OT: Mature driver review

Not all cars have electric handbrakes even today and many US cars have rear disks with a drum cast onto them to hold a drum brake for the handbrake

Quite a nice safety feature really

No. You engage the handbrake, put the car in drive and accelerate till it moves off. The handbrake cancels itself

or do they have that hill-start-assist

I cant say I have ever had that happen, Normally I brake to a halt and then if there is a big queue of traffic engage the handbrake and put the car in neutral to save the torque converter.

Only time it moves a couple of inches is when releasing the footbrake with the transmission in park

Half as much as you think

I'm talking about the mid-70s

As others have explained drum brakes have the self levering stopping power, they are enclosed from the weather and I think cheaper. Early disk brakes suffered from dirt etc and the demand for better braking didn't really arise until vehicle speeds got higher. 60mph used to be really fast for the average motor. My 848cc Mini with double valve springs probably never topped 65mph and my Dad's 1939 Austin 12 probably never topped 50mph.

He says: 'When I'm driving in 20 & 30mph roads, my gear changes (up to

I used to reverse articulated trailers, that had a rear overhang of about 6 feet, with an antiquated yard shunter with no mirrors. Some drivers with all their modern units would often have to have 2 tries, sometimes 3, to get their trailer in the same gap. All except for 1 trailer which had wheels right at the back. The same with a car with a caravan or trailer. With them I was all over the place. Probably would have got it with more practice.

How long did it take you, from having never driven with a trailer before, to being able to reverse in a straight line without the trailer drifting off and (if you'd continued) jacknifing? Was I exceptionally slow in not being able to pick up the rudiments in an hour or so? Obviously reversing around a corner or into a parking space takes a lot more practice.

I think I picked up reversing a car within a very short time when I first started to drive, but once you add the articulation, it becomes (for me, at least) several orders of magnitude more difficult.

How do you reverse without mirrors and therefore can't see what the trailer is doing? I always need mirrors for any reversing (in a car), so I can look along the sides of the car to make sure I am equidistant from the parking lines or the gateposts/hedges that I am trying to fit between. And for parallel parking when I need the passenger mirror angled down to point at my rear wheel to show how close it is to the kerb so I know when I need to start turning my front end in.

I used to look over my shoulder through the back window but I decided that it was easier to face forward and alternate my gaze between left, central and right mirror, as a van/lorry driver would do (obviously without the central mirror). I find that I use a reversing camera mainly for judging how close I am to the car behind, and not for positioning myself left and right when I still use mirrors.

Parking sensors are a waste of space. They seem to have a fundamental flaw: they are blind to objects which are directly in front of the sensor, as opposed to at an angle to it. Both my wife and I have nudged bollards (too low to see in any of the mirrors) which did not trigger the sensor, and the impact point was right on the sensor; objects which would have hit to one side or the other do trigger the sensor, as do flies and blades of grass and other insignificant objects!

I have not noticed this at all.

My parking sensors work fairly well, though they are not a panacea. Neither is the reversing camera.

I use *everything* sensors, camera, wing mirrors... depending on where the bumpable objects actually are...

NY snipped-for-privacy@privacy.net wrote

That's true for everyone

I could see the trailer thru the back window of the car

I don't

I don't do it like that

Or that either and that's not how I taught a couple of learners and they both passed the test on the first go

That's the way I always do it

Ah, it was high enough and long enough that its rear end was not below the sill of the rear window? That does help a lot.

On the course I did, the trailer was completely invisible by any aids (looking over shoulder or through door mirrors) if it was in line with the car, and only became visible (only through one of the door mirrors, still not over the shoulder through the rear window) when it had stepped a fair distance out of line, by which time I'd left it a bit late to start correcting for the error.

I imagine a big caravan which is visible through the rear window as well as the door/wing mirrors, and which has the axle much further from the towing hitch, it is a bit easier.

Can you judge the width-ways gap using only the view through the rear window (direct or via central mirror)? I find it difficult to tell whether I'm getting too close, using only that view.

One advantage I find with using the door mirrors is that I don't have to move my eyes far to switch between rear view in the door mirrors (for the rear end of the car) and the direct view of the front wings, to make sure that *neither* end of the car is getting too close to the wall/hedge that I'm trying to fit between.

Ah, can you judge where the kerb is in relation to the nearside wheel even long after it is hidden by the nearside body of the car? I haven't a hope of doing that. Once it's gone out of view, it could be *anywhere*.

When I was test-driving my present car, with front wings that slope away forwards and sideways much more than my old one did, I found a street where there were usually spaces for parallel parking, but rarely spaces that were much bigger than my car, so I could practice parallel parking and learn how much the corner of the car extended beyond the furthest part of the bonnet that I could see.

The best reversing I saw was in Australia in c1975. A low loader, with a dolly, and a Cat D10 payload, reversing into position. I think many of the firm's low loader drivers admired that guy.

My neck bones have stiffened to the point where I can't look behind when seated. Tractor gearing is such that I can stand beside the seat when doing a tricky reverse. For reversing something attached to a dolly, I try to imagine what steering is needed to correctly move the draw pin if it were held in my hands:-)>

NY snipped-for-privacy@privacy.net wrote

Yep, and always when loaded with what you are moving

Yep

I just keep it lined up with car and can trivially see that the car will fit and know that if the car will, the trailer will too

Yep you do that by getting the angle right while most of the car you are driving is still out in the road you are parking from

Not when you get the angle right and the time you start turning the steering wheel

I only have a problem with that when driving forward into a normal slot in a carpark, not parallel parking, because I can't see anything below the windscreen in my current hatch because it slopes so much

I think my Honda CR-V is like that.

Been there, done that. Clutch went halfway down the A30 going to a funeral in Cornwall from Oxford.

Back in my student days, I had just visited a large Leicester-area car breakers. As I drove home to Loughborough in the rain, my clutch-operating rod bent, so becoming useless. Luckily, I had a collection of cylinder head studs and nuts amongst my haul, so I managed to fashion a substitute clutch rod out of studs and nuts. I had an interested young audience in the window of the house in whose driveway I had managed to get to when the rod gave out. As this was way before mobiles, my housemates had no way of knowing what had happened until I appeared at our door, with very grubby hands. Dinner was burned to a crisp.

Yes, I was reversing completely blind. The first thing to do is physically check there isn't anything in your reversing path. I have seen someone jump in the shunter & reverse the trailer into another lorry which had just parked behind. If I hit a stationary object the fault is mine & mine alone. No excuses. I am in charge of the vehicle & it is up to me to take circumstances into account. That doesn't make me a good driver, just a sensible one.

That's just a short run :)

My clutch went on my Mini just outside of Heathrow c1968 and I made my way back to just North of Nottingham. I don't think the starter motor thanked me for it though I didn't have to stop more than a couple of times possibly to the annoyance of a few.

Mine was a htdraulic failure but the same effect.

It went in Hadlow, Suffolk. Got all the way back to East Kent.

(I basically threw the money at the guy in the toll booth at the Dartfor Tunnel; yes, tunnel, it was that long ago)