here let me help you with your reading comprehension
It’s not a case of I could not see what color the light was it was a case i did not know the pole was there, and the entire light pole was invisible due to the angle of the sun.
Should I have been driving slower? Yes of course I should have. Have you ever driven faster than you should have for the prevaling conditions? I will bet yes you have. If you did not get a bad result, you forget about it.
I got caught this one time when I did drive faster than conditions allowed. I did manage to minimize the damage and prevented the other driver from going to the hosipital or worse.
One accident since 1968 is not too bad a record I think.
Well, considering that less than an hour ago I prevented getting into a serious accident by swerving onto the left shoulder (of a divided highway), I’m inclined to say that this is a rule meant to be broken.
Stupid driver abruptly tried to merge into my car. She didn’t use her turn signal and obviously did not check her blind spot. I was lucky there was a decent amount of shoulder for me to merge into–a mile or two further down the highway and the shoulder is only around 2 feet wide before a concrete barrier starts.
Something like this happened in my family, many many years ago (before seatbelts or carseats). My cousin was riding in the backseat of a car with friends and their kids. Him and two kids in the back, Mom, Dad & baby up front. A kid on a bicycle rolled into the road. The Dad swerved, skidded, and got broadsided by an oncoming car. Mom, Dad, & baby dead. My cousin dead. Driver & passenger of opposing car dead. Only the two kids in the backseat and the original one on the bike survived.
I doubt any of us would have done any different though, just on instinct alone.
But is the swerve itself to blame? I submit that it was only a small factor, which would have been more appropriate with a few adjustments to the scenario. A slower moving car would not have gone into a skid. The surprise/panic effect being another (perhaps making too much of a swerve, resulting in an uncontrolled skid). And reaction time is a factor. If you begin a swerve early it’s not going to be as hard of a swerve, and the driver will be more likely to maintain control.
In the circumstances you described, it would have been best not to swerve if all other factors remained the same. It’s hard to say “never swerve” or “always swerve” because neither is the right answer. I guess I’m a little bothered by those trying to establish a universal rule while there are so many different scenarios. The safety campaigns should be more like “swerve smart,” but that implies effort on the driver’s part.
It seems that the behavior of deer is part of the reason people are pushing the “no swerve” agenda. Because deer are pretty stupid about stepping into the path of a vehicle that is swerving. It may, in fact, be best not to swerve for them, but even then it’s a gamble.
But we can all agree that a driver should never throw their hands up and say “Jesus, take the wheel.”
Actually, you don’t want to do that. Although it may not be obvious to car drivers, experienced or well-trained motorcyclists know that braking hard while swerving or making a turn is asking for a skid. When turning, you need the tired to keep rolling, unimpeded, so as to direct the path of the car, which of course wants to continue moving in the direction it was traveling previously, owing to Newton’s Second Law. When braking, you want to keep the tires straight so that they maintain their best aspect (i.e. tread inline) with respect to the road. While cars are more stable than motorcycles the principle remains. (Methinks car drivers should be required to take a motorcycle safety course so that they better understand both vehicle dynamics and the plight of motorcyclists.)
So you swerve or you brake, not both simultaneously. As for Rick’s situation, it is of course obvious in hindsight that he should have been aware of his reduced perception of the conditions, but that’s a recursive problem; we’ve all driven in conditions in which we later realized were unsafe, but which seemed appropriate at the time.
Now that you mention it, that makes sense. Given that the coefficient of static friction is always greater than the coefficient of dynamic friction, a skid would result in significantly less control, and I can see how braking and swerving together could lead to a skid. I’d just never thought of it in those terms.
Thank you. You may have pre-emptively prevented an eventual accident.
No sweat. Everybody has their field of knowledge. Yours is relativity physics; mine (one of them, anyway) is vehicle dynamics. On the whole, I think yours is cooler.
I don’t completely agree. Cars have available one thing that motorcycles don’t, that would be ABS.
Now before I go any further let me say that not all ABS systems are created equal, but ABS was designed to allow you to brake and retain steering control at the same time. With a top tier ABS system the results are nothing short of incredible. Stranger let’s get together some time, I will show you just what a good ABS system can do.
Actually some bikes have ABS now. Nonetheless, while it may be possible to swerve and maintain some measure of control with ABS, I regard it as a poor idea. Perhaps it’s just my early training, but I learned never to brake while swerving. (Braking during a ‘bootlegger turn’ is another issue entirely.) The panic response to an emergency is to hit the brakes, but that’s often an inappropriate action. But I’d be more than happy to spend a few hours in a C70 practicing braking technique.
Yep, if you lock up your brakes and turn the wheel, the car will just go straight. Ideally, one would do what the cops at my class called threshold breaking, where one applies the brakes until they lock and then back it off just a bit. According to them, with practice one can become good quite good at it. I’ve found that on the snow I can’t turn for shit even with my anti-lock brakes! I have to back off a little to maintain control of the car’s direction.
The C70 is built for sex not speed.
When I get approval to drive the C70 on a regular basis, and the weather is nice we can for sure do some serious road testing. Were you aware that the top has to be down for best ABS performance?
I remember reading about a study of the number of traffic fatalities. apparently, the study did not find the predicted positive results of anti-lock brakes.
A possible explanation was that people have been reflexively hitting the brakes and swerving. Before anti-lock brakes, the hitting the brakes locked up the tires, so the swerving was ineffective, and you’d have a nice, clean front impact.
After anti-lock brakes, the swerve actually happens, and there were enough fatal roll-overs and side-impacts to negate the other accident gains from anti-lock brakes.
ABS is kind of a pain in the ass for performance driving, and by that, I mean it’s damn tough to get an all-wheel drive ABS-equipped car to do a proper four wheel drift or induced skid. How can I recreate my John Frankenheimer-directed stunt-driving scenes with a Subaru SAWD or an Audi Quattro?
Seriously, I could probably stand some practice and update training in performance driving. Any of the local schools that you recommend?
That’s interesting, and makes a lot of sense. It might also be that ABS instills false confidence.
I remember ten or so years ago, they were pushing for people to go and do advanced driving courses. Now, they are admitting that these courses, whilst often quite good, are turning loose onto our roads large numbers of over-confident drivers.
I don’t know of the study you mention, but you need to take a few other factors into account; while anti-lock braking systems have become more prevelent, so have top-heavy SUV-type passenger vehicles. Performing an uncontrolled swerve in one of these suckers can easily result in a roll-over regardless of the braking system. I’m not sure you can credit this to the expanded use of ABS so much as the fact that there is a larger percentage of vehicles that are inherently less stable than previous designs which satisfy the same niche like station wagons or minivans.
I can think of situations where some of these would be bad advice…
Blindfolded driving might be recommended if it is the only way to escape your abductor.
I would drive while having a heart attack if I were near the hospital when it occurred. I also believe it is possible for people to have heart attacks without even knowing it or for the attack to be mild enough that it is mistaken for indigestion.
Both of the answers above (except for the mistaking it for indigestion part) would apply to being shot in the head.
Sleeping is a little more difficult to get around but if you count the unconsciousness due to carbon monoxide poisoning as “sleeping” then a last second shift into reverse and a press of the accelerator might not be a bad idea to get one out of the garage. Barring this I woud argue that driving while sleeping is a physical impossibility. If you have no way of exerting control over the vehicle you would be more properly classified as a passenger. Perhaps a better way to phrase it would be that falling asleep while driving is always a bad idea.
I’m sure someone will be clever enough to find an exception to even that rule.
My apologies, but I’m going to call bullshit on that fact, and/or its explanation. While I definitely respect your recollection, I also recognize that human memory is shoddy at best, so if you recall the citation, I’d love to see it. Thanks!
I seem to recall the study in question, and there was not an expected drop in accidents with the introduction of ABS brakes.
The study found two problems
People would press on the brakes hard enough to get the ABS to modulate the brakes causing the pedal to shudder. They would then take their foot off the brakes because the noise and movement scared them. :smack: I have personally observed this with people that brought ABS cars in for repair because “there is something really wrong with the brakes” You go for a test drive and they take their foot off of the brakes as soon as the ABS engages. The auto industry and sponsored a big educational campaign back in the early 90s to get people to use ABS correctly.
The people did hit the brakes, but kept their attention focused on the car/tree/person they were trying to miss. The car will go where every you are focusing your vision. In other words if you look at the tree you will hit the tree. They did.
I do recall the first time I used ABS; I was driving my dad’s car in the winter. I didn’t know how they work, and it startled the heck out of me. Now that I imagine living someplace where one doesn’t get much snow, and therefore may not experience as much slipping as winter drivers experience, only first using the anti-lock feature in a critical situation and panicking.
My apologies to gilly, BTW. I came off way stronger than I intended. Sorry about that!
