Safe Speed Forums

We had the first thick fog for ages here today with visibility less than 50 yards in places. It is truly staggering just how many people are happy to drive in those conditions with either no light or just side lights. Most of the offenders seemed to be grey haired older ladies doing a "safe" speed with a long queue behind. Can we have some "no lights in the fog" cameras please.

..and some "fog lights when its not even a little bit misty cameras" ?

I could advance a good argument that there should be no light switches at all on cars; all the lights being controlled by an LCC (lighting control computer) with the aid of a few photodiode sensors. ( I suppose that you would have to have a manual parking light switch but that would only operate with the ignition off)

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When I see an adult on a bicycle, I do not despair for the future of the human race. H.G. Wells
When I see a youth in a motor car I do d.c.brown

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Re: Fog

New postby dcbwhaley on Thu Jan 08, 2009 1:52 pm
I could advance a good argument that there should be no light switches at all on cars; all the lights being controlled by an LCC (lighting control computer) with the aid of a few photodiode sensors. ( I suppose that you would have to have a manual parking light switch but that would only operate with the ignition off) /quote]

would these devices be sensitive enough for daytime fog though? Sometimes visibility can be down to 50yards but still quite light.

I have to agree with Semitone, though, it is mainly women round our way that don't appreciate how poor, visibilty can be in daylight fog, just because they can see past their front bumper they seem to think all's ok

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My views do not represent Safespeed but those of a driver who has driven for 39 yrs, in all conditions, at all times of the day & night on every type of road and covered well over a million miles, so knows a bit about what makes for safety on the road,what is really dangerous and needs to be observed when driving and quite frankly, the speedo is way down on my list of things to observe to negotiate Britain's roads safely, but I don't expect some fool who sits behind a desk all day to appreciate that.

Typical of the stock market parasites friends to suggest the mandatory introduction of some potentially expensive electronic gadget when all you need to do is turn the switch. Sometimes its quite bright during fog and then road salt / dirt could obscure the sensor and leave you with lights on all the time.

Squirrel mentioned driving a car with automatic lights on that he thought were coming on when he went under trees etc. so cars in front thought he was flashing them; not ideal.

Reported to moderators.

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When I see an adult on a bicycle, I do not despair for the future of the human race. H.G. Wells
When I see a youth in a motor car I do d.c.brown

All this talk of automatic lights does make me wonder how much "driver input" and skill level will be involved in driving in the future. Now, when we get to the car, we press a button and the doors unlock, you get into your seat and a seat belt warning tells you to belt up, you programme your sat nav to tell you where to turn left or right. Your automatic gearbox won't let you start the engine whilst in gear, then changes gear for you, esp and abs stop you having to worry about how much brake pressure, accelerator to use when cornering etc. cars can park themselves, stop themselves running into one in front of you.Cruise control and ISA will control your speed. Where will it all end?
Soon we will just sit in the seats and they will drive there for us. It does also make me wonder if all this car automation is causing the poor standard of driving that we see more of these days?
Is it any wonder that fewer drivers look in their mirrors or indicate these days, when they are so used to the car doing everything for them?

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My views do not represent Safespeed but those of a driver who has driven for 39 yrs, in all conditions, at all times of the day & night on every type of road and covered well over a million miles, so knows a bit about what makes for safety on the road,what is really dangerous and needs to be observed when driving and quite frankly, the speedo is way down on my list of things to observe to negotiate Britain's roads safely, but I don't expect some fool who sits behind a desk all day to appreciate that.

Well my car does non of those things except sounding a buzzer if I leave the lights on. But I am sure that the driverles scar will be with us in the lifetime of the youngest member. A lot of work is being done on this, the DARPA challenge (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DARPA_Grand_Challenge for example. And once the technology is in place the pressure from the safety lobby will eventual make them the only vehicles permitted on the roads.

Add car to car communications (last month's Scientific American) and you won't need to keep a safe distance between vehicles on motorway type roads. Trains of magnetically coupled vehicles will be save fuel. Force fields surrounding the vehicles will gently whisk errant pedestrians out of the way and radar and sonar sensors will remove the need for cyclists to show lights. And if nothing ever fails, 100% safety will be assured.

Thank the spirit I won't be alive to see it.

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When I see an adult on a bicycle, I do not despair for the future of the human race. H.G. Wells
When I see a youth in a motor car I do d.c.brown

Me too, long live the basic car.

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My views do not represent Safespeed but those of a driver who has driven for 39 yrs, in all conditions, at all times of the day & night on every type of road and covered well over a million miles, so knows a bit about what makes for safety on the road,what is really dangerous and needs to be observed when driving and quite frankly, the speedo is way down on my list of things to observe to negotiate Britain's roads safely, but I don't expect some fool who sits behind a desk all day to appreciate that.

On Tuesday the half mile long winding drive was very slippery but we all got our old VWs, Escorts and such up it safely. The only damage happened to a fairly new Audi TT with every acronym known to motoring which went straight on at the last bend, demolished a gate post and significantly modified the front end. Since nobody was hurt we were able to have a good laugh

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When I see an adult on a bicycle, I do not despair for the future of the human race. H.G. Wells
When I see a youth in a motor car I do d.c.brown

NOOOOOooooooo!

I make my living fixing all this techycrap when it goes wrong. And frankly I hate it!

“Automated lighting computer” where decisions are removed from the driver and there is no manual override!??!

Heres how it will work.

The LCC will cost a minimum of £300 to replace if it fails.

It will be located in some utterly inaccessible part of the dashboard requiring a minimum of 4 hours work to remove/replace it. (or even to confirm that it isnt the problem! Think about it! )

It will be “coded” to the immobiliser, if it fails for any reason you will be unable to start the car (so you will need to be recovered by the $tealer- another £300)

Since it is “Coded” you will not be able to use S/H parts from the breakers! Only new parts from the $tealer will work AND it will need to be programmed by special $tealer only equipment. (For which they will charge you yet another £100)

Oh, and lastly, they will start dropping like flies six months after the extended warranties expire (say after 5 years or so!)

Trust me! I am NOT exaggerating! Many post-2000 cars are ALREADY like this with the electronic dashboards, electric PAS, electric handbrakes ETC ETC ETC! I come across this sort of thing regularly now!

We need yet more mission critical techycrap like we need collective holes in our heads!

The idea that we need to replace a £10 switch with hundreds of pounds worth of sensors, computers and whatever in order to make the world a better place is an absolute nonsense!

Now, don’t get me wrong. I am not fundamentally opposed to gadgets and luxuries, but the basic role/functions of a vehicle should be kept as simple as possible and operate independently of the toys so that older vehicles can still be used when the toys start to fail and they are not worth fixing.

I have an old Jag; originally it had an “autosensor” headlight mode. This has now failed, but at least I can still use the switch. Otherwise the cost of repair (along with the electric windows, which have also died!) would likely be greater than the value of the car!

Removing the manual option is a VERY BAD IDEA!

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"The road to a police state is paved with public safety legislation"

Dusty.

There really ought to be a smiley for irony and sarcasm Of course removing the manual option. I drive a twenty year old , very repairable, car for that very reason. I don't want to have to write a car of, as a friend did, because the brake lights fail.

I was merely joking that some numpties are so incapable of distinguishing between light and dark that the car should do it for them.

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When I see an adult on a bicycle, I do not despair for the future of the human race. H.G. Wells
When I see a youth in a motor car I do d.c.brown

Can I recommend fake code, i.e. [sarcasm]....[/sarcasm]? Saves a lot of misunderstanding!

Maybe there should!

the problem is that I see this sort of crap on a day to day basis at the "Coal Face" as it were! so I am a bit sensitive about it

I could write pages on how the manufacturers these days deliberatly introduce stuff like this in a way that is clearly intended to be expensive/time consuming/unrepairable.

I do not think I am, being paranoid about this. I see FAR too much "Bad design" for it to be mere engineering incompatance! it HAS to be malicious!

And in any case, so much is spent on developing new modal lines that they must be the way they are because the manufacturers want them to be that way (right down to the dry joints!)

30 years ago they could get old cars off the road after ten years or so by simply not painting the bits you cant see, they cant get away with that any more so they have to find other ways to stop people running old cars and force them to buy new ones. And I dont doubt for one minite that the politicians are in on the game too! Brossens comment may have been a bit intemparate, but in a general sense I supect it is right on the money!

It wasnt always like this.

Many years ago I had a Rover 2000 P6, the front chassis crossmenber actually had two little cut outs in it so that you could access the front sump bolts! and drop the sump with the engine in place. Nowadays they would (And Do! Ive seen it) weld an extra plate accross just to spite you!

The first FWD Cavelears had an inovative clutch design that allowed a simple replacement through a "Letterbox" under the gearbox without having to remove said gearbox. This was abbandoned in later models because of grumbles from dealers and quick fit!

By contrast, just yesterday I was servicing an A class merc. the replacement of the pollen filter has a "Book time" of 45 freaking minuits!. It didnt take me quite as long as that, but it took longer than all the rest of the service put together! Please dont anybody tell me that this wasnt a delibarate part of the design. and since I imagine inner city Merc dealers are charging over £150/hr these days think about what it means for owners pockets

To my mind the rot set in about 89. the pinacle of practical motor car design was embodied in the form of the Volvo 240GLT with K-jetronic fuel injection. the new technology (Fuel injection and TCI) actually provided real benefits to the owner with little downside. however, once electronics became commonplace everyhting started to go down hill.

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"The road to a police state is paved with public safety legislation"

more conspiracy theories ?

As I said I drive a '91 digifant Mk2 Golf GTI which I regard as just pastthat pinnacle (the slightly earlier K jets were better). But is it all down to the manufacturers? Offer two cars at the same price - one with enhanced maintainability at the expense of features such as multiple cupholders and see which one he punters buy

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When I see an adult on a bicycle, I do not despair for the future of the human race. H.G. Wells
When I see a youth in a motor car I do d.c.brown

That's exactly the point! (I feel)! Just like my father-in-law banging on about his old Hillman Hunter. If a car manufacturer DARED put one of those in the showroom tomorrow, I doubt he'd sell a single one! In fact, they've only just stopped making them in Iran! The number of times I've heard people bemoaning the alleged needlessness of the modern car's technology and yet what happened to that company that tried selling Indian-built Rover SDIs over here? You'd think, if the public really felt that way, that there would be a bursting market for grey imports - but not the high-tech stuff from Japan, they'd be bringing back all the old Morris Oxfords from India!

I wonder if they'd had Internet discussion forae just after the war whether there would be a load of malcontents moaning about "the complexity of modern cars" and asking whether electric start really WAS all it was cracked-up to be?! "Ah you knew where you were with a good, simple starting handle"! They'd say. "I spent two hours the other day replacing a starter motor"!

Or maybe you'd see comments like "...and these new-fangled tubeless tyres...(!) "I was never stuck with a puncture with me old tyre levers and me self-vulcanising patch"!

It's interesting that nobody seems to want to go back to carburettors though (not that we could these days if we'd wanted to anyway due to the emissions legislation). I'm baffled that anyone thinks the K-Jetronic system was any good though. I've had nothing but trouble from them! My own car has one of the first Bosch Motronic systems and I think those were LOVELY. It's 18 years ol (19 this year in fact!) and getting close to the quarter-million mile mark. The engine management has never given me a minute's bother (although it did let me down once when it melted it's rotor arm)! The model that replaced it was distributorless, but I've never fancied one of those because they had twice as many cams and the belt took 6 hours to change instead of 2! My wife's car is more modern. I cashed out about £50 on a programme for the laptop and a lead to connect it to the diagnostic socket and it's great! I can plug it in and watch the output of up to any 6 sensors or actuators in real-time at once! It was running badly just before Christmas and it must have taken all of 10 minutes to see that the air temperature passing through the airflow meter was supposedly 18 degrees (when in fact it was nearer 2)! A quick look at the Lambda trace confirmed that the airflow meter was giving duff information to the rest of the car. The diagnosis took about 10 minutes and I didn't even get dirty. Went back inside, ordered an airflow meter online and it turned up the next day. Half an hour after it turned up, the car was running sweet as a nut and I STILL wasn't dirty! (or cold)!

But before I get TOO smug, I also have to admit that the stupid thing DID trash it's cam belt once (and half it's valves). Now that DID take me a long time and I DID get dirty! (and cold). (AND mighty pi55ed-off when I realised I'd put the new head gasket on upside-down and had to take it all to bits again)!

None of this means that modern cars couldn't be better designed for maintenance though. Almost every car has some stupid fastener that makes you swear and curse the stupid CAD-jockey who, if he'd ever worked on a car in his life, could have put that casting web JUST 1/4" further over and then everyone would have been able to get a spanner on the bolt AND turn it!

I don't think anyone is arguing that we should go back to model T Fords in our quest for simplicity. Just that the balance between maintainability and features/performance peaked some years ago. Your comment about the distributor-less Volvo shows that you have some sympathy with this opinion.

I wonder if you will be so enamoured of your wife's car when it is 20 years old, 250,000 miles and needs a £1000 electronic package replacing because the fuel filler cap won't open. Assuming you can still buy the component.

But the unthinking buyer (most of them) has always been unduly impressed by novelty no matter how useless it is. Iti is interesting to speculate how car design would have evolved in the abcence of emission control legislation and with the continuing availability of cheap fuel.

But I still think that the most retrograde step in car design was when they replaced substantial bumbers with expensive painted plastic gim-cracks

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When I see an adult on a bicycle, I do not despair for the future of the human race. H.G. Wells
When I see a youth in a motor car I do d.c.brown

Agreed, but it would be interesting to see what a modern interpretation of Fords original desighn philosophy would be like!



I doubt if it would be anything like the multitude of vehicles currently sitting unsold on dealer forecourts!

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"The road to a police state is paved with public safety legislation"