Wing mirrors on cars

The followup header is pointless for a non-troll, because your reply doesn't got to the new group, only the ones after it. Better just to add the newsgroup to the newsgroup header.

Maybe it's the ability to drive while passengers are distracting you. Does the test have noisy crowds of people on the bus?

Reversing badly isn't going to cause a nasty accident. Driving forwards with a trailer is a piece of cake. The worst you might do is clip the kerb if you don't take a corner or junction wide enough.

Just how fast could that car accelerate? I very much doubt they were written off.

I don't see the problem with reversing a trailer. Just think if you were pushing a supermarket trolley, and you want it to go right, clearly you move your hands left.

It would have to be a damn big car and a damn big caravan for me (passed spring 97, after the cutoff point) not to be allowed to tow it. The combined weight is up to 3500kg. Most cars are 1000-1500 kg, and most caravans about 1000kg.

I can't see the police bothering to weigh everything anyway.

Technically I think I broke the law recently when I hired an enormous van, loaded it up, then drove 300 miles with it.

But reversing isn't what endangers others, it's not being able to control it while driving at speed.

Or a Renault 5:

Why do you need to add anything to a trailer to push it?

=A320 gets you a reversing camera. Just get one of those.

-- =

Peter is listening to "Motley Crue - Chicks =3D Trouble"

Why is holding the wheel on the bottom helpful?

What I want to learn is how to do this:

If it isn't then it's Welsh, which is worse.

"James Wilkinson Sword" wrote in message news: snipped-for-privacy@red.lan...

Two comments:

I find anything with rear-wheel steering more difficult to manoeuvre because I am far more used to driving vehicles with steered wheels at the front in the direction of travel. Rear-wheel steering trolleys with fixed front wheels are a real pain. Supermarket trolleys have all four wheels steerable, even though the front ones don't swivel as readily as the rear ones. The real bastard trolleys are the ones you find in DIY stores where the front wheels are locked solid - just as the rear wheels of a car are when you are reversing (when the rear wheels are at the front in the direction of travel). Sure, I can reverse, but it's like a dog riding a bicycle: you don't comment on how clumsily it does it, you marvel that it can do it at all. One of the big problems (leaving aside the fact that you have worse visibility because you only have side mirrors and central rear-view mirror) is that the self-centring of the steering works against you instead of in your favour: car steering has the wheel bearings offset laterally from the axis of rotation (ie a non-zero castor angle) which causes the wheels to tend to centre themselves if you release the steering wheel when the car is steering one way - but only when going forwards. When going backwards the opposite applies and the steering tries to go further to the extreme lock. Therefore it takes more effort and concentration to keep a car reversing in a constant line (straight or constant radius of curvature).

I remember a physics lesson about car steering and the compromises that are made - things are biassed to make the car easier to drive forwards at the expense of making it more difficult to drive backwards.

But that's any sort of reversing. The difficulty with reversing something articulated is that it isn't as simple as steering in the opposite direction to the one you want the trailer to go in. You have to be able to judge the point at which you change the steering from counter to normal so as to prevent the towed vehicle from jacknifing, by gradually lessening the amount of steering. until ultimately the towing and towed vehicles are in line again, but now pointing in a different direction to the one they were pointing in at the beginning.

Like all skills, it has to be taught/learned and it has to be practiced over and over again until eventually it becomes second nature. And you have to learn all the visual cues - points on the car to line up when you need to change over from counter to normal. I had it all explained and demonstrated to me. I even understood it all perfectly. But could I get the hang of it when I tried it myself. Could I f**k!

I think my instructor was wrong in saying that some people just can't get the hang of it. But probably there is a Normal distribution of the time take before everything "clicks" in your brain - and I was out at one end of the distribution so it would have taken me much longer than the average person. If my job or hobby depended on it, I'd have persisted with lessons and ignored the tutting and exasperation from the instructor (or found one who was more patient and could remember back to when *he* was learning).

You lost the ability to drive at a decent speed. Most people I encounter holding me up are OAPs.

Makes it easier to follow and direct the trailer. You are pushing the wheel in the same direction as a normal reverse.

True. But is the restriction solely on the grounds of safety, or is it also there to prevent inconvenience to others when you c*ck up your reversing and leave the vehicle blocking the road? I'd say it is there for both reasons.

Blimey o'Riley. That is bad: smoke coming from the car, a four-axle caravan, the whole thing kangarooing as the car strains to pull the caravan. And then of course it all goes pear-shaped and the caravan drags the car back with smoke coming from its wheels.

I'd love to have seen the insurance report that the car driver put in for the accident...

No, and no little assholes with laser pointers either.

Reading comprehension a little faulty today? Or do trailers in the UK commonly have front bumpers? The hitch ball is mounted to the front bumper of the vehicle. Do you need a diagram?