Jim Kenzie's The Driver's Seat

More on Fifteen-Passenger Vans

I was talking about the recent and quite horrible van crash the other day with Canadian racing star Ron Fellows.

He mentioned one thing about big passenger vans that was not - as far as we know - a contributing factor to THIS van crash, but has been implicated in others of a similar vein.

Fellows pointed out that bigger vans generally have true truck tires on them, which call for much higher inflation pressures than most people are used to - maybe 85 psi instead of 35.

This tends to make the ride choppy, especially when unladen.

So people figure, “Hey - 35 psi is good enough for my station wagon....”

The ride is smoother, everybody is happy.

But then when they DO put fifteen people in the van, the tires are seriously under-inflated, the carcass of the tire flexes much more than it was designed to do, it blows out, and the driver does the wrong thing in reaction.

What IS the wrong thing in this situation?

Doing just about anything is the wrong thing, actually. Don't just jump off the gas pedal, don't hammer on the brakes, and for cryin' out loud, don't over-correct at the steering wheel.

Stabilize the vehicle speed by keeping a constant throttle. As long as the vehicle is tracking straight, then you can gently lift to start slowing the vehicle down. Put on the four-way flashers, and start looking for a safe place to pull over.

Braking is likely to be dangerous because by definition you'll have half as much braking power on one side of one axle as on the other side, and a spin-out is a near-certainty.

Gently, gently...

This approach worked for me when I had the left front wheel on my massive Suburban part company with the vehicle at a buck-twenty on the 401. My first two clues were when I heard a big “BANG!” from the left front corner as the brake disc hit the pavement, and my wheel flew past my driver's side window.

I wish I had had the opportunity to practice this manoeuvre in advance, but - maybe more by good luck than by good management - I did get the vehicle stopped safely.

If I could do it, so can you.

Fortunately, my wheel didn't bounce into on-coming traffic. I had to walk some distance back to get it - it was leaning up aganst the concrete median barrier like it was waiting for a pit stop!

I rolled it back to the truck, and discovered that the wheel nuts had worked themselves loose and fallen off, followed shortly thereafter by the entire wheel.

I managed to get the truck jacked up, put the wheel back on what was left of the studs, borrowed one lug nut from each of the other three wheels, tightened them up and drove VERY slowly back home.

The next morning I had a sharply-worded conversation with the tire store which had put the new wheels and tires on a couple of days previously. They replaced them, put them on right, and I never had another problem.

Knowing what to do in a situation like this could save your life, and the lives of others.

Think about it...

 

Fifteen-Passenger Vans

That horrifying crash down near Stratford a couple of days ago has actually got some people calling for the banning of fifteen-passenger vans.

So, would two eight-passenger vans be any safer?

Statistically, there'd be twice as many opportunities for a collision.

It seems the driver of this van failed to stop at an intersection, and was Tee-boned by a flatbed transport truck.

The miracle here is that anybody survived.

There is some speculation that the driver of the westbound van might not have seen the stop sign due to glare from the late afternoon sun. We will probably never know this for a fact, but for sure that does happen - it did not so long ago in another terrible crash not far from where I live.

There are of course alternatives to simple stop signs - the addition of rumble strips in the road surface which alert drivers to an upcoming stop is a fairly cheap option with good 'return on investment'.

And may I switch into my 'roundabout rant' now?

It may be too expensive to convert every intersection in the province into a roundabout.

But every time a new intersection is built or major reconstruction work is being done on one, the 'default option' should always be a roundabout.

Because there's no way you can get Tee-boned at a roundabout, and Tee-bones are among the most difficult types of crash to survive, because there's so little 'crush space' in the sides of a vehicle to absorb the impact energy.

I mean, we can't afford to convert every railroad crossing into a 'grade separation' bridge or tunnel either, but especially in more heavily-populated areas, nobody could get away with building a 'level' railroad crossing any more.

And we kill a lot more people at road intersections than we do at railway crossings.

How does any municipality, or the province, get away with making any intersection anything BUT a roundabout? Does somebody have to start suing somebody? It's darn-near negligence.

The thing that stuns me about crashes like this is the incredible timing that's involved.

At Volvo's crash test facility in Gothenberg Sweden where they TRY to crash two cars into one another, an error of a fraction of a second in sending one car down the track can mean the cars miss each other entirely.

And Hollywood action movie directors spend weeks and hundreds of thousands of dollars for stunt drivers and coordinators, trying to set up crashes like this.

Yet out on the roads, we collectively manage to do it every single day...

 

Transport Canada, the EPA, and The Real World

Got an e-mail from the owner of a 2011 Ford F-Series pick-up today.

It has the base 3.7 litre V6 engine, which I have driven (shared by Mustang, incidentally) and reported on - great engine, good power, good fuel economy numbers.

But he complains that he gets nowhere near the advertised fuel economy, and feels he has been duped.

He also mentions that the US EPA numbers are quite a bit lower than Canada's, even after adjusting for the difference in our gallon. The US numbers are actually closer to what he is recording in the Real World.

He says he has always been a GM loyalist but was swayed by these numbers, and he and some of his other Ford-owning buddies feel they've been misled.

Thought I'd share my response to him with all of you - comments and any further info any of you can share always welcome.

*******

As you know, the mileage tests are conducted according to government-mandated protocols, which are conducted under very specific conditions - warm temperatures, etc. - and which are monitored pretty closely. The numbers the manufacturers report are what they got on those tests, and the purpose isn't necessarily to tell you exactly what YOU'LL get, but to provide a comparison for one vehicle versus another.

So the ads aren't 'misleading', technically anyway - the vehicle DID get those numbers on those tests. Of course, the lawyers always insist on lots of weasel clauses which say "Your mileage may differ", etc. etc. etc.

Sometimes, there are suspicions that engineers specifically tune the vehicles so they look good on these tests, as opposed to get the best mileage in the Real World, because these numbers are so important for marketing purposes - they swayed you, didn't they?

I don't know that anybody has ever proved that, but sometimes the gaps between the Transport Canada numbers and reality are greater for certain vehicles, which certainly raises some suspicion.

There was wide-spread complaining among consumers in the US a few years ago, especially w/r/t hybrids. It seems the EPA City numbers were WAY out of whack compared to what was achievable in normal driving. I'm not saying hybrid manufacturers 'cooked' the cars to beat the test, but for sure, the idle shut-off feature that hybrids have really generated great numbers.

The EPA modified the City test to reduce the impact of this effect, and I don't think Transport Canada has made a similar change to their protocol. This may be why the US numbers differ from Transport Canada. I don't know if the highway tests are different or not - might be worth looking into.

How long have you had the truck? As it gets a few thousand kilometres on it, the mileage should improve. Also, the way you drive, long trips versus short trips, etc., and cold weather - not that we've had a lot of it this winter - all affect mileage as well.

All of this may not change the way you feel about the truck, but maybe it helps explain the economy disparities a little.

 

What Did I Tell You About Fog Lights??

Regular readers/visitors/watchers know I hate fog lights.

First, they don't work, at least none that are fitted as original equipment on far too many cars. I probably drive more different cars than anybody else in this country, I live in an area where there is frequent fog, and I have never - NEVER - driven behind a set of fog lights that did any good whatsoever.

An instructor at a BMW Driver Training School at Mid-Ohio Race Track used to start each lesson with: "Ladies and gentlemen - the first thing we will do is turn on our headlights. The second thing we will do is turn OFF our fog lights. Thank you."

BMW owners - oh, and Mustang owners - seem to be among the worst offenders.

Another colleague once suggested that fog lights' only purpose was target practice for an over/under shotgun. The shot pattern from about five metres takes care of them perfectly and permanently.

The second downside of fog lights (other than their complete lack of functionality) is that they always seem to be aimed either directly into my eyes, or directly into my rear-view mirror.

This is especially and increasingly an issue with the proliferation of pick-ups, SUVs and even some Crossovers with their jacked-up suspensions.

Now, a study has been conducted by Swiftcover, an insurance company in England, which shows that improper use of fog lights (that is to say, ANY use of fog lights...) may be responsible for up to 300,000 crashes per year.

All for the obvious reasons - they dazzle the eyes of on-coming (or preceding) traffic.

The company says young people especially leave the fogs on during good visibility conditions because "...it looks good."

Yeah, so did smoking. I've never understood why being stupid in public has always been cool.

At least in the UK, driving with fogs in other than poor-visibility conditions is an offence under their Highway Code. I can only wish for that here too, but like left-lane banditry, the cops probably wouldn't charge anybody anyway.

See the full report here, and thanks to several readers who pointed this out to me.