Recycled Seat Belts from Cars Are Great for Sitting On

I visited the newest branch of the San Jose Public Library near my home the other day. The brand new facilities were beautiful and I was enjoying the free A/C and WiFi when I noticed the most interesting furniture. The chairs in the library appeared to have seating surfaces woven from automotive seat belts. They had that typical shiny nylon webbing seen in so many cars for the past 40 years. Ok, I’ll admit that noticing this probably raises my “car geek” status a few levels.

I looked into this a bit and found that chairs like this are made by a couple of different designers. Here are some online review of the chairs.

They aren’t cheap, but that webbing can supposedly hold up to 5000 lbs and should last forever. It’s also an interesting way to reuse a waste product. Though I imagine that these designers aren’t using belts out the local junkyards I might need to pay a visit to my local dismantler next time I need to put new webbing on lawn furniture.

While working at eBay years ago I built a trade show display by buying pairs of old car seats online and having them mounted on stands so we could use them as lounge furniture. My favorites were the metallic red vinyl 1965 GTO seats. These seatbelt chairs might be a way to introduce a bit of automotive art into my home in a manner more acceptable to my better half. What do you think?

Steve Haas

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Bristol Motor Speedway Caters to the Family

A few weekends ago NASCAR charged into Bristol, Tennessee and opened it's doors for the final time this season to the world that is NASCAR. Race Week at Bristol (BMS) is not just a normal week not only to the people who work there but to the fans as well. When you attend a race here at Bristol it's not just go check out the race and that's it. There's a whole week of festivities in place for everyone to take part in. The main focus for these events is to bring the family out and everyone enjoy themselves.

Race Week at Bristol started on August 18^th and went through August 24th. The first event of the week took place on the 21st. Everyone was bound for the “Food City Family Race Night.” Where you can rub elbows with your favorite drivers, get autographs, and grab some free grub. There's also live music throughout the day and all proceeds from the ticket sales go to charity. It's one of the few ways you can meet the drivers and stand next to the cars without having pit passes.

Next up on the Race Week agenda is the Transporter Parade. After the Food City celebration ends there's a few other things that go on. The transporters that take the cars from track to track line up for a very long parade back to the speedway. The streets line for miles for fans to see the trucks make their way slowly back to the track. Not only is this great for the fans but it's also great for some people inside the transporters themselves. Each one has a very special passenger from either the Make a Wish Foundation or Children's Miracle Network to ride shotgun for the length of the parade. To add to the dramatics of the parade along the route from Family Race Night to BMS at four different points fireworks were be rocketed into the sky.

After the racing is finished the Speedway still does things in the racing off season to support Speedway Children's Charities. “Speedway in Lights” has been an annual event for the last 11 years. As you drive onto the track itself you will view animated light sculptures. The tour is 5.2 miles long and continues outside the speedway's 0.5 half mile oval. Last year's event held over 200 exhibits and over two million lights, it's definitely a spectacle! The usual favorite among families is the Christmas Village display. Here your kiddies can pose for pictures with the Jolly Old Man himself Santa, roast marshmallows and have a nice cup of hot coco. Outside of the track there is also an ice skating rink for you to take part in, the rink is set up in the parking lot. For an additional charge you can try your hand at it or just watch everyone else have a great time on the ice.

Bristol definitely pulls out all the stops for the families that attend their events. I'm sure everyone who attends these events would give them a huge “thank you” if it was possible because they really put a lot of time and effort into a good time. Thanks Bristol from us the fans to you guys!

DrifterMama

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Greening of Car Manufacturing and more About PZEV

So you have a cell phone plan and you go over minutes every month for years but the phone company never charges you...sounds like a dream come true, right?

Well, that will never happen and that kind of monitoring has a reason! It costs them (mostly man hours) to maintain their systems. The way the government is monitoring the environment is kind of the same way.

Car manufacturing is not environmentally friendly usually although Ford and Subaru are reaching in the right direction. Add to all of that the federal and state governments monitoring carbon emissions from not only the activities of the car manufacturing process but also the environmental effect that their cars cause.

In an effort to reduce emissions dramatically the State of California created a new category for Partial Zero Emission Vehicles based on an agreement between the California Air Resources Board (CARB) and the manufacturers who sell cars in California. What CARB would have really loved to have done is passed a mandate that a growing percentage of vehicles being produced were Zero Emissions Vehicles (ZEVs) but that would occur at a huge cost to the automotive manufacturers because it would require huge advances very quickly in systems such as hydrogen or electric fuel cells. I think that we all know that the recent fuel crunch and the current economy is having drastic reprecussions to the auto manufacturers sales.

By current PZEV standards, the cars are required to have a 15 year/15,000 mile warranty on emission-control components, have zero evaporative emissions on its fuel system and fall under the SULEV category. These cars are only available in the 5 "clean car states" California, Maine, Massachusetts, New York, or Vermont and will soon be available in Connecticut, New Jersey, Oregon, Pennsylvania, Rhode Island, and Washington. All of these states have adopted California's pollution control rules.

Some other facts about PZEV:

• It has been said that a PZEV driving through Los Angeles County during times of high smog actually releases cleaner air out of its exhaust than it took into its system because it literally cleans the air.
• In the 15 year warrantied life of a PZEV emission sytem, it will emit less harmfull emissions than if you spilled a pint of gasoline on the pavement once. (see the picture of a gas spill at NASCAR- QUICK make another PZEV!!)
  
• There is a rumor about the amount of low carbon monoxide emissions from PZEVs but because this one is potentially dangerous and I do not have the facts, I am not going to publish it for now.

I wrote in my other details about PZEV in an article specifically about the Ford Focus PZEV yesterday and these emissions controls are pretty incredible and welcome in our smoggy city of Los Angeles.

Michelle Naranjo

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