Neil Hopcroft

A digital misfit

Driving without a safety net – a quick look at how far we’ve come in car safety design in the last 15 years. To my way of thinking this is some good reasons for not getting the latest greatest cars money can buy, you end up losing contact with the road, how to really control a car under pressure.

Peoples library


Categories: Memories.

/ 7 Comments

7 comments

  1. jarkman

    Driving the Landie is moderately instructive in these matters. It’s more or less a 1950 design, and it certainly doesn’t feel like it’s offering any kind of a safety net.

    Have a drive, if you get over this way…

    Reply
    • neilh

      I’d love to, last landie I drove was a good ten years ago, and it must’ve been on the road for a while by then. It had something of a tendancy to pop out of gear if you tried too hard, just at the moment you needed some power, and the way it wouldn’t do straight lines was somewhat unnerving, drift to the left for a bit, drift to the right for a bit, etc, like sailing into the wind. In a porta-cabin.

      Reply
      • jarkman

        :-) Exactly. A porta-cabin with ill-balanced brakes, too.

        I mean, in most cars, it would be a *bad* thing for the back left wheel to lock up under moderate braking.

        Reply
  2. aperrott

    Yay! My car is over twenty years old and doesn’t have any of the safety features they mention. :-)

    And it’s rear wheel drive too. :-)

    And, yes, I drive rather carefully when the roads are wet or otherwise slippery. :-)

    Reply
    • neilh

      Yeah, you’ve got a lot of power going through a small amount of rubber at the back of that thing….its gonna be a fun drive in good conditions but I imagine quite scary if the roads are a bit slippy.

      Reply
    • neilh

      Skidding doesn’t mean out of control. Thats the problem, drivers of modern cars don’t know how to skid properly, and they have systems that isolate them from needing to. Which means that they really don’t know what to do when the systems aren’t there any more….which could be because they’re broken, or because the weather is outside their functional range or for any number of other reasons.

      I’d prefer to be a safe driver in an unsafe car than a unsafe driver in a safe car.

      Reply

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