Word: lane
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1990-1999
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...decades. The basic idea is always the same. Proponents imagine a morning someday in the next century when you and your smart car pull out of the garage, drive down local roads in the conventional manner and head for the "smartway." There you will merge into the auto lanes, activate your robo-driver and relax. The car will hurtle along at high speed--perhaps up to 140 m.p.h.--only a few feet from the cars in front and behind but protected by collision-avoidance radar and automatic brakes, with guidance coils on either side steering it down the center...
What happens when a deer jumps onto the smartway? What if a driver in the auto lane decides to step on the brakes? What if a computer crashes? Do all the cars follow suit? And then whom do you sue--the driver, the carmaker or the programmer? "With all that can go wrong," asked Chrysler chairman Robert Eaton in a speech in Dearborn, Michigan, last week, expressing some of the industry's concerns, "will we all spend the rest of our lives in court...
Chrysler, for one, seems to have accepted the technology's limitations. Their smartway prototype--with a wire embedded in each lane to give the cars a reference point--is intended only as a test bed for putting the bodies and chassis of new cars through their paces. Chrysler figures the track can cut the time it takes to simulate the punishment the average car undergoes in 100,000 miles from six weeks to two. For the foreseeable future, however, the company doesn't plan to transfer its technology from the lab to the open road. "This stuff is not ready...
Michail, his wife and two friends were returning from an evening out when their car collided at a turn in the road with a drunk motorist who had been traveling in the wrong lane for more than a mile, according to George Sarakinos, a close friend of Michail...
...raucous comedy does not let up. The play has vast reserves of Saturday morning cartoon antics combined with the smug humor of Saturday Night Live. Though the action is struck in a loud key, the actors aren't obscured or overwhelmed. As Jackie, Lane Burgess is convincing and endearing. She succeeds at the difficult task of humanizing Jackie the icon, adding flesh and blood to the mysterious outline produced by pop culture. Roberta Kastelic is also memorable as Christina (Coke can-in-hand) Onasiss. Her character introduces a dark touch to the second half of the play as she terrorizes...