Thats a good one. Not putting the manual in reverse when the car is parked to save the transmission, but putting an auto in park. That parking pawl is easier to break off than it is to damage the manual gear box.
Just look at all of those replies! Plenty of wanks there Hucker.
Really? I thought it was strongly discouraged as you tend to press both at once in panic. When I drove a go kart which has the pedals literally on opposite sides of it, so I had to use 1 foot for each, I often found I'd forget to release the gas when I braked.
I don't. If you do, you aren't fit to operate a motor vehicle.
Nope, it's due to my brain telling me what I need to know. Where the thing is happening, not to which hand.
Yep.
Nope, that's how most who have only ever driven automatics do drive them
Those who drive automatic don't do that.
Sure, clearly most don't otherwise those spectacular crashes wouldn't make the news.
Impossible to predict who might do that, particularly as they age.
Some of our states do make you take the driving test again as you become a geriatric, and you need to keep taking more in the future too.
Same with mine on the left near 1. But it means I can switch between R and 1 more quickly when turning.
But deliberately making the gears more difficult for no benefit.
Pretty hard to damage a standard box by parking it in gear!!
In 1980, I drove an Opel in Germany for many months with the same thing. I agree, it was fine and foolproof.
Same as my old Firenza (Vauxhall HC SL) - and a Chevy Vega or Chevette - except they were reverse beside 1st. Almost impossible to accidentally get reverse. (sometimes hard to get reverse on purpose too - - - )
A little bit of my motivation was the kudos of knowing that I had passed a harder test and therefore *in theory* was a better driver. Part of it may have been a suggestion that my driving instructor had made 10 years earlier (he probably said it to everyone) that when people had been driving a while and "think they know it all" they should think about taking the IAM test; that may have been because he had been a Police Class 1 driving instructor until he retired, which trains drivers to a similar, if not higher, standard. I think he was concerned (rightly!) that it was a good idea to curb the youthful arrogance and over-confidence that can cause accidents.
It was an interesting exercise. It helped me see hazards further ahead, and anticipate things that previously I hadn't expected. Little things like looking for a puff of exhaust from a parked car, suggesting that the driver will probably want to set off soon, or looking for the feet of bus passengers under a bus, when they are hidden by the bus - they may be about to cross the road as soon as the bus leaves.
The one thing that I had to un-learn and re-learn was how to slow down, and that's because the normal test and the IAM test taught different things (now the normal test has adopted the IAM practice). Firstly, when you are approaching a hazard, stay in the gear you're in until you get close and have had time to assess which gear you will need to accelerate away, and then change *directly* from (for example) fifth to second; the normal test (at that time, in the early 80s) still taught you to change down laboriously through every gear, as the converse of changing up through every gear when accelerating. Secondly, to brake "progressively". This was an interesting one. For the normal test, I'd been taught to apply constant brake pressure right from high speed to (almost) stopping; for the IAM test, the advice is to brake gently at high speed, gradually increase the brake pressure and force as the car slows down, and then ease off the brake pressure almost to no brake at all as the car comes to a halt; this makes the braking smoother for the passengers and also (it is said) makes it less likely that you will skid while still doing a high speed if the surface is slippery. It is difficult initially to make yourself do, because it feels as if you are not braking hard enough.
It is true the IAM does get a bit po-faced and anal about some things. I remember having a "free and frank exchange of views" with my instructor when he said that I indicated "too much". What he meant was: I shouldn't indicate at a junction if I could see that there was no other road user to need to see my signal. By indicating or not, depending on conditions, I demonstrated that I had correctly assessed the hazards. Bollocks to that! I favoured a fail-safe approach where I get into the habit of always indicating, so I never forget to do it at a time when it *is* necessary.
I'm not a perfect driver, not by a long way. I *may* be better than average. I try to anticipate so I can start to slow down early by lifting off the power, rather than braking hard at the last minute once the brake lights of the car in front come on. I sometimes play a game with myself - how far can I drive (safely) without having to touch my footbrake - only works is fairly light traffic ;-)
One of the hardest things about taking the test is the bit where you have to give a commentary of what you can see and how you will react. It is *very* difficult to talk coherently and clearly, when things are happening faster than you can get the words out and formulate the sentences. I remember one thing during that bit of my test. I saw a lorry pull over to the side of the road and the driver get out. I indicated to pull out and was about to cross the line when it suddenly set off, without warning. Given that it had UK reg plates (so wasn't left-hand drive) I can only assume that the passenger had slid across into the driving seat after dropping off the previous driver ;-) "Hmm, I didn't see that one coming" I commented. My examiner said "Bloody hell, neither had I!" which made me realise that these examiners are *not* super-human beings after all ;-)
There's a famous Youtube video of an IAM examiner giving an commentary as he drives from London to Bath in the early 60s. It is very laid-back, and I'm sure the commentary was dubbed on afterwards with the benefit of hindsight, rather than being made at the time. There was so much less traffic in those days that things didn't happen as thick-and-fast as they do nowadays, so there was time for a leisurely commentary in complete sentences, with a bit of laconic humour thrown in.
The one thing that surprises me is that at one point he comes up behind a slower car in Lane 2 of a 2-lane road (I think it was the A4 heading past Heathrow Airport). Our driver says "I shall sound the horn at him" which he does - quite a long blast - and then he flashes his lights several times and sounds his horn again and yet again, on the grounds that "the other driver clearly hasn't seen me". I think now it would come over as very aggressive, and it was probably even more aggressive in the 60s; if a brief flash and toot of the horn didn't encourage the car to move over, I'd give up and wait, for fear of provoking road-rage.
I probably did sound the horn. If I did, it had no effect: the little toddler was hell-bent on retrieving his football that appeared in the road a second before he did, and seemed to be oblivious to me. It was probably the appearance of the football which warned me so I was already about to brake (just in case) before he appeared. I'd already decided that because of the abundance of garden gates, hedges and driveways, 20 might be a better speed than 30 at that point.
With some MOT certificates I've been given the bit of paper from the emissions meter, and I'm sure it quotes the engine oil temperature, so maybe the tester is required to dip a thermometer through the oil filler cap as part of the test. The amount of feedback that you get from the tester varies enormously from one year to the test, maybe partly due to different policies at different garages and partly through ever-changing formats of the official MOT paperwork that you are given. Ah, yes, here we are: my test in June last year: a report from a Sun DGA 2500 tester gives "[smoke] absorption coefficient" in litres/min, and then says "Engine temperature: 78 deg C - tested at below 80 deg C oil temperature".
I think the point that Commander Kinsey was making that a car with ABS that is not working is no worse than a car without ABS. And a car with working ABS is better than either. So a car with non-functional ABS should not be penalised worse than a car which is not designed to have ABS.
This is unlike the situation with power-steering. Having had an alternator belt fail when I was driving on the motorway, I can vouch for the fact that a car with power steering that has failed has *much* heavier steering than one without power steering, probably because a) you have having to push against the pressure of the PS fluid in the pipes, and b) a car with PS may well be designed with different steering geometry which gives better self-centring and feedback to the driver, at the expense of making the steering inherently heavier which is normally compensated by the PS.
I once test-drove two "identical" VW Golfs, one with PS and one without, to decide whether to pay extra for that when it was offered as an optional feature. More noticeable than the PS car having lighter steering was the fact that the wheels tended to straighten up more readily, and the steering required fewer turns lock-to-lock than the non PS one.
I bought a second-hand Golf once, one of the last with a carburettor and automatic choke rather than fuel injection. After a few weeks, I happened to be driving back along the M25 and it turned into a car-park because of an accident. So I was stopped for a while, then we'd all edge forward a bit, then stop for a while, and so on. After a few minutes of doing this, the slow-running control in the automatic choke packed up, so the engine wouldn't run at less than about 1200 rpm. I got lots of funny looks from cars around me - inevitably it was a hot day so everyone had their windows open, so the sound of my racing engine was clearly audible to everyone. The garage soon fixed that and I never had any more trouble with it.
My next car, the next Mark of Golf, had fly-by-wire for the throttle. But when it failed, it had the opposite effect to making the engine rev uncontrollably: it caused the engine to stall. It only ever happened just as I was pulling out from a junction: I'd get nicely out, across both streams of traffic (assuming I was turning right) and the engine would die. That took the garage a *long* time to fix: it was in the garage on numerous occasions. I remember getting an ecstatic phone call from the garage: we've found out what it is. Cost of part: about 50 pence. Cost of diagnostic labour: several hundred pounds. It was caused by a worn throttle potentiometer. That was one of those cases where it is good to keep all your paperwork. By the time the fault was discovered, the car was just outside its time or distance limit for the manufacturer's warranty. But I was able to produce the first garage bill, with the date and mileage clearly marked, together with the description of the fault. I gather VW head office and the VW garage had a long discussion about who would pay, but how ever it was settled, I got that diagnostic work, together with my earlier bills, refunded because it was covered by the warranty.
I had a Dodge pick-up with a '3 in the tree' lever on the steering column:
R 2
+N+ 1 3The linkage was sloppy, and sometimes if not pushed all the way to left or right going through N (into R or 2), it would get stuck in R&1 only, or 2&3 only.
So yeah, it was sometimes hard to get into R. You had to put it into N, put on the parking brake, get the big screwdriver from the glove box, and then go under the truck and fiddle with the other end of the linkage on the top of the transmission.
Having 1 oppose R was great for 'rocking' out of a rut though.
Not necessarily so. With no ABS, front and back brakes have to be balanced (in design) to prevent the rears locking up first. ABS takes care of this, allowing the same units to be used both ends (or whatever)
I've heard that too. One reason there are so many rear end crashes is because the driver is looking at the car, not the space in back of it where they want to stop.
Even better in an auto, amazing how quick it changes. I did that with my Golf in the snow.
In the UK, I've never seen a car like that, and I've owned about 15, and driven twice as many belonging to other people. 1st and reverse are always next to each other, R being left of 1. I'm not sure of the point of having it set up in the way you describe:
Point 1) It takes longer to shift between 1 and R when doing tight maneuvers. Point 2) If you do f*ck it up, you're changing to R while travelling at high speed.
My wife's Honda CRV 2015 model is like that.
That's important for motorcycles too. You need to be looking through the corner to where you want to go, not at the tree you're going to hit if you screw up.
I've wondered about an unintended consequence. My drive home is in a rural area with no street lights or many houses. I've sometimes encountered a bicyclist with a flashing red light. Since there is nothing else to see you tend to focus on it and drift towards it...
I drove a truck with an overdrive transmission for a while. Ignoring the splitter that made it a 9 speed the pattern was
1 4 2 3The 2 to 3 shift was a pain in the ass. In moments of confusion going from 2 to 4 seldom worked. In a big diesel rig you only have about a 700 rpm useful range from 1100 to 1800 or so.
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