Driver "aids" Why so many? Can no-one drive anymore?

[Hasbeen]

I learnt to drive in our 1930 dodge ute. At 16 I had a dawn to dusk permit, which allowed me to take fruit from our orchard to the cool store in town.

The Dodge had an early form of cruise control, but back then we called it a hand throttle. Pull it out, & the car drove itself, almost.

I was inordinately proud that I understood the ignition advance leaver on the steering wheel, & knew how much to retard the spark to enable the thing to pull up the hill out of town in top. Most adults didn't understand what it did.

Our next Dodge, a 36 model had removed this great control, & cars have gone down hill ever since.

My last good car is my TR7. No control has been taken from the driver. I don't need a gym membership, I get my workout turning the steering wheel. Whats more, I can wind the windows up, even when the battery is flat. Heaven!

There is one drivers aid I do like, but it's not on a car. It is the rumble strip white line on the edge of some main roads. When I was commuting 400 miles early on Monday mornings leaving home about 3AM, & home Friday nights, often around midnight, they quite possibly saved me from falling asleep & running off the road a few times.

Edited by Hasbeen on Wednesday 26th September 15:42

[Twincam16]

renrut said:

Leins said:

Completely agree, my previous E92 3-series was full of junk I never wanted (eg an automated arm to hand you your seat-belt), and will bankrupt someone to fix a few years down the line I suspect. All added to the weight too

What a bizzare bit of equipment? Was this an option or did they all have it? I thought the idea of electric seats was too much, its not like I constantly move the seat while I'm driving...

I had a Mercedes with one of those. Regularly went bonkers (extending when there was no-one sitting there, or on the move when someone was belted in) so I just ended up taking the fuse out.

A mate of mine had his BMW fail its MoT on a pressure sensor in the driver's seat linked to the seatbelt warning light. To replace it would have cost £600. Why does the EU deem a car unroadworthy if the thing that tells the driver he's not wearing his own seatbelt doesn't work, but will let it pass if the reversing lights are kaput? Madness.

[Captain Muppet]

renrut said:

What a bizzare bit of equipment? Was this an option or did they all have it? I thought the idea of electric seats was too much, its not like I constantly move the seat while I'm driving...

Electric seats are best used with memory buttons so you can switch between his and hers seating positions without all that tedious huffing and muttering under your breath that married people have to do all the time to avoid divorce. Useful, but not to everyone all of the time.

[AJB]

Twincam16 said:

AJB said:

How about intermittent wipers then? Presumably you'd rather not have that particular new-fangled, over-complicated invention. And what about self-parking wipers? If you're competent to drive, then I'd think it would be second nature to flick the wipers when required in light rain, and switch them off at just the right time so that they park at the bottom of the screen...

Don't be silly. The difference is in the driver deciding and the car, in effect, guessing.

I'd say that intermittent wipers are the car guessing. Rain sensing wipers are the car making a slightly better and more informed guess.

[Pannywagon]

renrut said:

Leins said:

Completely agree, my previous E92 3-series was full of junk I never wanted (eg an automated arm to hand you your seat-belt), and will bankrupt someone to fix a few years down the line I suspect. All added to the weight too

What a bizzare bit of equipment? Was this an option or did they all have it? I thought the idea of electric seats was too much, its not like I constantly move the seat while I'm driving...

The whole point of memory seats (and mirrors) is that at the push of a button the car can be ready for that driver. I'm not tall but my wife is tiny. I like to sit in the car and quite far back. She likes the seat as high as it goes and forward, plus the mirrors are all angled differently. It would be a ball ache to have to readjust everything just because she's driven the car down to the shops.

As for auto lights/wipers and auto dimming mirrors, I don't need them, but I like them and with an auto gearbox, the car's extremely relaxing as a daily drive.

[otolith]

doogz said:

Now all I do is hop in, press one button, and it remembers where I like my seat to be.

Handy IMO.

The Saab has electric memory seats and also remembers the position of the door mirrors. Useful feature. I also like the way you can safely tweak the position of an electric seat while driving if you need to, useful on long motorway journeys.

[carinaman]

No.

[Panda76]

Davel said:

Having got rid of my Disco 4 HSE with auto virtually everything, I'm quite enjoying the new Defender without all the gadgets.

The drive is much more involving and not an awful lot slower in journey time.

I'm not sure you could call driving a house brick more involving tbh

Is it one of those fancy new ones or one that lets draughts into every gap and the windscreen freezes more on the inside ?

[AJB]

Twincam16 said:

I'd say the same of my parents, and they buy cars with a view to keeping them indefinitely.

As a result they want the simplest engineering possible. I'm talking no electric windows here. They'd be ideal candidates for a Dacia Logan, but for some reason we can't get them over here.

Mine too. Dad still slightly resents the fact that the Mk3 Golf they've taken over from my Sister has newfangled fuel injection - just something else to go wrong and require expensive parts in his opinion. Electric windows would certainly be a step too far, and he'd probably pay extra not to have them if he could!

Having said that, he's up for safety features and specified ABS on the 1982 W123 Mercedes he had from new until it needed work for an MOT and the Golf was going spare two or three years ago. Amazingly nothing ever went wrong with that ABS in 27 years and 250,000 miles - not even a sensor. And he specified cruise control too, on the grounds that it's less tiring, and therefore safer for long journey. Think that needed a dry joint resoldered in the "computer" once, but otherwise worked perfectly.

[renrut]

Captain Muppet said:

renrut said:

What a bizzare bit of equipment? Was this an option or did they all have it? I thought the idea of electric seats was too much, its not like I constantly move the seat while I'm driving...

Electric seats are best used with memory buttons so you can switch between his and hers seating positions without all that tedious huffing and muttering under your breath that married people have to do all the time to avoid divorce. Useful, but not to everyone all of the time.

Memory seats I understand but I was more talking about electic seats without the memory function which I've seen a fair few times and seemed completely daft. Still think either is excessive though, nothing wrong with a simple adjustment system that takes 2 seconds to sort out.

[S2Mike]

Thats a good point all these "aids" are ok for some people, but when they don't work, or break. They are expensive, quite often, and with parking sensors, if you just rely on them, the first you know is the crunch of broken lights. As mentioned before, also its just a matter of time until a responsive cruise controlled car is in a rearender shunt cos the "driver" wasn't alert. As humans, the less we have to do, the less we want to do. Hence this boredom thread.
This has proved very entertaining though, and some good arguments ffrom both camps, for and against "aids", not too many personal jibes, hopefully I have just voiced what some were thinking, but taken it a step further.

[Captain Muppet]

renrut said:

Captain Muppet said:

renrut said:

What a bizzare bit of equipment? Was this an option or did they all have it? I thought the idea of electric seats was too much, its not like I constantly move the seat while I'm driving...

Electric seats are best used with memory buttons so you can switch between his and hers seating positions without all that tedious huffing and muttering under your breath that married people have to do all the time to avoid divorce. Useful, but not to everyone all of the time.

Memory seats I understand but I was more talking about electic seats without the memory function which I've seen a fair few times and seemed completely daft. Still think either is excessive though, nothing wrong with a simple adjustment system that takes 2 seconds to sort out.

No there is nothing wrong with normal seats. I'm perfectly happy with non-adjustable bucket seats bolted to the floor. However some people like moving the seats with a button, even the ones too cheap to buy the memory button option.

It's a luxury, like soft touch dashboards, carpeted gloveboxes, more than 29bhp, tinted glass and leather steering wheels. People don't need luxuries, but they do seem willing to pay quite a bit for them.

[AC43]

nickbee said:

Indicators have always struck me as the lazy man's alternative to sticking your arm out the window. The highway code clearly shows the relevant hand signals; if you can't be bothered to learn them you shouldn't be on the road. And don't get me started on synchromesh! Why can't people just double declutch, like they used to?

[caveman] Wheels? What the f*ck is wrong with your feet? [/caveman]

[amoeba] Feet? What the f*ck is wrong with your membrane? [/amoeba]

[Apache]

recently drove a Hertz Golf Team diesel auto thingy in Switzerland and it had auto park, radar, rear camera and auto lighting and it was pretty obvious that these aids would quickly make one dependent on them and consequently make driving a 'manual' car a bit of a challenge

[Twincam16]

AJB said:

Twincam16 said:

AJB said:

How about intermittent wipers then? Presumably you'd rather not have that particular new-fangled, over-complicated invention. And what about self-parking wipers? If you're competent to drive, then I'd think it would be second nature to flick the wipers when required in light rain, and switch them off at just the right time so that they park at the bottom of the screen...

Don't be silly. The difference is in the driver deciding and the car, in effect, guessing.

I'd say that intermittent wipers are the car guessing. Rain sensing wipers are the car making a slightly better and more informed guess.

You've been lucky then, because I've yet to encounter a car with rain-sensing wipers that actually work.

It's especially annoying because in a lot of cars (including all from the VW Group), the 'auto' setting has replaced the 'intermittent' setting. For some reason they just don't sense the rain at all, leaving you with a windscreen full of raindrops and wiping once in a blue moon. As a result I end up having to put them on the first of the constant settings, which is too frequent for what I want them to do, so they'll end up making that fingers-down-a-blackboard scraping noise on a dry windscreen.

As a result, I end up having to press the column stalk down for a single wipe every time I want the wipers to clear drizzle - which surely misses the point of the 'labour-saving' approach of auto wipers in the first place. And we get rather a lot of drizzle in this country.

My Toyota, on the other hand, has a collar on the column that you twist when it's on the intermittent setting until you get the speed you want. It works perfectly. It's 20 years old.

[Twincam16]

Apache said:

recently drove a Hertz Golf Team diesel auto thingy in Switzerland and it had auto park, radar, rear camera and auto lighting and it was pretty obvious that these aids would quickly make one dependent on them and consequently make driving a 'manual' car a bit of a challenge

My uncle got a little too used to his auto-everything Mercedes, until it went in for a repair.

He got a base-model Nissan as a courtesy car. He didn't know how to turn the headlights on, only worked out the windscreen wipers last-minute when it started raining, and ended up tearing off one of the wingmirrors parking it in his garage due to its lack of parking sensors.

[S2Mike]

[redacted]

[otolith]

Twincam16 said:

You've been lucky then, because I've yet to encounter a car with rain-sensing wipers that actually work.

Works fine on our 9-5 - presumably off-the-shelf Vauxhall kit. Just behaves like an intelligent intermittent setting.

[The Wookie]

S2Mike said:

.
There we go, could this be a TVR owners thing?

Probably because technology according to TVR is something along the lines of a button operated door opener. Both pointless and spectacularly unreliable/annoying when it breaks

It would nicely explain the prevalance of 'burn the witch!!' on PH when it comes to a piece of technology that extends beyond rack and pinion steering or telescopic dampers

Edited by The Wookie on Wednesday 26th September 16:39

[otolith]

The Wookie said:

Probably because technology according to TVR is something along the lines of a button operated door opener. Both pointless and spectacularly unreliable

TVR door opening mechanisms are a trap for people who like to say "watch this".

Actually, that's pretty much all of a TVR, isn't it?