OT: "Mixed up the brake and accelerator"?!?

Someone who panics.

Some who is heading at speed for the barrier on a multi story car park at times.

Its more complicated than that with those who panic.

Phil did, after Liz made him do that.

That's not true of those who have only ever driven an automatic and that's very common now.

They usually are but can be caught out in a panic situation.

That's due to the ear to ear dog s*it and being a druggy.

When I panic, I do something to prevent the situation I'm in, not do more of the the thing that got me into it. Imagine you're running along and encounter a tiger in front of you. Do you run even faster in the same direction towards the tiger or turn round and run another way? It's not rocket science.

As above, barrier coming towards you fast because you pressed a pedal, best to try another thing perhaps?

I panic, but sensibly.

Pity about the guy who was driving their daughter.

Yes *both* the layouts that they Wiki page shows look equally dangerous, because they *both* put reverse within the same up/down plane as a forward gear. I presume they have some additional interlock (a lifting collar?) since they can't rely on a stronger spring than normal.

All the cars I've driven have had reverse either left of first (in a plane of its own) or else right of fifth/sixth (again, in a plane of its own), often with a collar that you have to lift. And always with a stronger spring than the ones that normally bias the lever into the 3rd/4th plane and against which you need to push (slightly) to get 1st/2nd or 5th/6th.

I did once drive a very old car - I think it might have been a Hillman Hunter - and it had no bias spring so the lever was equally at home in

The really hard thing is swapping between my car that has reverse to the left of 1st and my wife's which has it to the right of 6th. And remembering that whereas my car (Peugeot) will let me engage reverse while the car is still rolling forwards slightly (obviously as long as I don't let the clutch up), I need to come to a *complete* halt before I can go into reverse in her car - or face the Graunch of Death as the synchromesh teeth grate ;-)

Reverse on the opposite side from first does have the advantage that you press the lever hard right and then hard left to go from 1st to reverse to

I remember when I was little, the mum of one of my friends had a Vauxhall Viva. That was the first car I'd seen that had reverse to the left of first instead of to the right of 4th. But instead of a lifting collar, you had to either push the gear knob towards the floor or pull it upwards away from the floor (I forget which) to engage reverse, which looked a very cumbersome manoeuvre.

Not in my car:

And no clutch on better than 98% of north american vehicles. That's right, all you guys on the other side of the pond - only 2% of vehicles sold in 2016 in North America had standard transmission. Not even AVAILABLE on better than 75%

world!

smaller

Yep. and often close together so if you have wide feet you have to get the postions just right or catch your own feet or adjacent pedals.

Yep, a friends wife was very nearly killed when an "elderly driver" accelerated hard down a market street ploughing into her market stall.

I often wonder whether ours is still as necessary as it was. In the old days they were checking not only that you had quick reactions but that you could

I remember when I took my (optional) Advanced test about 10 years after passing the normal one. The instructor kept drumming it into me that in an emergency I should use "cadence braking" - repeatedly and rapidly pressing and releasing the footbrake in the same way as ABS now does. I asked him whether he'd ever had the presence of mind to do it when he had to do an emergency stop, and he had the good grace to look embarrassed and say "when the s*it hits the fan, you just brake - there's no time to think about cadence braking". I did try it on a skid pan a few years later where you're moving much slower, in a clapped out car that's already suffered a few knocks and where the worst that you can hit is a row of tyres. In a car with no ABS, it made a hell of a lot of difference to being able to steer around a simulated hazard while braking. The only time I've had to do a real emergency stop was when a kid ran out of a gateway a few yards ahead of me. It's a wonder that the brake pedal didn't go through the floor! But thanks to ABS I was able to steer the car towards the opposite kerb and then back to straight ahead without skidding. Child and car survived. Car behind didn't - it was rear-ended by the car behind *him*.

Ah, our test uses a rolling road for testing the brakes. The car never leaves the garage for the test. I suppose the tester might have to take the car for a short drive before starting the test if the engine isn't warm and so the emissions test may not be valid.

I once drove a Rover 3.5 automatic that had the accelerator to the LEFT of the brake pedal (which was in the usual place). The owner had a gammy right leg, so drove only using the left foot.

Just to complicate matters, the handbrake was partially faulty (didn't grip on hills). I was driving it from the owner's house to the garge where I worked, for this to be fixed. I managed OK although it got a bit hairy at the traffic jam halfway up the hill in Lewes.

It was generally OK. I parked it outside the workshops with the nose facing a wall. The manager came along (having been warned about it) and slammed it into the wall. Body repair job.

All 3 speeds had Reverse n front of 1st. All 4 speeds had reverse off on its own, either tothe right and back or left and back - usually right. Adding 5th gear put it to the right front - again in line with reverse. Pretty much has to be that way when you understand how a constant mesh standard transmission functions, while on the older sliding gear type virtually anything was possible, within reason.

What I always found fun was a 4 speed (or 5 speed) column shift ----

That only works with a 4 speed or a 6 speed trans, generally speeking.

The old hillman hunter had one when new too. Some of them didn't survive as long as the rest of the car. Even those with a lift "gate" sometimes failed to keep the shifter out of reverse after a few housand shifts.

Had several Vauxhalls in the family - a '61 Victor special. A '64 Viva HA and a Viva HC(Firenza) as well as a bedford door-van (about

Yes, but instinct isnt that reliable in very rarely seen situations.

You don't have the time to analyse it like that.

Its not that simple with car pedals.

That's why that sort of fuckup is rare enough to make the newspaper when it ends up with a smashed pharmacy or a severely injured person.

Mate of mine, who is now dead, managed to take out his back fence when driving home pissed one evening. Presumably by applying the accelerators instead of the brake.

Another mate of a mate of mine managed to come home pissed in a f****ng great Landcruiser and go straight thru his fence and over a couple of quite big ditches and didn't remember a thing about it, When his mate asked him about it, he said 'how do you know that's that happened' The reply was that he managed to hit one of those road works signs with the landcruiser and left the imprint of the number plate in the road works sign. No one has ever seen anything like that result before.

We went to a garage sale at this place, Its got a steep drive down the hill down the side and that ends up below the house on a big concrete platform with a turn to the garage under the house. With a massive great drop of 15 feet off the back edge of that to the house the next down the hill.

You don't have time to think that thru.

Most do too, but a few f*ck it up and it makes the news.

It was a woman. not a guy.

My late mum did exactly that. Ran into the back of a stationary artic in the high street.

"I forgot where the brake pedal was" she confided to me later..

Still later she forgot where she lived, that she had ever been married or had children.

Yes, they've gradually added items to the test, over the years.

For memory, the things they check are:

- condition of suspension and load-bearing parts of body (checking for worn shock-absorbers/dampers, and rust on structural parts)

- correct operation of head/tail/brake/indicator lights, including correct aiming of dipped headlights

- condition of windscreen wiper blades and of screen (no stone chips larger than about 10 mm within driver's field of view)

- presence and correct operation of seatbelts

- brakes: checking balance of brakes between left and right (to avoid a car swerving under heavy braking); checking that handbrake works

- exhaust emissions (CO for petrol; NOx and particulates for diesel); confirm presence of catalytic converter and/or diesel particulate filter if car is new enough to require one

- tyres: eg tread depth must be > 1.6 mm across most of the width and all the way round the circumference

I may have forgotten something.

And all of this takes about 15-30 minutes and is done at many garages, large and small. I've watched the guys at the garage in my village doing my car and they've got it down to a fine art.

It's needed every year, starting three years after the car was first registered (ie three years from brand new, in most cases), and officially costs £55, though many garages offer it at a lower price, especially if they think you might book the car in for a service at around the same time as well. A good garage will not fail you for a minor fault such as a worn wiper blade or a blown indicator bulb, but will instead simply put it right (for a charge) and record it as a pass. This avoids having to have the car re-tested (and I think they have to go through the motions of testing

There are exemptions: cars that are older than 40 years no longer need to be tested, on the rather dubious grounds that someone who owns a so-called classic car will take greater care of it and will maintain it to a higher standard, so they will fix any faults that an MOT would find. I'm sure that's true in many cases, but by no means all: there will be people who have kept a car from new or have bought an old banger as a run-around and who will do minimal maintenance beyond what is needed to make the car go; it is those cars which are probably the *most* urgent to be tested, but they are exempt. As I understand it, the owner of an exempt car can still choose to have a voluntary MOT test to make sure that car is in good condition; presumably if the test does find anything serious, you are required to fix it even though the MOT is optional.

You are allowed to book your car in for a test up to a month before the test is due, which gives you chance to fail, take the car to a more specialised garage to have it fixed, and get it re-tested before the expiry of the previous test. As long as the failure reasons are classed as "minor" (ie not things like brakes, steering, suspension) you are allowed to drive the car in the meantime. If you*do* get the car tested early, the expiry date is forward-dated to 12 months from the previous one, so you don't lose up to a month's "coverage" by testing early.

This applies to England, Scotland and Wales. Until the recent fiasco in Northern Ireland, I didn't realise that they do things differently: rather than licensing most garages to do MOT tests, they require all cars to be tested at government test centres. It was the condition of car lifts at some of those test centres which led to MOTs being postponed until the problem had been sorted out. I'm still not sure what you did if the test was due: whether you had to stop driving once the previous test expired until you could get it re-tested, or whether they extended the validity of the last one for a few weeks. There was a really stupid and petty problem for cars which were coming up to 3 years old and needed their *first* test: there was no bureaucratic process for postponing the *first* test in a crisis like this, only for extending the validity of a pre-existing MOT (ie because the car was at least 3 years old), so people with newer cars were in a worse state than those with older ones, as regards being able to drive once the MOT became due. That comes into the realms of "just f***ing do it" - ie find a way of making it happen, obeying the *spirit* of the law, even if there's a bureaucratic problem that is none of the end-user's concern.

Had an old Rover where you had to lift a collar on the gearstick to select reverse - even although it was a fairly conventional 4 speed with reverse next to second. Seems quite sensible, really.

In the UK, I took my test in a non-ABS car (1997). I was told it didn't matter if I skidded, I just had to react quickly to the request to stop. They were only testing reaction time.

In an emergency, who cares? The main thing is you stop before you hit the thing in front of you. Inconveniencing a passenger is not as important as saving someone's life.

Why the f*ck would anyone do that? They just make you into a weird OCD obey every single rule person.

I do it automatically in a non-ABS car. The instant I feel a skid, I let go of the pedal for a bit. There's no point in tapping it if you're not skidding.

You should have used the horn and tested the kid's acceleration. It worked for me when a group of them were skateboarding along the road in the other direction on the wrong side and hadn't even seen me. They f****ng scattered!

My dad caused that once. He did an emergency stop for an AMBER traffic light. The car 2 behind rammed the car 1 behind into him. Since his was a Volvo, he suffered no damage. The other two cars had about £500 damage each. In my opinion it was his fault for stopping unnecessarily, but the insurance disagreed and he got away with it.

They're a bit behind in the outback.

Nah, here they just start it and leave it idling while they work on another car. Or don't bother - the testing machine doesn't check the temperature. I had a duel fuel car once which drastically failed the emissions on petrol. He switched it to LPG and it passed :-)

I've never practiced that, but I can do good handbrake turns (well when the handbrake is functional) and J-turns. Good for scaring the s*it out of the passenger if they aren't expecting it. Or turning round in a confined space where the passenger has said we're stuck.

And very useful for the mechanic to use to diagnose faults without trying to watch for problems while driving around. Other people can be stood next to the car observing things while it's "driving" but stationary.

To go under a car here, they hoist the car up, even tiny garages always have a couple of hoists.

They let the customer test it?!? I would never let a random person drive a car inside my building.

I think we don't bother for the first few years, but after that they have a test, with less strict limits as it gets older. F****ng stupid really, as a newer car therefore has to be in a better condition than my old one. Same goes for ABS. If I have a non-ABS car, that's ok, but an ABS car with failed ABS (which is precisely as safe) fails.

Yeah, same here except for trucks and buses etc.

They make the customer test it.

This is an immense shed with open ends. You drive thru it, not into and then out of the same way you came in.

Yep, 3 years. Ours is 5,

Because ABS is much BETTER than no ABS.

My 1988 Range Rover did that, although I think it was just a normal accelerator cable. Being an auto gearbox, I'd be sat at a junction with the thing revving away and my foot hard on the brake. People in front thought I was being impatient. Sometimes I'd flick it into neutral to save wearing the torque converter, but then it would rev even higher, and cause a wheelspin when I engaged D.