Wing mirrors on cars

[Max Demian]

I think you can retain the extra classes if you need them. Maybe you need a letter from your doctor.

[Ed]

You don't need skill if you have a good excuse. At work one day years ago the truck and 40' trailer was backed into one of the shipping doors and it had to be moved. Driver was gone for the day so I said I'd move it to another door about 20 feet away. I backed it in. perfectly square, but 3 feet away from the door. When asked, I just said "I didn't want to block the air flow"

My first experience backing a boat trailer was horrid too. Once I learned how, I could back a trailer along a turning and twisting path. Easy once you know how and hold the wheel on the bottom.

[boltar]

[Roger Hayter]

There are sometimes sound reasons for continuing thread divergence in fewer groups, or a different group. 'Follow-up' headers are a neat, effortless way of doing so. It is conventional to mention in the message that you've set follow-ups and it may be abusive (or careless) not to do so. That doesn't mean they should be programmatically ignored. A warning is good, though.

[Roger Hayter]

You need a formal HGV medical report. Including a optician report if your doctor doesn't do eye tests. What I don't know is if you can regain the classes later without an HGV test if you relinquish them at

70.

[Huge]

[14 lines snipped]

At a job I had many years ago, my desk overlooked a yard where they taught artic (US: semitrailer) drivers to drive. They had an exercise where they laid out 4 road cones in a line, about 20 yards apart, and the driver drove the artic zigzag in and out of them, around the end one and back again.

Backwards.

The instructors could do it at great speed. The trainees, well, I wish I'd had the contract to supply them with road cones.

[NY]

I'd find it hard enough to reverse a car around cones in a slalom "at great speed" if the cones were spaced closer together to match the shorter length of a car. :-)

I've seen film of HGV instructors doing it and it confirms my suspicion that those guys are superhuman ;-)

[Max Demian]

If you need all that crap, why do they let over 70s drive anything?

[Tekkie®]

rbowman posted for all of us...

It's called the: Braille method

[Tekkie®]

NY posted for all of us...

Hey NY it's spelled curbs in the USA.

Newer cars have a setting on them the allows the outside mirrors to tilt downward to see the curb. In fact my cars have automatic parking ability. It does not account for the idiot Corvette driver that pulls 8 inches from your bumper with the turn signal & back up lights on. The sensors screamed and brakes applied automatically...

[Tekkie®]

Tony Dragon posted for all of us...

Anyone that operates a larger vehicle such as fire truck or ambulance uses their mirrors because the ain't no rear windows. When backing an assistant should be used because emergency personnel have other things on their minds beside backup alarms.

[NY]

Apologies. I'd used both alternative spellings in some of my other posts, but I forgot in this one!

Yes, that feature is very useful on cars which have it. On my old Peugeot I need to do it manually with the 4-way joystick, but my wife's 2015 Honda CR-V has it - but only for the passenger side. It only works if the left-off-right slider switch is in the left (passenger for RHD) position. Strange that if you put the slider in the RHS position (which allows the driver's mirror rather than the passenger mirror to be adjusted by the 4-way joystick), the auto-tilt-when-reverse-is-engaged doesn't work.

I know you are usually encouraged to park with your passenger side next to the kerb/curb (and in the UK it's actually illegal to park on the opposite side *at night* because cars don't have reflectors at the front for them to be seen by passing traffic) but even so it would be useful if engaging reverse tilted both mirrors down so you could see *either* rear wheel relative to its adjacent kerb/curb so you can park as close as possible without mounting the kerb/curb.

Some superhuman people claim to be able to estimate where their car is in relation to the kerb/curb, even though it is longer visible, and scorn the need to tilt the mirrors downwards, but I'm a mere mortal and I rely on this unless there's a convenient lamp-post nearby which continues the line of the kerb/curb upwards to a point where you can see it through the rear-side window and hence judge how close you are to the kerb/curb.

[James Wilkinson Sword]

You don't need that much FOV. There's a compromise.

[James Wilkinson Sword]

Sounds like a device I'd disable as soon as I bought the car. I ain't having my own car spy on me!

[Bob Eager]

No, then.

[James Wilkinson Sword]

I don't have this problem, I'm overtaken about once per 200 miles. Drive faster.

[James Wilkinson Sword]

I have no blind spots on my car. The overtaking car is in the rearview mirror, then the wing mirror, then in my peripheral vision. Never a point where they're in none of those.

[James Wilkinson Sword]

Odd I have never in my entire life seen a truck driver from any country do anything stupid. Only car drivers and cyclists, and of course pedestrians.

[James Wilkinson Sword]

Or just use your eyes?!

[James Wilkinson Sword]

I was awoken in the night to a bleeping noise I didn't recognise. I was still half asleep and determined it wasn't the smoke alarm, so went back to sleep. The next morning I found it was the computer's UPS warning me the power was off and it was running on battery, which it was still doing the following morning, caused by a short under the house which had evaporated the incoming wire.