The dangers of DRLs 4640

On Mon, 11 Jul 2005 22:45:25 -0400, Nate Nagel

In certain vehicles in a non-emergency situation with about equal friction on all wheels in a straight line I think you may be right. Otherwise you are very likely wrong.

Unfortunately surfaces are rarely even or have equal friction on all wheels, which is why in most real life situations ABS gives you a shorter brake distance than you could get with skill.

One of the biggest reasons, why ABS doesn't reduce accidents caused by the average driver as much as originally predicted is that many drivers still learned to drive old-school like James Reeves. Don't brake hard, try to maintain control first, rather run into the obstacle than off the road. With ABS that's exactly the wrong way to do it. You can get much shorter distances by simply hitting the brakes so hard ABS engages.

... and which would be even worse than they already are without ABS. It's not as if cars were better made before ABS arrived, people just thought that there was no way to make them better.

GTO. C6. C6 Z06. CTS-V. STS. XLR. And of the cars yet to come: Solstice. Sky. 'Blue Devil'. And others.

I know about a dozen Vette fans. 10 of them already have a C6 and the others are interested. Every single one of them likes the C6 better than they liked the C5.

What you probably are referring to is some geezers, who had a '67 and don't see a non-popup-headlight car as 'not a Corvette'.

I see several of them every day. And don't tell me that a Toyota Corolla or Honda Civic is in any way interesting. Aside from the Miata the japanese manufacturers don't have anything affordable and fun either.

weight for 20 grand.

At least they won't build one dead boring Camry after another.

I will admit that the first Fiero was a beta product. Just like the Nissan 350Z currently is. It's not that the japanese are better, just that distant pastures always seem greener.

James just admitted that there is no traffic safety related reason to have an off switch. And he was the only one claiming repeatedly that there was.

If you have a safety relevant reason to have an off switch I am interested in hearing it. If it is only a question of convenience, safety comes far before convenience.

Again, if you feel like you are treated like a moron just because someone implements a safety feature, that's your problem alone. You may never run into anything, but it is still a good idea to have a safety belt. You may never forget your headlights but you are a rare specimen in that and it is better to give you automatic headlights alongside with everyone else just in case.

Which is a sound recipe against making all the morons checking said box because they feel treated like a moron if they get DRLs and auto headlights.

... under optimum conditions. In real life and an emergency situation you with almost absolute certainity would not beat it.

Btw, a German car magazine did an interesting test specifically with people like you.

They had them try to beat the ABS on their own with a range of different cars. As you predicted, a handful did under optimum conditions with the worst design in the bunch. Then they tried the same thing under adverse conditions, pressure, wet road, uneven pavement and combinations thereof. Even the people who had been most convinced of themselves managed to out brake even the worst ABS design under these conditions.

To be quite fair, none of the cars was a Ford with the infamous mechanical ABS, but the result shows what I told you. You may be able to outbrake ABS under optimum conditions, but as emergency situations never entail optimum conditions the question whether you can do that or not is moot.

That's not a controlled skid but a recipe for disaster if done in real world conditions on the street. There is a reason why rally drivers use the hand brake to initiate controlled drifts and not a quick jab on non-ABS brakes to unsettle the car. The last thing you want for a controlled drift is unsettling the chbuttis.

I was asking for a controlled drift, not random skidding.

An amusing collection of anecdotes. I liked the one with the 70 year old geezer who knows that the conditions in Sweden don't apply to the US because in the US all accidents are driver related...

How much experience with statistics do you have? Not much, apparently. People write when they have a gripe for some reason. If something works, they just don't write. And the number of support letters in relation to the 200 Million drivers in the US is not exactly overwhelming in the first place.

If you want an even borderline fair estimate of the public opinion you need to poll in a way that doesn't predetermine the group of people that will reply.

If you had had statistics at university level I am sure your professor would have advised you about this trick to stuff the ballot box.

Yes.

I leave that to you and James to duke out. If you are right you are shooting a big hole in his case, if he is right the opposite is true.

If they determine that it would be in their financial interest to do so: Yes.

The Goat is $30k, not 40k. MSRP is 32295 and with the GM employee discount you can get it for under 30k. Again: You said it is overpriced. So show me a comparable car that is cheaper.

And sells like hotcakes.

FYI: Overpriced doesn't mean 'more expensive than Nate Nagel can afford' or even 'more expensive than most drivers can afford' but 'more expensive than the compebreastion, which is not the case for any of the cars I mentioned.

Usenetties with some car inclination.

To be fair, I deem a few people in here real car guys, C.R. for example. Most are not.

You posted a few amusing anecdotes and a lonely reference to some political bullpoo which you promptly proceeded to try to convert into a statistic improperly. Thanks, Nate, if I really want a doctored statistic I will doctor it myself.

No, it merely sounds like I don't have the time to sift through tons of flotsam and jetsam just to search for info you critters claim you already have and just don't want to reference for some weird reason.

If the info was there as plain as you guys claim you would have referenced it long ago. And no, I don't mean that amusing collection of anecdotes you call dockets.

Someone needs to tell you that your repebreastion of a claim doesn't make it true.

No, they haven't. They merely have claimed some info and totally failed to reference it properly.

The only one in this extremely limited group. Look at James. He is barely able to understand and write English. I do a much better job and I am not a native speaker. What he thinks to have read in documents somewhere deep inside NHTSA doesn't have any bearing on what really is in there.

You drive old cars with a pbuttion and hate GM. You try to compare a clunker with a souped up engine with a new Corvette. Your bias is obvious from everything you write.

Do I have to continue?

I don't have the time to sift through all the inane comments to possibly find one jewel. And referencing a pdf file is so easy even a total moron can do it: Post the URL and add the pdf page number.

Neither is really good, but the NHTSA at least has some hard numbers and not only amusing anecdotes. What a pity the numbers don't support your view or you would be all over the NHTSA.

The Stang is cheap. The V6 Stang is even cheaper. Any secretary that wants a spiffy looking car can buy one and drive it without undue stress on her delicate psyche. The Goat is a totally different animal and mostly targets the enthusiast market. You of all people should understand the difference between a slightly spiffed up everyday car and a car for someone, who loves driving.

You don't get much house for 5k, at least not around here. And I truly pity the enthusiast, who chooses a Stang over a GTO just because of the bit of money he saves.

Weird reasoning. If someone really can afford a Mustang GT he can afford the GTO. May take a tad more effort but if money is so tight he should buy neither.

Around here they sell well. And as GM sells as many as they get the pricing seems to be correct.

What's wrong with that?

Chris