Safe Speed Forums

maybe its related to the avatar



i'm assuming placating a nervous passenger would mean going slower in most situations...... you're uncertain of how your car reacts at low(er) speed?

I do not actually drive an Impreza. It's supposed to be a dig at T2K's opinion that anything bigger than a Smart car is evil and wants to murder your children.



My car is a strange beast and I'm still not 100% up on everything that it does. Some examples that are reasonably well documented.

1) If you ease off during a corner it will oversteer. If you ease off before the corner and maintain speed through it, it will understeer.

2) If you cruise in the 3.5K - 4K rev range and then floor it (eg. for an overtake) it will take about 30 seconds to creep through the rev range until about 4.3K at which point the secondary turbo starts working and you actually get some acceleration. If you cruise at a lower revs then the primary turbo will still be active and it will get through the "Valley of Death" (as it's known) in less than a second and away you go.

I tend to avoid cruising in that rev range if at all possible, not the easiest thing in an automatic. Perhaps I should make use of the semi auto mode a bit more, but I'm lazy. But the first time I discovered the VOD for myself it was quite frightening. It's a good job that I always underestimate a car's overtaking ability, and had plenty of time to get back in.

I wonder what other suprises the car has in store for me?

You could try driving normally, and stop using the roads as a race circuit. If you must drive around as fast as you can, try Oulton Park, where you can pay to wear your car out without using the public road system for your thrills.

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.....basic vehicle dynamics!
(made worse by FWD but still possible in RWD/AWD)

Rover 400 / 45 / ZR scared the pants off a few of us on a benchmarking exercise by doing just that. caught out by horrid understeer through a bend and getting onto the dirty stuff toward the kerb, i backed off the throttle as gently as i dared, soon to find the back end coming round to visit!
(all good fun to play with on the test track but this was public road and i wasnt the only one to find it particularly susceptible)

Sorry pardon, I didn't mean to accuse anyone here of doing that, but I have come across people who seem to think that scaring passengers is a clever thing to do. It isn't.

Best wishes all,
Dave.

Making progress ( where safe ) and driving smoothly should be possible at the same time.

Agree TripleS. Good drivers are sympthetic to the needs of passengers - and that means driving smoothly and comptetently.

Lum - take a look see at post on the "Improve forum" where they guys discussed cornering.

Application of COAST is crucial to safety - and you position for best view, never compromise safety and you always use the limit point to help you judge and choose the safest speed.

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Take with a chuckle or a grain of salt
Drive without COAST and it's all your own fault!

A SMILE is a curve that sets everything straight (P Diller).

A Smiley Per post
FINES USfor our COAST!

Approach love and cooking with reckless abandon - but driving with a smile and a COAST calm mind.

You have never seen me drive, these days I don't even exceed the speed limit (except in the interests of a safe overtake)

Are you one of those people who when holding up other cars say "I don't see what their problem is, it's only 10 minutes" by any chance?

My two pennerth.

If you are doing it right then they shouldn't even notice you are going fast.

If you are slinging them around in the seat and they have to brace themselves as you brake for every corner then they are going to start looking at the speedo. Then they will know you are going fast.

I have been a passenger with some people who drive very fast and you never know it and always feel 100% relaxed with them at the wheel. I have been a passenger with other people who don't drive nearly as quickly but treat the car so poorly you wonder how they stay on the road.

This is from someone who believes there is only one speed limit and that limit has been repeated often enough on this forum.

When Vicky Butler Henderson wrote in TG mag she said that she could tell alot about how a man "performs" as it were, by they way he drives his car.

Death defying corning and overtaking is good for for the driver, but less so for passengers. Cleaning up someone elses puke is no fun either.

I just go into chauffer mode when I have passengers, they like it that way.

forgot. Spent a week on deliveries at work. I must have abut pushed a hole in the passenger foot well looking for phantom brake pedals. I makes for a long day atheist is praying to which ever god that the driver will actually stop before the vehicle in from.

Where's the fire?

Well, I'm back up to speed with my Legacy after some time off the road and my GF is nice and relaxed despite me probably driving it faster than the rental cars, had another passenger today and he didn't seem to mind either even though it was a guy who I'd only met once before and has never even seen my car before.

Pissed off a Citroen XM driver who was tailgating the (admittedly bloody slow - 30 in a 60 on a long straight) car in front and flashing away on the headlights by overtaking both of them once there was plenty of room to do so. I'm still underestimating the speed with which an overtake can be completed in this car, which is a good thing IMO. Passengers were quite happy.

I bet you my mum complain and want to puke though (and would probably have tailgated the XM if she were driving )

Do you need a Subaru Legacy with AWD and Billstein suspension (and two turbos) for that kind of driving?

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It makes a significant difference to the time it takes to get up the A41 to M40 J9 and back, thus shortening my working day.

Also, I have back problems, but my back seems to like this suspension.

Rather than speed, I prefer fast cornering to make up the time, having decent brakes means you can do this quicker while still being able to stop in the distance you can see

Plus I intend to take it around a track at some point (though not with passengers )

Oh and the car is unmodified

I'm sorry to learn you have back problems. I had a few tips from a physio a few years ago, and things have been better for me since then.

A lot of people commuting on the A41 to M40 J9 will be doing as you are, trying to shave a little time off their working day that way. It’s the same on the B1049 to the A14. Do you see may many close shaves each day? It was especially bad on the B1049 this morning!

For me, it would be easy for the “rush to work” to spill over to become the regular driving routine. So I don’t do the “rush to work” at all. I don’t hold people back, but I keep plenty of margin in hand, and I try never to close my cool, whatever happens. It’s hard, though, because we have so many selfish risk-taking boneheads everywhere, who think they are more important than safety.

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I occasionally see a few dubious overtakes on that road, usually very close to my front bumper after I drop the anchors to avoid them hitting me.

It's fair enough you saying I should just plan for it, but as a field engineer who does not get paid overtime then no matter what time I leave I still want to get there as quick as I can legally do so, the fault will not get easier to fix if I drive slower and if I leave the job half an hour late that generally translates into getting home an hour late.

Oh and the M40 J9 southbound exit needs an extra lane. I have to queue forever because both lanes are full of people going to oxford and the other lane doesn't appear until right at the end. Given the damage to the grass at that point I'm sure I'm not the only one pissed off by this.

Are you taking a ‘safety first’ approach, and do you avoid transferring employment-abuse onto other road users? Do other reps and engineers zoom along as fast as they can to minimise their work-time? Is that why we have tailgating?

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I suppose technically overtaking on a single carriageway can never be considered "safety first" but it would be safer to just sit at home and call in sick, so I'm not going to give a yes/no answer to that question.

I don't tailgate, that's just pointless and acheives nothing, but I'm not going to just sit behind someone doing 40 in a 60 when it's straight.

If someone clearly wants to get past me I'll generally shift over a bit to let them (especially bikers), if they want to go faster than I'm comfortable with and/or risk their licence that's up to them they may well have a car that's more able than me, the exception to this is if they drop back loads and go really slow around the corners then catch up later, it may be selfish but I know this person is going to slow me down in the next twisty bit. OTOH if they try and overtake anyway I'll not do anything to prevent them. There will always be room in front of me for them to pull in.

The only other thing I do which may be considered a bit dubious is if a car is doing, say 55 in a 60 and I've been following them for a bit, I'll make a guestimate of their driving style and may overtake anyway if I decide that they are the kind of driver likely to sit 3 feet off the arse of a 40mph truck and never try to overtake it, otherwise I might end up stuck behind a longer vehicle that I can't get past.

If the roads wernt limited to an unnecessary 60 then most of the above would be unnecessary, I could just zoom along at a speed that I am comfortable with and feel is safe and thus would be less bothered about each person that makes me lose a few minutes, it would also help keep my driving skill up as there would be more corners that I would actually have to slow down for. I would probably also drive slower through the bit of A41 that is a 60 limit and goes past a pub and a few houses (currently with gatso) as I would not have this law turning me into a pedantic arsehole with time to make up.

Possibly I am misunderstanding you, but you appear to be saying that you have serious reservations about the safety of overtaking on SC roads, as if overtaking should mainly be confined to DC roads, which is surely going to impose severe restrictions on your rate of progress.

I certainly do not limit myself in that way. I overtake quite freely on SC roads and if this entails exceeding the NSL, well so be it. In fact I probably spend most of my time in excess of the NSL, whether or not I'm overtaking.

I agree with you that the 60 mph NSL on SC roads can amount to an added handicap to drivers wishing to overtake.

To my mind there are only two considerations here:

Making sure that what you do is safe.
Doing your best to avoid getting penalised for speeding.

Best wishes all,
Dave.

No, I'm just saying that overtaking on an SC road is less safe than not overtaking on an SC road, which was in answer to the "safety first" question.

I love overtaking on SC roads, it's a more skilled manouvre than overtaking on a DC and acheives a lot more, I prefer to cruise at 60 for "safety" reasons (by "safety" I mean the safety of my wallet and job)

I believe overtaking is safer when done faster, even if this means exceeding the NSL, but you have to be careful with that these days.