Check your oil!

[gbaglo]

I started binge watching Highway Thru **** and all the craziness on the Coquihalla

Coquihalla is four and six lanes, and gets snow.

 

[Mike Lewis]

Yikes! --says the Floridian.

 

[Brian B-P]

My Subaru Outback with the Eyesight system (which I really like now that I’m used to it and better understand it’s limitations), uses a dual camera system. If conditions become bad enough, it will automatically shut down as it can’t see any better than you can. I suspect a fully autonomous car would have to do likewise.

But when the Outback's driver assistance system shuts down, that means leaving the driver to drive without assistance; when a fully autonomous vehicle's guidance system shuts down, that means coming to a halt and becoming a useless box dangerously deposited on a highway. If a fully autonomous car shuts down in bad weather that we are capable of manually driving in, it's a useless toy, or it leaves the person in the car (who doesn't want to drive, gets no practice, and may not even know how to drive) to drive in the worst possible situation. This is way past the problem of drivers who don't know how to check their oil.

This vision problem is the reason that serious attempts at full autonomy include radar and those odd-looking devices on the roof, which are LiDAR scanners, not just ordinary cameras. I don't know how well the LiDAR equipment works in adverse weather, and I've only seen photos of it on cars driving in nice clear weather.

 

[Hilola]

I agree Brian. A fully autonomous vehicle would need a much more advanced system in inclement weather than the Eyesight system.

My brother-in-law lives in Mountain View, Calif. just a couple blocks away from the Google facility that tests those funny looking LIDAR system cars and you’ll see them driving around his neighborhood, albeit with a real driver ready to take the controls, if need be.

 

[Mike Lewis]

If a fully autonomous car shuts down in bad weather that we are capable of manually driving in, it's a useless toy, or it leaves the person in the car (who doesn't want to drive, gets no practice, and may not even know how to drive) to drive in the worst possible situation.

And don't forget-- the goal of autonomous cars is to have vehicles without steering wheels or pedals, so that a person can't take over driving at all. No thanks.

 

[sclifrickson]

For a short time I lived in (then) West Germany in the early 1980s. I noticed the driving schools, "fahrschuls" that advertised with disassembled brakes, etc., in their windows. It turned out that getting a drivers license in West Germany was hard, with strict requirements, including courses on how to drive and maintain a car...The country has an extensive rail network, so having a drivers license isn't really necessary in order to live a decent life. This presented the opportunity to make driving a privilege and require drivers to really know what they were doing with a car.

It’s true. I’ve driven in many countries around the world and on a majority of the continents, and as a group, Germans are by far the most highly skilled group of motorists on the road. I have often lamented what a joke driver standards in the US are, by comparison.

 

[Rossue2]

They're so skilled they can be four feet from your bumper at 100+ mph- which to this defensive driver is disconcerting to say the least. They seem to set the standard too: when in Slovenia & Croatia last fall I couldn't believe how aggressive and unsafe people drove there. Not only do they tailgate- they are encroaching your lane on curves. Is this a sign of superior driving skill or a sign of antisocial behavior?

 

[gbaglo]

The Germans are also skilled at having major accidents with high death and injury tolls.

 

[sclifrickson]

They're so skilled they can be four feet from your bumper at 100+ mph- which to this defensive driver is disconcerting to say the least. They seem to set the standard too: when in Slovenia & Croatia last fall I couldn't believe how aggressive and unsafe people drove there. Not only do they tailgate- they are encroaching your lane on curves. Is this a sign of superior driving skill or a sign of antisocial behavior?

I said Germans are highly skilled drivers. Not Slovenians or Croatians. Nor are Italians or the French, by comparison. Nor Greeks, nor Brits, nor even the Swiss. It is hard to get a driver license in Germany, and you must be highly proficient to get one. And if you drive there without one you will go to prison. The Germans don’t screw around.

 

[Mike Lewis]

The Germans are also skilled at having major accidents with high death and injury tolls.

I remember being in a bus driving along the autobahn and seeing parts of cars scattered on the side of the road. After a quarter mile or so it dawned on me that these were parts from the same car-- it had collided with something at very high speed and disintegrated, strewing its parts along the road for quite a ways. Yeah, the Germans have spectacular accidents.

 

[Mike Lewis]

Is this a sign of superior driving skill or a sign of antisocial behavior?

In a book I read on traffic, the author, a traffic engineer, said that the more repressive the society, the wilder the driving. It's as if driving is the only outlet for people to let off steam. He gave Saudi Arabia as an example, if I remember right.

 

[sclifrickson]

In a book I read on traffic, the author, a traffic engineer, said that the more repressive the society, the wilder the driving. It's as if driving is the only outlet for people to let off steam. He gave Saudi Arabia as an example, if I remember right.

Well, that would not be Germany. They are highly regimented, in general, and tend to drive like you would expect a trained, professional driver to do over here. Much more predictable and orderly than we drive. It’s an unpleasant slap to come back to American drivers once you get used to Germans. We lived there for a time and miss their orderliness, and tendency to follow the rules. On the other hand, trying to fight a crowd to order at a cheese counter or bakery was positively chaotic by comparison. We just automatically queue up and wait our turn. Not Germans. It’s a free for all. I could never reconcile that with the precision and orderliness of their driving. Perhaps because in driving it was a matter of life and death. A screw up on the Autobahn is easily fatal. And they do not toy around with people caught violating the rules. Penalties are severe.

 

[cpaharley2008]

All I know about the Autobahn is that General Eisenhower was so impressed with the German road building as compared to the US, that President Eisenhower's Interstate System was modeled after it. During the war we would bomb their roads without too much success and the Germans were landing aircraft on them! Supposedly in every state with an Interstate road, there has to be a section that can be used for that purpose, just in case!

 

[Mike Lewis]

On the other hand, trying to fight a crowd to order at a cheese counter or bakery was positively chaotic by comparison. We just automatically queue up and wait our turn. Not Germans. It’s a free for all.

Indeed. I remember visiting a castle. There was a line to get tickets on each side of the road going in. The line of British tourists was queued up and orderly. Across the street the "line" of Germans was a chaotic mess, clumped around the ticket counter, pushing and shoving each other. It cracked me up. Germans' behavior in these situations seemed so incongruous in such an otherwise orderly society-- once I got a good berating from a cop for jaywalking across an empty street. Alles ordnung.

 

[Hilola]

All I know about the Autobahn is that General Eisenhower was so impressed with the German road building as compared to the US, that President Eisenhower's Interstate System was modeled after it. During the war we would bomb their roads without too much success and the Germans were landing aircraft on them! Supposedly in every state with an Interstate road, there has to be a section that can be used for that purpose, just in case!

Better bring your fast car if you drive the Autobahn:

https://auto.howstuffworks.com/5-fastest-speeds-on-autobahn.htm

 

[Brian B-P]

Better bring your fast car if you drive the Autobahn...

But there's no need for a fast car.

Stay in the right lane, and you can safely drive at ordinary highway speeds, as most Germans do. They don't all drive Porsche 911's, you know... lots drive VWs, with engines smaller than the ones sold here. Lots of them even tow trailers - on the Autobahns - with a maximum speed of 80 km/h (in general) or 100 km/h (if appropriately equipped); those limits apply even on an Autobahn. Buses and trucks are also restricted, and much slower than typical cars. The minimum is only 60 km/h.

That's the point (for this discussion) of the difference between typical highways in North America and the Autobahn network: the high speeds and even high speed differences can be allowed there because people drive competently, which includes driving in the correct lane.

 

[mizterwizard]

It must be midwinter for a thread about checking oil to turn into a comparison of driving skills around the world.

 

[gbaglo]

Is that odd?

 

[Chotch]

Hopefully you have more than a qt of oil in whatever your driving on the Autobahn......
Maybe we can discuss wheel bearings now

 

[Rossue2]

Wheel Bearing Maintenance

Funny you should mention that; new seals arriving today and it stopped raining so am going to pull the right front first to see whether am instead ordering new backing plates with new shoes, magnets etc. as the trailer is approaching five years with a bunch of memories