Thanks, tp. I've said a couple of times how worrying is for me the number of people dead by driving, explaining that the reason that brings me to this forum is
to learn from the racing world how to make better drivers AND better roads, in hopes that, some day, racing will be a school mandatory subject and civil engineers will have at the tips of their hands the same tools racing teams use today for simulation of car behaviour.
Today we learn a lot of things at school, from the binomial theorem to the bones of the body, but maybe few are so practical and related to life itself as the subject of learning to drive: not by a mere 30 hours (or something like that) of practice, when you're already 18, but through several years of education at school. The situation of drivers in the third world is abysmal. I quote:
"NEW DELHI — A few weeks ago, the traditional Indian joint family household of Vineet Sharma, a fertilizer industry consultant, achieved a long deferred dream. Having ferried themselves on scooters all these years, the Sharmas bought a brand-new, silver-gray hatchback known as the Tata Indica.
Never mind that none of the six adult members of the household knew how to drive. No sooner had the car arrived than Mr. Sharma, 34, took it for a spin and knocked over a friend. His brother slammed into a motorcyclist, injuring no one but damaging the bumper. The brother was so scared that he no longer gets behind the wheel, except on Sundays (NOTE: !), when the roads are empty.
“We bought it first, and then we thought about driving,” Mr. Sharma confessed.
This week, as Tata Motors unveiled the world’s cheapest car, the $2,500 Nano, and automakers from across the world came to New Delhi to peddle their wares to a bubbling Indian car market, Mr. Sharma began to think about his driving.
He enrolled in a weeklong driving course and dived headlong into the madness of the morning commute in a beat-up Maruti 800. Its odometer had long ago stopped working, and it carried on its roof a sign for the driving school, accompanied, improbably, by the smiling face of the animated movie character Shrek. He wasn’t going very fast and said he was very nervous.
He had good reason, for his first real foray on four wheels revealed how many hurdles still hinder the new Indian romance with the road. Amid a cacophony of horns, a blood-red sport utility vehicle weaved between cars, passing Mr. Sharma within a razor’s edge on the right. A school bus snuggled close up on his left. No one seemed to care about traffic lanes. Cars bounced in and out of crater-size potholes."
I know too well this situation: I've mentioned how I've picked up broken bodies from car wreckages in my country, and, believe me, it's not something you forget easily.
I would also like to mention the fact that some people is worried by the fact that
these millions of new cars have to be made in a better way. I've always thought that the third world, that is,
the majority of humanity, has to find its own new, innovative way: we cannot copy the american or european way, they've not done it well, sorry for saying it this way, pals!
This is the people that needs this kind of car, but I propose to deliver a better one
If we extrapolate the problems that a mere 600 million people have caused until now, and multiply them by 10, this world is going to be a true sh..t. That's the base scenario: we get a car like the ones in the movies, but for everybody... That might be the dream of some, but it's not good enough for me.
We can learn from "them", but
"they" are not going to come "here" to solve our problems, we have to develop our own solutions. We have to think in a
new, more ambitious, more exigent way. We cannot be happy by "being like them", we have to show "them" how to make things correctly. I quote again, an inspiring quote (at least for me):
"We envision a transport system producing zero emissions and sparing the surface landscape, while people on average range hundreds of kilometers daily. We believe this prospect of ‘green mobility’ is consistent in general principles with historical evolution. We lay out these general principles, extracted from widespread observations of human behavior over long periods, and use them to explain past transport and to project the next 50 to 100 years. Our picture emphasizes the slow penetration of new technologies of transport adding speed in the course of substituting for the old ones in terms of time allocation."
Toward green mobility: the evolution of transport
). During the other 9 months the weather is quite okay for bikers, unless u wanna wear leather clothing when it gets tropically hot in the summer. 
