Word: motorists
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License-plate slogans tend to be innocuous boasts of a state's famous product: corn, copper, sunshine, lakes, Lincoln, enchantment. From 1969 on, New Hampshire car owners had a more forceful phrase, LIVE FREE OR DIE, and it drove some of them to distraction. Motorist George Maynard, feeling the slogan confined him to the right lane, went all the way to the Supreme Court in 1977 with his refusal to pay a $75 fine for blotting out the offending words on his plates. The court ruled in his favor...
What members of these factions forget is that they are citizens not of a cause but of a country of many causes. The adamant attitude that gives some motorists victory on the expressway may well propel some other faction to triumph on another issue - environment, conservation, name it - in a way the motorist might deplore...
...Chrysler itself performed this test on Omni-Horizon with inconclusive results: "Some do, some don't" perform the same way as the cars that Consumers Union examined. But, says Chrysler's chief engineer, Sidney Jeffe, the test has no "validity in the real world of driving"; a motorist who actually had to swerve suddenly at high speed would let up on the gas pedal, and moreover would certainly hang on to the wheel. Consumers Union concedes that point, but says the way an auto behaves in the trial "can point to problems in the car's basic...
Which makes the second test the crucial one. In it, a driver tries to swing a car around an obstacle, then pull back into lane-supposedly simulating the maneuvers a motorist would have to make to avoid a child suddenly darting into the road, say, or an object falling off a truck. When C.U. drivers tried it, the car fishtailed alarmingly and failed to recover. When Chrysler re-created the test for an audience of reporters at its proving grounds in Chelsea, Mich., the company's driver threaded the car flawlessly through a slalom course around pylons...
...first like fog to Richard Kuhn, who was driving home to New York from a skindiving vacation in Florida. Then his van stalled and he got a whiff of the searing vapor. Kuhn strapped on his scuba air tank and walked out of the death cloud to safety. Another motorist, Donald Sellers of Tallahassee, a veteran of Army chemical-warfare training, recognized the gas as chlorine and told his wife to get to the floor of the car, where there was still breathable air. "We were both vomiting," he said. "The car was a mess. Fortunately, we had just eaten...