25 THE WRONG DEAL
25 THE WRONG DEAL
They say that they are making cars safer and able to withstand more and harder impacts and that they are adding more and more safety features to keep the people inside from harm. Unfortunately, they are dealing with the vehicles and not the root cause of car crashes; the drivers.
Because we are being told that the cars are safer now, we are relying more and more on them than on our own skills to drive and we are losing those skills faster than they are putting safer things on the cars.
Your skill at being able to handle your car when it is not doing what you want it to do is the best crash prevention there is. The second is to have a vehicle that is equipped to keep you safe instead of comfortable.
To drive safely means that you HAVE to pay attention to what you are doing and what is going on around you. Then you can watch and learn the proper techniques of a skilled driver.
After learning that safety is your first concern, you can move on to the proper vehicle. A front wheel drive vehicle is fine for getting going but, when you want to stop, it is a different story. In a panic stop, and especially on slippery roads, the back of the vehicle, being lighter and having no traction [drive or drag] on the tires, will try to pass the front, putting the car into a skid that requires the driver to power out of it; in a panic, this is the most unnatural thing that a person wants to do.
What the manufactures tell you about their vehicles also leaves some questions. They are putting white lights on the cars now for fog lights. In other words, you now have four white lights reflecting back at you off the fog instead of two yellow lights that do not reflect on the fog. [Yellow lights do not reflect back at you in the fog and will let you see almost as good as white lights on a fogless night.] [Also, the last time I looked, four white lights were not legal while meeting or following another vehicle.]
Most people buy their own vehicle that they drive and buy them for looks and/or to impress other people so manufactures are trying to add safety to fashionable cars. Some of those ugly older cars were built like tanks and were made out of steel instead of plastic.
I remember one such crash that my father had when I was a boy on the Trans-Canada Highway. It ruined Dad’s right front fender on his ’49 Chevy and broke out the tail light of the other car. They both drove away later. The speed limit then was 65 MPH, although neither one was going that fast.
Drivers are being told that the cars will keep them safe, that highways are built better than before and the law enforcement officers are not clamping down as hard as they should; giving them a false sense of security.
I think they’re giving us the wrong deal; how about you?
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The joke is that, in the winter, the first vehicle you'll see in the ditch is a 4 wheel drive. The reason is because the drivers, having more traction from a dead stop, overestimate their ability to drive and create potentially dangerous situations when they eventually lose control.
Give drivers the old 6 cylinder, manual transmission, rear wheel drive cars and you'll see a lot less driver distractions being used and probably fewer crashes.
Merry Christmas
I don't think I could have said that any better.
In my years of driving transports, I went through that stage of regular brakes and ABS; they also had a change in the jake setting at the same time. The old jakes used to go to 0 RPM and stall the motor so you had to run with the jakes off and only turn them on when you were on a hard hill; then you could feather the standard brakes and maintain your speed going down a hill. [On snow and ice, you could spike the trailer brakes to slow down and still stay straight]
With the introduction of ABS, feathering does not work because with ABS they only work if you floor the brakes and hold it there, so we got used to running with the jakes on and used them more often. Many drivers forgot about the 0 RPM range and stalled their motors. You cannot restart a desiel motor in a skid before you crash and that is what was happening. They have since reset the jake kick out to between 8oo and 1000 RPM so they won't stall the motor. con...
When I first started teaching transport driving, I taught my students not to leave the jake switch on or they could stall their motor and crash but with the new settings, the safest way now is to run with the jakes on and use them first because they will act like a feathering of the brakes; only applying a little drag preasure and, when the wheels stop turning because they are sliding, the jakes kick out and you get free roll. You now have safe braking and you still maintain complete control of the vehicle.
Drivers that did not keep up with the changes got in trouble by using the wrong techneque with the wrong equipment. It's much like grinding a few gears in the old standard transmissions; you weren't long paying attention to what you were doing before you broke something.