Ever seen golf carts puttering down the side roads of your city or town? If you’re naive like me, you probably thought they belonged on golf courses, right?

Wrong! Apparently, those cute little gas-savers don’t just roll around on the green anymore. In the majority of states, they’re also allowed on secondary roads within a few miles of owners’ homes.

Man, have I been missing out! If I had only known, I might have purchased one and taken the side roads to work in it every day, saving myself a ton of money on gas and avoiding piling all those miles on my car. I can see it now (vroom-vroom!)….

But last week, I read an interesting article in the Myrtle Beach Sun News online. South Carolina, which has apparently allowed carts on the state’s secondary roads for 23 years, is considering expanding the distance they can be driven from home from two miles to five.

Now, S.C. residents may be able to play 18 holes, bring their grocery list along, and stop off at the local Piggly-Wiggly on the way home from the golf course to pick up the week’s groceries. Or visit a local post office to mail some packages. Or maybe just stop off at a friend’s house for a cup of coffee in their little rolling cart.

How convenient!

With the rising cost of fuel and transportation, many people are looking for ways to trim costs, find alternate means of transportation and reduce vehicle emissions in the environment. At first glance, golf carts seem to meet all three standards. Whereas city busses or lightrail systems maintain a certain schedule that riders must adjust to, golf cart owners can come and go as they please, as if they were driving a regular car or other licensed vehicle.

In addition, many are electric, so they reduce gas consumption and avoid polluting the air. And because they’re small, they can be parked in much tighter spaces and easily maneuvered from one place to another.

But there’s actually a big difference. Not only do most carts lack safety equipment like horns and lights required for normal cars to be considered road-worthy; they’re also much more dangerous, as they’re completely open and offer absolutely no rollover protection.

Yet in many states, including South Carolina, all that’s required for owners to drive a golf cart on side streets–and to cross major highways–is a driver’s license, a $5 permit and proof of liability insurance. As long as they’re driven during daylight hours only and the owner carries the registration papers along on the ride, he can putter around town in this vehicle designed solely for the golf course to his heart’s content.

Maybe I should rethink this puttering-to-work thing. What happens when I’m toodling along at 15 mph, the top industry-recommended speed for carts on flat ground, and a line of cars with impatient drivers stacks up behind me? Should I pull over and let them by, or stand my ground because, after all, I have just as much right to be there as they do?

And what about crossing major roads? If I cut it a little too close, I could find myself staring down the nose of one of those vehicles going 65 mph–and end up roadkill!

It seems to me the risks outweigh the benefits. Maybe I’ll keep my safety-rated Altima and avoid those golf carts—for safety’s sake.

As we alluded to in our previous post (and you may have already heard in the media), mechanical issues involving Toyota vehicles came as no surprise to the nation’s largest auto insurer.

In fact, State Farm reported a disturbing trend involving some Toyota models way back in 2007.

Late that year, the company contacted the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration to report a worrying accident trend it was seeing amongst drivers of some Toyota vehicles.

State Farm processes a huge volume of consumer claims each year. The company felt the pattern of accidents it was seeing was not normal and indicated a problem, though few other insurers saw the same.

Few others, however, write enough auto policies to make such a trend noticeable. State Farm, on the other hand, holds more than 42 million auto policies nationwide.

As reported in the Insurance Journal, spokesman Kip Diggs said of the company’s actions, “When you start to see significant claims activity that indicates that there may be widespread problems with a product, that’s when you go to the NHTSA. There had to have been significant activity, a noticeable trend, for that to happen.”

Now, two Congressional leaders are requesting information from State Farm and four other top auto insurers, including Geico, Allstate, Farmers and Progressive. Lawmakers are looking for any information regarding consumer complaints of sudden unintended acceleration in Toyotas and any warnings these companies may have provided the NHTSA concerning defect trends in those vehicles.

Consumers who own recalled Toyotas and were involved in accidents during the past few years may have seen their insurance rates rise unfairly due to mechanical defects like stuck accelerators and floor mats that caused braking issues.

With further research, if some of those mishaps are proven to have been caused by vehicle fault, rather than driver error, some Toyota owners may see their insurance premiums return to the rates they were paying pre-accident.

This isn’t the first time State Farm has come to consumers’ aid regarding safety. The company also collected data and tracked problems that linked rollover accidents in Ford Explorers with Firestone tires 10 years ago. 

With the previous trends the insurer noted concerning Toyota, it seems State Farm is at work on drivers’ behalf once again.

In the wake of Toyota’s recent recall of more than 8 million vehicles worldwide, you may find yourself wondering what effect, if any, an accident due to a defective part has on your insurance.

That’s a great question…and we’re here to answer it.

Say you’re driving your brand new, 2010 Toyota Camry down the street and your accelerator (the defective part, in this instance) sticks. Suddenly, you’re careening through your neighborhood at speeds upward of 50 mph, totally in a panic.

You smash on the brakes but, before you can regain control, your car smashes into the back of a vehicle that pulls out in front of you, propelling both cars off the road and into a ditch. 

What now? Should you file an insurance claim? Though the accident was technically your fault, it would never have happened if that defective part hadn’t left you without control over your vehicle.

If this should happen to you, try to relax. If your car is driveable, move to a safe place out of traffic, call 9-1-1 and report the accident. When the police arrive, tell them what happened, and then call your insurance company to relate the incident and file a claim.

Once your insurer has investigated and confirmed your account of the story, they’ll pay the claim under the liability or physical damage section of your insurance policy. Afterward they’ll likely seek reimbursement from the car’s manufacturer (in this case, Toyota), because the defective part actually caused the accident. 

“This type of unforeseen event is what insurance is for,” said Robert Passmore, senior director of claims for the Property Casualty Insurers Association of America (PCI) in an article on accidents involving recalled Toyotas published in yesterday’s Insurance Journal.

 But what about your insurance rates? Will you have to pay more for insurance coverage following this type of accident?

Not likely, says Passmore—not unless a large number of accidents can be attributed to the defective part and the vehicle involved is expensive to repair.

“Insurers look at the cost of claims over a period of time. They are interested in how much it costs to repair a vehicle and how often the vehicle is involved in an accident,” he remarked.

With the previously good safety record Toyota enjoyed prior to recent recalls, these issues aren’t likely to cause thousands of accidents—or drive up insurance rates. Still, we have to wonder what went wrong.

Apparently, safety problems have been present but under wraps for the maker of the most popular car in America for some time, says the nation’s largest auto insurer. We’ll address that next time on the blog. 

For now, if you drive a Toyota (or any other vehicle involved in a nationwide recall), check with your insurance agent to make sure you have plenty of liability coverage under your present policy. Then rest assured: Your auto insurance has you covered!

For years now, we’ve all heard the “nature vs nuture” argument as it relates to obesity, and wonder whether environment or genetics plays a larger role where weight is concerned.

Some say it’s all about environment—and we should be teaching our kids healthy eating habits from the time they’re young to prevent lifetime weight gain. Proponents of the nurture theory often place the blame on the shoulders of the overweight, saying they’re fat because they’re lazy, eat too much or lead a sedentary lifestyle.

Others point to genetics, claiming that, no matter what they eat or how much they exercise, they’re destined to be fat, just like their parents or other family members. No matter how hard they try, they just can’t get the extra weight off, and often put themselves at further health risk by resorting to desperate measures in order to lose the additional weight.

Either way, obesity can lead to many health problems that are difficult to overcome and can make getting and staying insured difficult.

In fact, those who are overweight usually pay at least 15 percent more for health insurance than individuals of normal weight—if they can get insured at all.

But a new report published today in the journal Nature now indicates that genetics may play a larger role in obesity than any of us previously realized.

In a recent European study, scientists found a rare genetic abnormality that is linked to both severe obesity and learning disabilities: the absence of 30 genes that reportedly virtually guarantee that a person will become obese.

What are the missing genes doing to cause obesity? No one is really sure, but experts speculate their absence may cause the production of an enzyme or protein that keeps the overweight from being able to burn energy efficiently.

With the genes necessary for regulating the body’s calorie consumption and energy burning process absent, obesity appears to result 100 percent of the time.

Though balancing caloric intake with expended energy is often the key to maintaining a healthy weight, the bodies of the obese don’t always function normally. Instead, they often “extract calories from food more effectively and may not be burning energy as efficiently as others,” says Dr. Stuart Weiss, an assistant clinical professor at NYU Langone Medical Center, in today’s Yahoo news article on the subject.

Maybe in the future, we’ll all undergo genetic tests to see if we’re missing any genes and, if so, what can be done to counteract the effects of their absence. Who knows, maybe scientists will find a cure for obesity—or figure out a way to overcome the effect of genetics on our bodies.

Meanwhile, it looks like science is proving that nature plays a much bigger role than previously thought.  

Additional Resources:

Weigh in: Do your kids make the grade?

Obesity & Genetics

Fat Chance