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ByTamiAbdollah TheAssociatedPress OXNARD A driver who abandoned his pickup truck on railroad tracks before a fiery crash with a com- muter train made repeated attempts to get the vehicle off the rails and then ran for his life as the train ap- proached, his lawyer said Wednesday. Jose Alejandro Sanchez- Ramirez accidentally drove onto the tracks and made the situation worse by con- tinuing forward in an at- tempt to get enough speed to get his wide pickup over the rails, attorney Ron Bamieh said. When that ef- fort failed, he tried to push the truck and then fled be- fore impact. "He hits his high beams trying to do something. He's screaming. He real- izes, 'I can't do anything,' and then he tries to run so he doesn't get killed," Bamieh said. "He saw the impact, yes, it was a huge explosion." The lawyer's account of- fered a different perspective on what investigators have said about the crash that in- jured 30 people, four criti- cally, when the Los Angeles- bound Metrolink train de- railed before dawn Tuesday. Police said Ramirez was trying to go right at an in- tersection just beyond the crossing, but made the turn too soon and ended up stuck on the tracks before the crossing arms came down. National Transportation Safety Board member Rob- ert Sumwalt said Tuesday that the truck was not stuck in the sense that it had bot- tomed out on the tracks and he questioned why Ramirez had engaged the parking brake before fleeing. Bamieh said Ramirez's Ford F-450 truck strad- dled the tracks and while he was able to drive, he couldn't back up because he was towing a trailer and he couldn't get his wheels to clear the rails. Police said Ramirez did not call 911 and made no immediate effort to call for help. But Bamieh said Ramirez, who doesn't speak English well, tried to get help from a passerby, tried calling his employer and eventually reached his son to help him speak with po- lice. Sumwalt said the train's video and data recorders will help the investigation. The engine of Ramirez's truck was intact, despite being burned, and may also offer clues about what hap- pened. The NTSB scheduled a news conference Wednes- day afternoon to provide updates. Police said Ramirez was found 45 minutes after the crash 1.5 miles away, though Bamieh said he was only a half-mile away and that he has phone records that show he spoke with police much sooner. He was ar- rested on suspicion of leav- ing the scene of an accident with injuries. Police would not discuss drug and alcohol test re- sults, but Bamieh said he was told there was no sign Ramirez was impaired. Ramirez, 54, of Yuma, Arizona, pleaded guilty to drunken driving in Ari- zona in 1998 and was cited for failure to obey a traffic control in 2007, the Los An- geles Times reported. Passenger Joel Bingham said many of those aboard the train were asleep and shocked awake when the loud boom first happened about 65 miles northwest of downtown Los Angeles. "It seemed like an eter- nity while we were flying around the train. Every- thing was flying," Bingham said. "A brush of death def- initely came over me." Eight of the 30 people ini- tially examined were admit- ted to the hospital, officials said. Lives were likely saved by passenger cars designed to absorb a crash that were purchased after a collision a decade ago in Glendale killed 11 people and injured 180 others, Metrolink offi- cials said. The four passen- ger cars in Tuesday's crash remained largely intact, as did the locomotive. The crash disrupted rail service for a day, but freight trains and Amtrak resumed running Wednes- day and commuter trains were scheduled to roll later in the day. The train collision hap- pened Tuesday around 5:45 a.m., a few minutes after leaving the Oxnard sta- tion. The engineer saw the abandoned vehicle and hit the brakes, but there wasn't enough time to stop, Ox- nard Fire Battalion Chief Sergio Martinez said. The crossing has been the scene of many crashes over the years. FIERY CRASH Lawyer:Truckerranforhislife a er stranding truck on tracks MARKJ.TERRILL—THEASSOCIATEDPRESS Workers walk near a Metrolink train engine from a train that hit a truck and then derailed Tuesday in Oxnard. By Dee-Ann Durbin The Associated Press DETROIT Lexus is the most dependable car brand for the fourth consecutive year in rankings that increas- ingly hinge on high-tech features. Buick finished second, followed by Toyota and Ca- dillac. Honda and Porsche tied to round out the top five spots in the annual survey, released Wednesday by the consulting firm J.D. Power. The survey asked original owners of vehicles from the 2012 model year about prob- lems experienced in the last year. Lexus owners reported 89 problems per 100 vehi- cles; the industry average was 147 problems. Fiat was theworstperformingbrand, with 273 problems per 100 vehicles. Land Rover, Jeep, Mini and Dodge rounded out the bottom five per- formers. The top two complaints were technical ones: inabil- ity to pair phones to the car and trouble with voice rec- ognition systems, which of- ten misunderstood drivers' commands. That's a change from past years, when de- sign problems like wind noise or mechanical issues like squeaky brakes topped the list. J.D. Power spokesman John Tews said it's difficult to compare the results to prior years, since J.D. Power changed this year's survey to include more specific questions about technology. But it's clear that high-tech features — and owners' ex- pectations about how they will perform — are increas- ingly important to overall perceptions of quality. J.D. Power said 15 per- cent of respondents avoided a model because it lacked new technology, up from 4 percent in last year's survey. "Owners clearly want the latesttechnologyintheirve- hicles, and they don't hesi- tate to express their dis- approval when it doesn't work," said Renee Stephens, vice president of U.S. auto- motive at J.D. Power. Wind noise was the third most reported problem on this year's list, followed by hesitating automatic trans- missions and excessive road noise. The rankings are impor- tant to automakers, since unhappy customers are more likely to shop other brands when they buy their next vehicle. J.D. Power said 56 percent of owners who reported no problems with their vehicles said they will purchase the same brand next time. In rankings of individ- ual vehicles, General Mo- tors Co. and Toyota Motor Corp. tied with seven seg- ment winners each. GM's Chevrolet Malibu was the most dependable midsize car, while the Toy- ota Corolla was the highest ranked small car. J.D. POWER L ex us t op s au to mo bi le , dependability survey Thank you! PLEASE RECYCLE THIS NEWSPAPER. By Justin Pritchard The Associated Press LOS ANGELES Nearly a decade ago, the U.S. sec- retary of transportation stood at the site of a hor- rendous commuter train crash near downtown Los Angeles and called for the adoption of a new train car design that testing showed could blunt the tremen- dous force of a head-on collision. In response to that 2005 accident that killed 11 peo- ple, Southern California's Metrolink commuter rail- road bought new passen- ger cars equipped with these "crash energy man- agement" systems. On Tuesday, that invest- ment appeared to have paid off when a Metro- link train smashed into an abandoned truck in a crash remarkably similar to the 2005 wreck. This time, three of the four double-decker passen- ger cars had the technol- ogy. Of the 50 people on board, only eight were ad- mitted to hospitals, even though the impact at an estimated 55 mph was vi- olent enough to fling sev- eral of the cars onto their sides. No one died. "Safe to say it would have been much worse without it," Metrolink spokesman Jeff Lustgarten said of how the technology performed during the crash in Ox- nard, about 65 miles north- west of Los Angeles. And yet the technology is not widely used in the United States. And while federal regulators have for years weighed rules that might require it, they have not formally pro- posed such measures. Aside from Metrolink, crash energy management equipment is used by Am- trak, including on its Acela line in the Northeast, and two systems in Texas, ac- cording to the Federal Railroad Administration. Such systems can vary in design, but the general idea is to disperse the en- ergy of a crash away from where the passengers sit. Metrolink's cars have col- lapsible "crush zones" at the ends of its cars that help absorb the impact, along with shock absorb- ers, bumpers and couplers. It is the same principle at work in the "crumple zones" in newer cars. They are designed to absorb the force of a crash while keep- ing people inside safe. One obstacle to more widespread use of the train technology is that it has to be designed into new passenger cars, and railroads that bought cars without it in recent years may not want to invest in new ones so soon. Rail- roads can't simply retrofit existing cars. "It is not a bolt-on de- vice," said Martin Schro- eder, chief technology offi- cer for the American Public Transportation Associa- tion. He has been working with the Federal Railroad Administration as it con- siders whether to propose rules for the systems. The advisory committee on which he sat finished its work in 2010. The Fed- eral Railroad Administra- tion would not comment Wednesday on the status of possible regulations. Metrolink began in- vesting in new cars with the technology soon after the 2005 crash between a train and an SUV in Glen- dale. In 2010, the first of those cars rolled into use. By June 2013, the system had 137 of the cars — about two-thirds of its fleet. TECHNOLOGY Life-saving train car design is rarely used By Seth Borenstein The Associated Press WASHINGTON Comput- ers already have bested hu- man champions in "Jeop- ardy!" and chess, but arti- ficial intelligence now has gone to master an entirely new level: "Space Invaders." Google scientists have cooked up software that can do better than humans on dozens of Atari video games from the 1980s, like video pinball, boxing, and 'Breakout.' But computers don't seem to have a ghost of a chance at "Ms. Pac-Man." The aim is not to make video games a spectator sport, turning couch pota- toes who play games into couch potatoes who watch computers play games. The real accomplishment: com- puters that can teach them- selves to succeed at tasks, learning from scratch, trial and error, just like humans. The computer program, called Deep Q-network, wasn'tgivenmuchintheway of instructions to start, but in time it did better than hu- mans in 29 out of 49 games and in some cases, like video pinball, it did 26 times bet- ter, according to a new study released Wednesday by the journal Nature. It's a first time an artificial intelli- gence program bridged dif- ferent type of learning sys- tems, said study author De- mis Hassabis of Google DeepMind in London. Deep Q "can learn and adapt to unexpected things," Hassabis said in a news con- ference. "These types of sys- tems are more human-like in the way they learn." In the submarine game "Seaquest," Deep Q came up with a strategy that the scientists had never consid- ered. "It's definitely fun to see computers discover things that you didn't figure out yourself," said study co-au- thor Volodymyr Mnih, also of Google. Sebastian Thrun, direc- tor of the Artificial Intelli- genceLaboratoryatStanford University, who wasn't part of the research, said in an email: "This is very impres- sive. Most people don't un- derstand how far (artificial intelligence) has come. And this is just the beginning." Nothing about Deep Q is customized to Atari or to a specific game. The idea is to create a "general learn- ing system" that can figure tasks out by trial and er- ror and eventually to stuff even humans have diffi- culty with, Hassabis said. This program, he said, "is the first rung of the ladder." Carnegie Mellon Univer- sity computer science pro- fessor Emma Brunskill, who also wasn't part of the study, said this learning de- spite lack of customization "brings us closer to hav- ing general purpose agents equipped to work well at learning a large range of tasks, instead of just chess or just 'Jeopardy!'" To go from pixels on a screen to making decisions on what to do next, with- out even a hint of pre-pro- grammed guidance, "is re- ally exciting," Brunskill said. "We do that as people." The idea is that when the system gets scaled up, maybe it could work like asking a phone to plan a complete trip to Europe, book all the flights and ho- tels on its own "and it sorts it all out as if you have a personal assistant," Hass- abis said. TECHNOLOGY Humans lost to computer in 'Space Invaders' RICHARD DREW — THE ASSOCIATED PRESS FILE A youth tries a Ms. Pac-Man TV game in New York. 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