer has confirmed. The cap will also reportedly apply to cars built by Renault’s budget Romanian subsidiary Dacia (although this is unlikely to inconvenience many people as, even in flagship 2.0-litre guise, the top-selling Duster SUV maxes out at just 181km/h).

Tesla’s autonomous driving technology has been blamed for yet another deadly crash in the US, with authorities claiming two people died after a Tesla crashed when no-one was in the driver’s seat. The 2019 Tesla Model S sedan reportedly left the road and struck a tree on a road north of Houston, Texas, on Saturday night US time. “There was no one in the driver’s seat,” Sergeant Cinthya Umanzor told news agency Reuters.