What a hero. I'd like to think I'd have the courage to do that in such a situation, while realising that I might well not.
The insurance company who laid blame on him should hang its corporate head in shame. It won't of course, but it should be named.
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Decent bloke...they are out there.
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Just out of genuine curiousity WP, if you had seen that poor chap the van driver tried to help while you were in a 'work' car, would you have been tempted to try a similar method of slowing it down or is there something cleverer ? I'm sort of thinking that getting alongside it and by sort of nudging / squeezing it into the Armco might have worked. Dunno of course.
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>> sort of nudging / squeezing it into the Armco might have worked. Dunno of course.
If there was Armco. But a bank, and certain kinds of concrete verge, can deflect a car across all three lanes or make it roll back into the nearside lane full of hypnotised lorries all doing 56 mph with their eyes glued to the TV in the passenger seat...
Just ask Pat. She's there every day.
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Well done that chap.
"Cars were still zooming past and I hated them for a moment"
I know *exactly* what he means. With feeling.
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or make it roll back into the nearside lane
>> full of hypnotised lorries all doing 56 mph with their eyes glued to the TV
>> in the passenger seat...
>>
>> Just ask Pat. She's there every day.
>>
Unkind, untrue and un-called for. I thought you were better than that.
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>> Unkind, untrue and un-called for.
Well, I hoped that would be obvious, and that everyone especially Pat would take it in the right spirit. Sorry you got it wrong Harley... is it my fault or yours? Sorry anyway.
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>> >> Unkind, untrue and un-called for.
>>
>> Well, I hoped that would be obvious, and that everyone especially Pat would take it
>> in the right spirit. Sorry you got it wrong Harley... is it my fault or
>> yours? Sorry anyway.
>>
Fair play mate. It takes more than that to enflounce me, anyway. I rpobably read more into it than you'd intended, and you forgot the "smiley". So we were both wrong.
On a more serious note; modern HGV training methods (we're talking driver "improvement" here not test passing) tend to encourage drivers to make more use of their cruise control to maintain constant speeds and thereby reduce fuel consumption; our company has introduced a zero tolerance on speeding which effectively means that on NSL single carriageways it's set to 37 mph. Much more risk, in these situations, of the driver either nodding off or his attention wandering. I have a regular run up to Shropshire on a Friday and trust me it is a very tedious trip home.
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>> on NSL single carriageways it's set to 37 mph. Much more risk, in these situations, of the driver either nodding off or his attention wandering. I have a regular run up to Shropshire on a Friday and trust me it is a very tedious trip home.
In my hitching days, fifties and early sixties, HGVs were all governed at 38mph. Took ages to get anywhere, and the hammering of those Gardner 5 cylinder diesels used to send me into a trance. Sometimes drivers would freewheel down long hills getting up to quite decent speeds.
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This came to me yesterday:
Oh look Darling, here comes a plod car!
But I'll surely outrun any squadcar,
Being thoroughly drunk
On some heavyweight skunk
And a third of a bottle of vodka...
I would hate anyone to think this frivolous verse reflected my own behaviour these days.
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>>I would hate anyone to think this frivolous verse reflected my own behaviour these days.
I should hope not.
Drunk on only a 3rd of a bottle? Shameful.
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>> Drunk on only a 3rd of a bottle? Shameful.
You're so right FMR.
'Two thirds' would scan just as well, and sound a bit more macho. But perhaps caution could be thrown to the winds.
How does 'And two litres of cask-strength vodka' sound? Why let verisimilitude make one look a wimp?
:o}
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Don't worry AC, taken in the manner it was intended:)
Pat
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You are right of course. It could have been squeezed to a stop. Particularly with a heavier van. But in the heat of the moment a layman may not have been thinking quite so clearly. Someone who is trained in tactical resolution may have quickly processed the scenario and dealt accordingly.
Well done that man!
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Oh, to be clear, I think he was an absolute star to do what he did. I was just interested to know if those who are trained to deal with such things would have a preferred method.
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If cars had hand-throttles rather than foot, would this kind of thing be less likely?
Just thinking of "dead man's handles" on trains.
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Less likely? Can't say I haver ever heard of such a case before.
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>> Less likely? Can't say I haver ever heard of such a case before.
>>
I've just done a Google search for "heart attacks at wheel" and there were 9 deaths so far this year.
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Yea but how many resulted in cars falling to stop and needing another vehicle to bring them to a halt? So small an issue in the scheme of things that it doesn' t need to be addressed.
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Now Google "heart attack at the wheel, car out of control stopped by another vehicle braking to slow it down"
Bet you don't get 9 examples then.
Last edited by: No FM2R on Sun 4 May 14 at 21:39
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If cars had hand-throttles rather than foot, would this kind of thing be less likely?
My vintage car only has a hand throttle. But you can only make one work where your hold on the steering wheel doesn't change. As mine is 270 degrees loch to lock - mine works fine, but modern cars are more like 3.5 turns lock to lock (1260 degrees...).
PS - added, I'd not want drive a car with a dirty great flappy paddle throttle as per the video.
Last edited by: Slidingpillar on Sun 4 May 14 at 09:30
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Arguably cruise control could be an exacerbating factor in an instance of a driver passing out or whatever. If it was engaged at the time. If a driver felt himself unwell he / she might just have enough time to at least take their foot off the accelerator but with cruise switched on the vehicle would attempt to keep going.
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The Merc is fitted with 'attention assist' which, through some kind of magic, senses when it thinks the driver is not paying attention. It sounds a nice loud chime to wake you back up :-) At the risk of extending nannying tecnhology further, it's surely a simple matter of programming to make it reduce or cut the power if the driver doesn't respond and at least reduce the speed of any impending collision. Though the likelihood of such an event does seem low, so I'm not actually suggesting its implemented...
And before someone else says it, it's bound to go wrong at some point ;-)
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Oh, and I've never managed to 'force' its activation by pretending to fall asleep, despite having had a few goes :)
In fact I have only actually heard the alert once (on a late night run back from Belgium). I can't swear to it, but I'm pretty sure I'd have had the cruise control on and I *think* it was deactivated when the alert sounded...
Last edited by: PeterS on Sun 4 May 14 at 09:56
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That ruddy thing goes off all the time in my car. Especially at night. I guess there must be some kind of algorithm built into it which takes account of time of day and hours / miles driven or something. What I do notice is that if you, say, cruise down the M1 at 04.00 hrs it goes off regularly but if you do the same journey at 10.00 am it keeps quiet.
I must get around to turning it off. It always seems to think its a good idea to interrupt the News.
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>> That ruddy thing goes off all the time in my car. Especially at night. I
>> guess there must be some kind of algorithm built into it which takes account of
>> time of day and hours / miles driven or something.
>>
No, it's programmed to take into account the age and mental competence of the driver. Does he have peculiar tastes in other departments and directions, for example?
;-)
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>> No, it's programmed to take into account the age and mental competence of the driver.
>> Does he have peculiar tastes in other departments and directions, for example?
That's what happens when you drive in stilettos...;-)
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Interesting... I'm atually surprised it doesn't go of more often :-). Easy enough to turn off though - hidden in the same menu ESP I think.
Which reminds me, why can't the just be a button for deactivating traction control? Hiding it in a sub menu under driver assistance doesn't make for speedy deactivation, and sometimes that's the difference between maintaining momentum and getting stuck!! Says someone who's been spending more time than is wise driving round farms and construction sites recently...
Thank goodness it's being serviced on Tuesday - it'll be nice and clean again for no effort :-)
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The V40's Adaptive CC and the attention alert thingy is pretty spooky, testing the City Guard feature in a queue of traffic (and trusting the car's sensors and computers) brought about a stop along with lights and sounds...The driver alert system system does not like fast bendy roads..keeps asking me whether I should stop for a coffee.
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I usually have a flask with my own coffee in it which it clearly doesn't know about. It might think its clever but it isn't !
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Maybe you should set Cafe Nero as a destination in the satnav to mollify it somewhat ;-)
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Here then ( as a mega drift !) this time last week almost to the hour, imagine the pain a Scotsman would suffer before answering, four coffees and four glasses of water in Gillis on the Piazza Della Republica in Florence.
How much ? ( I'm going to say you will be wrong )
;-)
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Well we were in Florence around this time last year, and while I don't recognise the cafe you refer to I'm going to guess somewhere in the region of €65 before tip...
... Oh, hang on, you're a Scotsman. €65
:-)
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Well, you must have found an even more expensive cafe ! I thought our €40 was quite enough !
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I seem to recall a small bottle of water was €5 or €6!! Edited to add, I've just noticed you said glasses of water. So we paid a similar amount I reckon...
Mind you, it was cheaper than Thursday nights taxi in Dublin. €610 I reckon. To be fair, €10 was the fare, and €600 the value of the iPhone I left in the back of it...
:-(
Last edited by: PeterS on Sun 4 May 14 at 10:59
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>>
>> How much ? ( I'm going to say you will be wrong )
Forty Euros?
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I properly cleaned mine yesterday inside and out ( a rare event ) but my son wants to go mountain biking today so it will all have been in vain. To get to where we'll want to start will involve at the latter stages a mile or so of muddy track to where we will park and on our return to the car we will most likely resemble mud wrestlers...
Oh well.
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Arguably cruise control could be an exacerbating factor in an instance of a driver passing out...
Almost certainly the principal factor here, I'd have thought. Accelerator pedals are typically sprung to require a conscious effort to keep them depressed; have you ever been changing CDs on a clear motorway, turned your mind fully back to the road and found your speed has dropped by 10mph? I have, and that's with only a small, partial distraction. I can't imagine a comatose driver could maintain enough pressure to push a braking van along the road; something was upping the input to try to maintain a pre-set speed.
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>> Which reminds me, why can't the just be a button for deactivating traction control? Hiding
>> it in a sub menu under driver assistance doesn't make for speedy deactivation, and sometimes
>> that's the difference between maintaining momentum and getting stuck!! Says someone who's been spending more
>> time than is wise driving round farms and construction sites recently...
See recent thread re touch screens! We need a "bring back the button" campaign :-)
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Adaptive CC would have probably brought him to a halt ?
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>>Just out of genuine curiousity WP, if you had seen that poor chap the van driver tried to help while you were in a 'work' car, would you have been tempted to try a similar method of slowing it down or is there something cleverer
Going by the latest round of Police Interceptor programs they would have followed it at a safe distance until they had another 5 or 6 police cars to pull it over!
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"I properly cleaned mine yesterday inside and out...."
The suspense is killing, Runfer. Did you clean, inside and out, your....
German taxi?
Mountain bike?
Son?
Florentine café?
Or maybe just shoes.
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Sporran?
Jock-strap?
Last edited by: Roger. on Sun 4 May 14 at 16:54
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For all the good that will do you......you might as well shove it up your........!
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Quick thinking hero - Runfer D'Hills
