Be Excellent To Each Other

Hohoho.

That looks awesome, particularly the yellow dead-ahead marker. What is the surface? Alcantera?

Still no car.

The chap rang me back at 20 to 4 yesterday (I was asleep) to advise that the parts which should have arrived Saturday still haven't come, and the courtesy car is still mine if I want it.

Which, considering the freezing cold ride to work I had this morning, might well be an idea.

Fucking hell, that's shit, mate.

It looks cold today, so I'm taking the car into college.

Grab the car, for no reason other than having £mutiK of their property may well concentrate their minds wonderfully in terms of getting you yours back.

Yup. I've been told that it was 5 degrees this morning.

The only thing is, the hassle of collecting this stupid car. Grrrr.

Is it detachable?
I'm going to get a detachable one for my Tomcat so that i) getting in and out is easier, and ii) as it has no doors (just gaps) I can take the steering wheel out to deter thieving gits.

It probably is detachable, in the sense that if you undo all of the bolts on the boss kit it'll come off

Ace: Did your MR2 have an airbag in the steering wheel? How complicated was it to get the old steering wheel off and remove the airbag? And, of course, have you declared your airbag deficit to your insurance company?

Won't it be a bit of a pain to have to walk round Fortnum and Masons carrying a steering wheel?

One of the first things I want to do in it is put a suit on and park it half on the pavement outside a big posh office in Bank or somewhere at around 5pm, then get out and walk in with my steering wheel in my hand

Video or it never happened!

Do you need to do that? I was thinking of having the front passenger airbag deactivated for the child seat. (long story but rear seatbelts are too short to get around the child seat).

I don't think so. And doesn't there have to be a switch to turn the airbag off for that reason, in cars with airbags? I'm sure I've seen that..


Also, Gazchap, you do have to notify them if you've got red bits behind your wheels. They double your premium automatically for that.

Yes there should be, for the passenger side. My 206 had one.

Yes, but there's unlikely to be a switch for disabling the driver's side airbag (as I can't imagine you'd have a child seat in there!)

And disabling safety features is, as I understand it, something that absolutely needs to be declared to your insurers.

Yes, if you have it mechanically disabled. Or if you change your steering wheel

Don't fancy trying this sort of thing?

It's not really a safety feature though is it?

If it was, then like a seatbelt, it'd be illegal to use the vehicle without it present and in full working order.

Lovely.

Ta Grim...

So by that logic, it's illegal to use a car that doesn't have ABS?

ABS not working is an MOT failure, isn't it?

No, because like airbags, ABS isn't really a safety feature either. It's, I dunno, a "driving aid" or something. By law it doesn't need to be present.

Would an identical car with ABS or without it get a different insurance quote? I don't know for sure, but I doubt it.

Yes, but only on cars that originally had ABS. ABS isn't a driving aid because it doesn't help you at all in normal driving conditions, it only really comes into it's own in an emergency stop situation and then it's very definitely a safety feature.

I'd honestly be surprised if insurance quotes were identical whether the car had ABS or not.

Well, it replaces the driver doing cadence braking. Whether the insurance premium is affected by its presence or not will depend on the statistics: do cars equipped with ABS have fewer or less-costly accidents than otherwise? It's unlikely we'll find the answer to that, but I doubt it's as clear-cut as "ABS makes you safer".

If it was originally fitted then yes.

Same with a left hand door mirror. Not actually a legal requirement, unless your car came with one (which they all have for a long time).

I agree. Consider that insurance quotes are statistics based, not rules based. They aren't some guy in a room saying "we'll take 3% off for people with ABS on their car", it's a computer that says, "this car with ABS has 2.78% less accidents than this car that doesn't have it, and furthermore, those accidents cost 9.8% less to resolve".

Given that the insurance industry has very very granular statistics, and a hell of a lot of them, I would feel comfortable saying that if the insurance pemiums on ABS equipped cars were not lower then, on average, ABS isn't actually a very useful feature.

Anyway, Muhammad Ali in his prime was way better than antilock brakes.

ABS is going to outperform pretty much any normal driver's ability to cadence brake, as it can react in sub-millisecond times and keep the wheel right on edge of going into a skid i.e. at maximum braking force. The only flipside I see is when people lift off, subconciously, because of the offputting vibration of the brake pedal but modern ABS systems compensate for that with a variety of different acronyms (e.g. ESP) that all do the same thing: decide you are in an emergency stop and keep braking regardless of your foot.

ESP is more than that though. It has yaw sensors that detect which way the car is travelling and if it is in a different direction to the wheels then it seeks to correct it by applying the brakes differentially. It's quite startling how good it is, I played around in snow in a RWD car both with it and without it and with it on there was almost nothing I could do to send my car into a spin. They reckon it cuts accident rates quite dramatically.

Er, it's not illegal to have a vehicle without a seatbelt. Also, I have the choice of whether or not to put headlights (or any lights at all) on my Tomcat, as the car would be perfectly MOTable without them.

You're right, I think I used the wrong TLA up there. My father (a braking engineer) and my father's father (also a braking engineer) would be ashamed.

I don't think that's the case. You're obliged to have one interior and one exterior, nothing about what was fitted originally.

Mad dad used to be a policeman, and he went on the A1 driving course (this would have been in the late 70s early 80s) and they were all taught to do manual abs (ie to pump the brake when needing to slow down suddenly) he was a little upset when they introduced it to most cars and anyone could it...

Malc

That's what I was trying to say: although it's sold as a safety feature, whether that shows through in the statistics is another matter.



Or steer off the road into a wall because they're instinctively expecting a skid response
Or because people believe ABS makes them bulletproof and going zooming up to T-junctions on slippery roads at Mach 3 and expect to stop on a dime.

It used to be in the highway code and I got taught it when learning to drive. Handbrake turns used to be a perfectly acceptable maneuver on the roads too, nowadays you'd be arrested as a terrorist.

Thinking about it, I wouldn't be surprised if ABS just creates different sorts of accidents. ABS doesn't really help you stop quicker, it just gives you more steering control while braking in an emergency, so in the event that you're about to rear-end someone I would think that having more steering control might stop you rear-ending the car in front, but might make you swerve into the path of another car or even crash into a lamp-post/tree/wall or whatever

It does stop most people quicker. Even those who think they're Michael Schumacher tend to just stomp the brakes when they see their impending doom.

Yeah, sorry, I was referring to the difference in time between cadence braking and ABS.

But wouldn't ABS stop you quicker, as it lets you brake hard but without fully locking the wheels?

And yes, it is unnerving when it goes off... it almost feels like you've bottomed out.

That's the theory. You largely retain steering control too.

For most people it probably does help you stop quicker, which will certainly be very useful sometimes. I'd still be skeptical about whether it reduces the chances of having an accident overall though..

I'm pretty sure I've read statistics indicating that it does. I can't see how it wouldn't reduce the numbers of people crashing into the back of each other. The argument that people compensate by driving faster and more closely is twaddle I think, most drivers aren't even aware of what ABS does until such time as they need it.

As far as I know, the general consensus is that any reduction in stopping distance is minimal and that the primary advantage to ABS is the retainment of steering control.

I guess it depends on a variety of factors though, road surface and quality of tyre tread being the two main ones I would imagine.

This study seems to support the notion that, in general, ABS reduces accidents.

ABS will never be as good as the perfect human driver because it can only ever be reactive.

It can certainly be better than virtually every human driver in reality though.

Which is perhaps where any skewing of statistics comes from. I know that the first time I braked hard enough for my ABS to kick in (fortunately it wasn't in an emergency situation) I wasn't expecting the pedal vibrations and grinding noises and instinctively lifted my foot off the brake.

If most people do the same then the accident is still going to happen even with ABS

I think if you were hurtling toward the back of a lorry then you might have been more likely to stay on the brakes whatever it sounded like.

It's because not everyone has ABS, and not everyone is driving a vehicle of the same mass. Say you're driving a Civic with ABS, and you've done an emergency stop, safely stopping well before an accident that's just happened on the motorway. Great. Then an elderly Range Rover plows into the back of you, still doing 40.



Nah, I've heard people say it "I'm not worried about snow and ice, my car has ABS". Your car won't stop at all on snow and ice, is what'll happen.

That doesn't make much sense, what with vans and all.

Range Rovers were one of the first cars in the UK to have ABS


Yeah, idiots. What do they think it is, a magical super-traction device? Pulling the handbrake on will help in snow if you have ABS as it allows you to lock the wheels up, which is what you need in the snow.

That's 'cos they needed it so much!
Fair enough, I didn't know that


Exactly.

So not dropping it into reverse and flooring it, then?

My old Mondeo passed at least two MOTs without a rear-view mirror.