Lane departure systems

Have you driven a car with lane departure control yet? Not the warning system that flashes an alert if the car detects that you're leaving your lane. I'm talking about the full-on driver-interference system that either vibrates the wheel, or worse, nudges or steers the car back into the lane? I had the misfortune of driving a car equipped with this a couple of weeks ago. I can understand why manufacturers want to put it in their vehicles but I can't understand why there isn't an option to turn it off permanently. I don't know if the system in the car I was in was faulty or if this is just how they work, but I had to fight the car to perform an overtake on a mountain road. The setup was simple enough; following someone who had no idea we were there, who was doing a good 15 mph below the limit, I wanted to overtake. No traffic coming, solid/dashed line making it legal to overtake, I hung back a moment, indicated then hit the gas and started to pull out. At this point the lane departure warning system went into meltdown with lights on the dash and a loud audio warning. Within what I suppose was milliseconds, I felt the power steering tighten up until it took control away and forced me back into the lane I was leaving. Not only was this a surprise to me (which, by the way scared the living shit out of me), but it was a surprise to the car behind who suddenly found me back where I was as he too had begun to accelerate to follow my overtake. Could I turn this nanny system off? Nope. In the end I had to literally fight the steering to get an overtake done. Not safe, and highly undesirable, and now added to the list of stuff I don't want in my next car.

Is your steering a bit 'vague' ?

Suspension can be complicated at the best of times, and trying to diagnose 'vague' handling in a car is always a fun topic for the morning discussion around the coffee machine.
From my personal experience (in other words, doesn't really count for much), 'vague' steering or handling at the front is almost always down to worn bushes or ball joints. The suspension bushes are basically the 'hinges' that the suspension components pivot around. Most vehicles have rubber bushes and the rubber perishes and gets brittle over time, allowing a little slack into that joint. If this happens on both sides, then the suspension arms will tend to move forwards and backwards a little under braking and acceleration, and laterally under cornering. Once the 'foundation' of the suspension is moving like this, the sense of vagueness creeps into the handling. The same thing can happen with the ball joints - normally either at the track rod ends (where the steering rack joins the hubs) or on the lower side of the suspension where it joins the lower swing arm. The same 'vague' handling will happen because parts of the suspension that are supposed to be rigidly tied together begin to have movement relative to each other (same as worn suspension bushes).
Neither of these jobs is particularly hard to fix if you're a decent home mechanic with the right tools, but most people will prefer to have a mechanic do it for them. Expect to pay about two hour's labour per wheel for a job like this. And then marvel at how much better your vehicle feels again, even if you can't put your finger on exactly why it feels better.

I know why cars get such terrible gas mileage in America!

Roundabouts!
That's why American vehicles have such awful gas mileage. It's not that they're any worse than any other vehicles, it's that the cities here are laid out such that even in the suburbs you can't drive more than 200m without coming to a stop sign or a set of traffic lights. The constant stop-start driving destroys fuel economy, and could be so easily rectified with roundabouts.
Some driver training would be required though. I hate coming across roundabouts here because the average American driver has no idea what to do with them. Watching Americans trying to negotiate a roundabout is an entertaining and embarrassing representation of their ignorance about an intersection that does not require you to stop but does require you to yield, but only in certain circumstances. It seems to cause some sort of severe psychological disorder since it is neither green nor red, but requires them to steer and calculate approaching distances and speeds at the same time.
Having said that, roundabouts are, generally speaking, a great idea. Unless you do them like they do in England, where the roundabout cures the traffic problem so the local council then puts traffic lights ON the roundabout to bring the problem back. I'm looking at you Berkshire county council.

America The Monochrome.

I've always complained about the number of non-colour cars people own over here in the U.S (white, grey, black, silver, beige). There's barely any colour on the roads - it's like being stuck in a black and white movie. I've known all along that it wasn't just my perception, but this video proves it. Shot by a filmmaker in San Diego, he took a load of footage and then edited it to show all the cars that passed by, sorted by colour. This ties up with the findings of several recent studies that have shown that 72% of US cars are monochrome.
It's not until the closing seconds of the video that there's any hint of a real colour - a scattering of blue, two orange, a few red, and three yellow. Otherwise it's a see of beige, black, silver, white, and grey.
You can see this for yourself using Google Earth - go look at an airport parking lot in a major US city and it's a sea of monochrome. Now go and look at one in Europe and you'll see a considerable amount of colour by comparison.
Come on, people - black, white, silver and grey are not colour choices. Those are the colours you pick when you can't be bothered to pick an actual colour....Plus, it's worth noting that the four colours with the worst re-sale value are black, white, grey and silver, whilst those with the highest resale value are any colour other than those (Forbes article)
(Video link on Vimeo)

Midday Traffic Time Collapsed and Reorganized by Color: San Diego Study #3 from Cy Kuckenbaker on Vimeo.

Thinking ahead and being aware.

I recently watched a woman in a giant SUV try to park in a space that was plenty big enough for the car, but she just couldn't do it. It was both hilarious and tragic to watch. Try as she might, she could never get enough lock on the steering to turn the car into the space without kerbing the passenger side wheel. Of course she only had the wheel turned about half a lock because she was doing this one-handed whilst on the phone, but even so, it illustrated a common problem today - drivers who can't think ahead and have no idea where the extents of their own vehicle are.
I see this a lot on my commute. Someone will be coming towards us on their side of the road, and the car in front will veer off towards the kerb because they think the approaching car is going to hit them. Or they'll come across a cyclist in a cycle lane, and instead of giving the cyclists the required 3ft of space (which by the way you can do without getting out of your lane), they'll sit there waiting and waiting and waiting for no approaching traffic, then drive on the wrong side of the road to get around the bike.
Kerbed wheels, dented corner panels, scrapes along the sides of the cars - these all point to people who just have no grasp of how large or small their vehicle is.
The failure to think ahead problem is worse, though. How many times have you seen a lane closed sign coming up, and the person behind you decides the traffic is moving too slow and pulls out into the lane which is about to close? Back in the UK I saw a great example of this 15 years ago on the M4. The outside lane was coned off and everyone was neatly driving in the inner two lanes. As we passed an on-ramp, I watched a guy come down the ramp and spear across two lanes of slow-moving traffic to what I assume was where he normally drives (see last week's post), only to be met by a coned-off lane and a road construction vehicle. The brake lights came on as he batted four or five of the cones out of the way, and his car came to a complete stop when he buried it windscreen-deep under the back of the dump truck in the outside lane.
More recently, the guy who was driving our lunch crowd one day was presented with a closed road and two lanes of stalled traffic. The level of indecision he displayed made me want to get out of the car and walk. Indicate left. Stop indicating. Attempt to U-turn but stop mid way then pull back into the lane. Indicate the other way. Stop. Indicate left again then try to turn right into a side road....it was horrendous.
Look further ahead than the front of your own car and I guarantee you it will make you a safer driver. Watch the traffic, adjust your speed and lane positioning accordingly, and pick your times to maneuver carefully. Above all, use your brain.

Tailgating - you hate it, I hate it, we all hate it. But there's such an easy solution....

We all hate tailgaters - people who drive so close that you can see the sweat running down their forehead when you look in your rearview mirror. But there's such an easy solution : get out of the way.
Tailgating happens mostly on motorways, and mostly in the outside lane. Why? Because some drivers don't understand basic lane discipline, and they'll spear across the motorway from the on ramp and then sit in the outside lane just barely doing the speed limit. Result? A Tailback of people irritably trying to get past.
Many states and countries have laws in place now to try to prevent this - even if you're doing the speed limit, if you see a faster vehicle coming up behind you, it's your responsibility to get out of the way. The problem is that this is an unenforceable law, so it has very blunt teeth when it comes to attacking the problem in a real world situation.
Of course part of the problem is right there in the description - 'when you see....in your mirror'. Between the rampant cellphone use, texting, watching videos, reading books and otherwise not concentrating on the matter at hand, it's almost unheard of to see anyone using their mirrors any more. If they're going to sit in the outside lane and block traffic, they're not going to use their mirrors.
Fun factoid : in a recent online survey, there was an unsurprisingly high correlation between the number of people who hated tailgaters and the number of people who admitted to driving in the outside lane no matter what the traffic. Cause, and effect.