I never bother to turn my headlights on, there’s plenty of street lights, why waste my electricity?
(I drive a Volvo, the headlights are pretty much always on, 24/7)
What’s interesting, we were handing out some reflectors and stuff to some bicyclists (San Jose Bike Party, kinda like Critical Mass but less assholes*), and there were a group of them with fixies, they were all wearing black on black with black highlights, nary a one had any lights or reflectors. One said “You can’t hit what you can’t see.”* and he was serious. *
and people wonder why drivers hate cyclists.
- which is pretty damn easy
“Well, not on purpose.”
My husband does that. I don’t, because I’m entirely too good at failing to turn them off when parking during the day. At night, I can notice they’re still on, but seem to blip right past that during the day.
I totally agree with the OP.
Wouldn’t the issue be what happens when your tyres, that have spun up due to low traction, gain traction again? If they’ve spun up enough they will momentarily launch you forwards until you (or the cruise control) corrects it. It does point to an inherent flaw in cruise control, that you don’t have direct control over the car and there is a slight delay while you get your foot on the brake whereas if you had your foot on the accelerator you start the slowing down process the moment you remove your foot. I would assume though that cruise control would have some system of detecting skidding by monitoring all of the wheel speeds.
What would have happened if you hit a dry spot there, though? You would have suddenly accelerated and flown into the wall. That’s the basic problem with cruise control and hydroplaning-- you hit the puddle which slows you down fast and so the CC responds by giving it full throttle. But then the wheels break traction so there’s no resistance and so the wheels spin up past what the CC is set for. Then, a second later, you’re out of the puddle, the wheels grab traction while spinning way past what the CC is set for and… off you go! This won’t happen on a newer car because the CC will already back off as soon as the tires start spinning, but older CC systems were far less responsive and you could get a fair amount of speed up before the slop in the system caught up.
Playing around in a snowy parking lot with an old Taurus I had, I could pretty consistently get it to do a thing where I would set the CC to 25 (as low as it went), it would spin the wheels, back off, and then overcompensate the instant it caught traction again, with the net effect of a feedback cycle that caused the car to continually speed up past where the CC was set. It’s definitely not the wild out of control acceleration suggested by the e-mail, but considering how long that stupid thing has been floating around the inbox-o-sphere I wouldn’t be surprised if it was talking about an older Towncar with a CC system that could do some genuinely scary stuff on wet roads.
They may have been on to warn you that the driver was going 10 or more mph less than the posted speed limit. I believe that’s a fairly standard law. You often see the big trucks with their hazards on when they’re climbing a steep grade.
(Oh, yeah, and TURN ON YOUR FUCKING LIGHTS, YOU DICKHEADS. I CAN’T SEE YOU!)
When I moved to WA three years ago, from AK (the second highest COL in the US), my car insurance went UP by about 40 bucks. The insurance agent told me it was because WA has the worst drivers and highest percentage of uninsured drivers in the US.
I remember being irritated at this very thing. Not so much at dusk and dawn, since I commuted to work by Light Rail, but more when it was raining. It’s dark, and visibility is low and idiots are driving around in “the Grey” without headlights. I’m fully on-board with this pitting.
Doesn’t your car beep at you if you open the door with the lights still on? Mine does, which is one of the reasons I always turn mine on.
I haven’t really noticed the “too cool/oblivious to turn on my headlights” thing.
What I would appreciate is that if you are riding a bike at night in or just off the traffic lane in a totally unlit area, at least have some sort of rear reflector and preferably wear light-colored clothing. This also applies to pedestrians walking in or just off the edge of the road. I am not psychic and you are not immune to the forces of physics.
I’ve seen a big ol’ sedan hydroplane down a sloped parking lot, jump a curb, and come to rest between some trees. County PD happened to be working a three-vehicle collision at the top of the hill so it shouldn’t have taken long to render aid.
Ditto a stretch of 152/154 from Gilroy to I5. I thought it was a requirement, though I don’t know if it is enforced. Most cars have their lights on, though.
What bugs me is this. California has a law requiring lights on during the rain, defined as enough rain to use your full wipers, not just intermittent. At least a third of the cars don’t bother. Even in really heavy rain.
Except, of course…hydroplanes
If a hydroplane was on a watermill…
…would it float off?
Here’s a photo I took last year during Wenatchee’s annual forest/brush fire, to show the smoke filling our valley:
http://mister-rik.com/hosted/smoke.jpg
But ignore the smoke and look at the vehicles. This is just a random selection of the vehicles that happened to be passing by when I snapped the photo. What do you see? They’re all white or silver (heck, my car is white). Now picture all of these idiots driving down this street in December. With snow on the ground and on the road. And heavy snow falling. And most of them don’t have their headlights on, because, hey, it’s daytime. The photo was taken from my apartment’s front door; I have to parallel park on that street. So try to imagine the difficulty I have pulling into traffic under the conditions I described. More than once I’ve said, “Fuck this”, turned off my car, and just walked (work was only six blocks away).
Hey, at least you can walk to “Jack in the Box” for supper.
And I have done so many times.
Well in a word, no. Want proof? Here you go
First off in all of my years of driving, I don’t think I have ever gone from hydroplaning, or potential hydroplaning to flat dry and perfectly dry with great traction in the blink of an eye. Have you?
Next those cars you are describing have very stone age CC units. A modern CC on a modern car has several safety disconnects that prevent this from happening.
Also go back and read the original email, they state the wheels were off the ground, but the car accelerated. That is flat impossible unless you are using a jet engine in your car. NO traction = no acceleration.
I watched the Mythbusters episode on this (driving a car into the back of a moving truck) and for the life of me I cannot figure out the physics involved. Why the car doesn’t rocket to the front of the truck mystifies me.
If my drive wheels are making my car travel at, say, 60 MPH on the highway, and I’m moving onto a truck traveling at 55 MPH, I would expect that once the drive wheels touched the moving truck I would be moving at 60 MPH relative to the truck, or 115 MPH total.
There’s something about inertia in the Mythbusters explanation, but I don’t get it.