Autoblog

Vägverket, the Swedish Road Administration, is reporting that General Motors used ten human cadavers for crash research. While it isn't clear which GM vehicle hosted the corpses on their one-way trip into a wall, a spokesman for Vägverket said it was most likely the Saab brand. The spokesman was also quick to point out that all of the cadavers were people "who had donated their own bodies." (Well, that is comforting to know!)

While cadavers were used in the earliest crash tests (first started in the late 1930s), most of us were under the assumption that fully-instrumented million-dollar synthetic crash test dummies, or computer simulations, had replaced human remains in current testing. Apparently, some folks at GM may have been thinking otherwise. As of today, neither General Motors or Saab have acknowledged any tests involving dead bodies, but our hunch says this issue hasn't been laid to rest. Thanks for the tip, Will!

UPDATE: Saab called to let us know that neither it nor General Motors use "postmortem human test subjects" for safety research, nor do they have the facilities to even do so. They do, however, provide funds to certain bio-mechanical research projects, often through universities, the results of which they use to make better crash test dummies.

[Source: The Local]

We're surprised that this gag can be retailed without disclaimers. CarPool Kenny is an inflatable head and torso that is marketed on the premise that you can cruise the carpool lane in passengerless peace, your inflatable pal offering impunity. People have tried this, and many have had their ruse detected. When you do eventually get hooked by the long arm of the law, it's going cost a lot more than this $20 useless hunk of plastic. Think hundreds.

Your odds of getting caught are likely rather high, since police officers tend to operate on the assumption that all is not what it seems, and Kenny looks so fake that he's just asking to get busted. Our own healthy sense of schadenfreude would kick into overdrive if we cruised by a schmuck whose bluff got called.

Using one of these things to circumvent the rules just means you'll bypass a jam and have to attend to being productive sooner than the rest of us left surfing for that mythical NPR station that's not fund-raising.

Thanks, Jason, for the tip.