Hondas next-generation airbagHonda Welcome to our weekly round-up of the biggest breaking stories on Driving.ca from this past week. Get caught up and ready to get on with the weekend, because it’s hard keeping pace in a digital traffic jam.Here’s what you missed while you were away.Honda’s reinvention of the passenger side airbag will save lives Honda’s next-generation passenger front airbag design Honda Honda has partnered with auto safety supplier Autoliv to develop a new kind of passenger side airbag that has the potential to reduce the number and severity of injuries and save lives. Over the last four years, the collaboration piece conceived an airbag with three separate chambers instead of one, and a piece of fabric that bridges them in front like a sail, adding “uninflated volume” and helping to reduce blunt force of impact. Honda says it will debut the next-gen airbags in select models by 2020. U.K. bans VW ad for promoting gender stereotypesIn yet another ‘c’mon VW, you’re better than that’ moment, the German automaker has received a slap on the wrist from advertising authorities in the U.K. for airing an ad that harmfully portrayed gender stereotypes. And, yeah, it’s pretty bad. The men are doing things like floating in a spaceship, leaping across a long jump pit with a prosthetic leg, while the female characters make sandwiches, do laundry and take the baby to the park. Ouch. We’ve said it before and will probably say it again: do better, VW. VW recalls 117,000 cars in Canada over rollaway riskCloser to home, Volkswagen is recalling over a hundred thousand cars in Canada that may be at risk of rolling away unexpectedly. The brand explained that the issue is caused by silicate that builds up on a shift lever switch which then allows the key to be slid out even if the car isn’t in park. So, you park your Jetta on a slight incline up the street from the farmer’s market, get out with your reusable shopping bags and then watch as the car rolls backwards into the organic corn stall. The recall, which also hits some 670,000 vehicles in the U.S., includes a number of Jettas, Golfs, GTIs and Beetles. Dealers can simply add a switch and circuit board to solve the issue, but you’ll still be eating corn for weeks. 15-year-old vanity plate with ‘pee joke’ causes ruckus at the DMVHow do you make the New Hampshire motor vehicle department laugh in 2019? Tell them a joke in 2004. A Rochester woman had her vanity plates pulled by the issuing authorities earlier this year, even though she’d already been using them for 15 years. The seven-character message in question: PB4WEG0. It’s clever, family-friendly and just solid travel advice, but somebody at the DMV didn’t think so. Luckily, the New Hampshire governor read about her pee-pun plight and intervened on her behalf, so the DMV reissued the plates. Next-gen VW Golf nears production The new Golf – still camouflaged The eighth-generation Golf is entering its final phases of testing, says Volkswagen. The brand teased the hot hatch with an image of a test mule draped in camo. Close inspection reveals modified headlights, a more tapered profile and a few other hints at the sort of tech that’ll be packed into it. VW promises it’ll be a “genuine eye catcher” as well as a “digital, intelligent and connected” creature, but we’ll have to wait until fall to determine how right or wrong they
Origin: News Roundup: Honda’s life-saving new airbag, VW’s sexist ad and more