Safe Speed Forums

Ignore them. They are supposed to respect the 'L Plate' that designates you as a new user.

Everyone take note please. We need to be kind and tolerant towards new users.

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Paul Smith
Our scrap speed cameras petition got over 28,000 sigs
The Safe Speed campaign demands a return to intelligent road safety

Can only echo Paul's sentiments, play nicely folks.

murphyweb we're not all that bad honest.

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Gordon Brown saying I got the country into it's current economic mess so I'll get us out of it is the same as Bomber Harris nipping over to Dresden and offering to repair a few windows.

Chaos, panic and disorder - my work here is done.

http://www.wildcrafts.co.uk

[quote="murphyweb"]

Sorry, did not think i would get such a kicking
quote]

murphyweb - three possible reasons - 1) people don't read the whole of what you say
2) the text doesent come over as well as spoken

3) no allowance being made for "L " plate.

--let those who say something that caould be construed otherwise stand up and be counted ( called clever dick itus)

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lets bring sanity back to speed limits.
Drivers are like donkeys -they respond best to a carrot, not a stick .Road safety experts are like Asses - best kept covered up ,or sat on

No Worries, i aint got an issue, my bad really. another bad habit i have is to assume that everyone knows what i mean without having to explain myself properly! It did sound like i drive like a nob and in that case deserved some stick!

edited

That's a really helpful remark - introduce emotion and hysteria into what started as a serious question. Do you work for the DfT?

I know that from working in the car trade that some airbags have initiated incorrectly and caused accidents. I was wondering if any serious research has been carried out to indicate whether airbags are more of a hazard than a help, particularly as improved design in most cars eg pre-tensioner arrangements etc, have reduced facial injuries, or so I heard recently.

[quote="Rick99]I was wondering if any serious research has been carried out to indicate whether airbags are more of a hazard than a help[/quote]
I dunno, I think Mercedes (it was them wasn't it?) might have done just a little bit of research before putting it into their cars? (this was before they became american) Would other manufacturers have jumped on board if they didn't work? Just remember, safety doesn't sell anywhere near as well as a flash new cd/dvd player. As well as all the manufacturer testing there's also ncap tests. They're also trying to work out how to get it to function in race cars.
However, as with seatbelts, there's always someone who wants to argue that you're better off flying out through the windscreen on the off chance the car bursts into flames before you can get out of it.

I'm on a list of 300 or so crash investigators in a number of countries. I asked in there last year for information regarding spurious air bag deployment. There wasn't much. A few stories about a particular car where cable chafing had caused spurious deployment. Certainly no 'general feeling' that spurious deployment was a safety issue.

However, I certainly do have some concerns about ageing trigger mechanisms and ageing wiring. Clearly it's possible that we are storing up some safety problems for the future.

If I was designing an air bag trigger mechanism, I wouldn't risk having an airbag that could be triggered with a 12V signal. Instead I'd build a 100v (?) generator into the impact detector and send that signal to the air bag. In that way no cable fault between the detector and the air bag would be able to set the bloody thing off, and you could disable it with a high degree of confidence by disconnecting the detector(s).

One possible nasty spurious deployment is in the workshop when some poor unfortunate mechanic is working on the steering wheel. There are a number of scenarios where disconnecting the vehicle battery isn't enough to make it safe.

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Paul Smith
Our scrap speed cameras petition got over 28,000 sigs
The Safe Speed campaign demands a return to intelligent road safety

err actually No !...........in the event of a 'big moment' or 'off'we are on the controls all the time to make sure that if theres an impact we bounce off as many trees as possible before we come to rest thus minimising the effect of any individual impact.

Co-driver tends to fold the arms just to stop them going out of the window in a roll.

Ediited to say Yesssss!!!! Ive finally figured out how to do the quote bit properly. Its different here from some other fora !

L plate or not Paul, if someone is going to come on here & state that they rest their hands on the centre of the wheel while driving along the motorway, then they are admitting to an act of sheer lunacy.

I know the OP has now admitted that he did not explain himself clearly and only takes this course of action when crawling along in a traffic jam, but the way the post originally read, the OP deserved a slight roasting IMO.

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What makes you think I'm drunk officer, have I got a fat bird with me?

If one post had made that point politely that would have been great - but as it was three or four folk jumped on him. Anyway note that I didn't complain to or about any individual - I just offered the new user some protection. Don't worry about it.

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Paul Smith
Our scrap speed cameras petition got over 28,000 sigs
The Safe Speed campaign demands a return to intelligent road safety

Ah! not wanting to be pedantic but that this not what i said! If you read my post you will see that i said i rest my wrists on the centre of the wheel!
my fingers are still wrapped tightly around the wheel.

Then you either have an incredibly small steering wheel, very large hands, are double jointed, or a combination of all 3

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What makes you think I'm drunk officer, have I got a fat bird with me?

or the zoo has managed to train a very smart chimp to drive (and post on internet forums)

Depends on whether or not the act of sounding the horn excludes the driver from being able to do something more useful, doesn't it? If you're able to perform as much avoidance/mitigation as possible whilst also sounding the horn, thus alerting other road users to what's going on in their vicinity, isn't that better than doing the avoidance/mitigation in (relative) silence and risking someone else getting mixed up in the accident because they had little or no warning that it was taking place?




Is this true across the board for EU-spec cars, and if so is it something that's been brought in fairly recently? I'm sure I recall Vauxhall making a selling point, during the early-mid 90's, out of their cars having full-sized airbags as opposed to the euro-bags fitted to their rivals cars.

People worry unnecessarily about spurious airbag deployment. The incidences of it have been extremely rare. Airbags only trigger on a specific signal (a digital pattern of high and low voltages in quick succession) from the airbag computer. A short to 12v or ground won't do the job.

If the computer picks up a short in the wiring, an internal fault, or goes off-line altogether, the airbag is rendered completely inoperative and won't even go off in a genuine front-end collision.

When an old car suffers wiring and/or airbag system deterioratation, the system simply shuts down and leaves you with a permanent red light on the dash. That's all.

The only potential problem is that sellers of these vehicles often remove the bulb from the airbag light to conceal the failure, making the buyer think they've got working airbags when they haven't. But that's another discussion.

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“For every complex problem, there is a solution that is simple, neat, and wrong.” - H. L. Mencken

Is that right?

Well, sorry, but I think that's a complete nightmare. No digital electronics is errorless enough for such a system to be trustworthy. It's subject to crashes, RFI and breakdowns and the state-at-failure is largely unpredictable.

If that's REALLY what we've got then I hope and pray that the decision making parts of the system are triplicated. Otherwise it'll all end in tears.

And I've spent the largest portion of my entire career designing embedded microprocessor systems. And I've lost count of the number of times I've heard engineers making wild claims about the reliability of digital electronics.

And these problems can apply equally to the pattern-matching electronics at the 'trigger end'.

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Paul Smith
Our scrap speed cameras petition got over 28,000 sigs
The Safe Speed campaign demands a return to intelligent road safety

Isn't it supposed to be an infinite number of chimps with typewriters, and eventually one will type a novel? I'm sure we have not stumbled on "the one" by chance!
I have big hands, and a wheel with very small apertures in it (compared to some cars I have had).
I tried it today, and I can rest my wrists on the big lumpy bit in the middle, and wrap my fingers around the edge! Now which way did that circus go?

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Time to take responsibility for our actions.. and don't be afraid of speaking out!

from some of the driving i have seen i assumed that zoo animals were driving

I can think of many internet forums that could be used to prove the infinite chimps theory, but this one is not one of them.

omg pwn3d rofl kthxbye!!!11 <3