Random automotive observations

Daylan C said:

I find vehicle stereotypes very difficult these days since myself, several of my friends and most of you guys have wildly varying fleets. 

Do I behave more like a Mustang guy in my Saturn or more like a Saturn guy in my Mustang? And are any of my Dodge habits left? 

I’m somewhat aggressive, very respectable, always predictable but consistently impatient no matter what I drive!

That DRIVING WELL is really the only priority when you get behind the wheel seems to be lost on 99% of drivers nowadays.

dculberson said:

freetors said:

People in Dodge/ram trucks seem to be the most consistently aggressive and annoying road users, at least around here.

I agree, but lately I've been wondering if it isn't the styling on the trucks that make me notice them and think they're driven more aggressively. Since they always look angry and full of testosterone. Plus the front end is about 20' tall so it's hard not to feel tailgated when you're sitting on the pavement in a tiny sports car, even if they are a reasonable distance back.

'round these parts most Diesel Dodges are driven like mopeds. By that I mean either wide open throttle or fully closed. Since we moved to our new shop location on a main thoroughfare I get to hear, see and smell this every 20 minutes. Clouds of black unburnt diesel mixed with roasted tire smoke and the racket of a Cummins from one stoplight to the next a block away. 

I understand the power is intoxicating, but this is ludicrous. 

Jeep and brodozer drivers with wheel offsets so wrong you can see their brake rotors from directly behind.

Generally the same kind of vehicles with tires that are more out of the fender than in.

Man I'm glad I finally have a thread where I can vent about all the things that annoy me.

ebonyandivory said:

I’m somewhat aggressive, very respectable, always predictable but consistently impatient no matter what I drive!

That DRIVING WELL is really the only priority when you get behind the wheel seems to be lost on 99% of drivers nowadays.

I am very careful to differentiate between aggressiveness and competence. To most people, a competently driven vehicle appears to be driven aggressively, mostly because they don't understand competence, and like Carlin said, "Everyone driving slower than me is an idiot. Everyone driving faster than me is a maniac."

Time to vent my thoughts on headlights. Daytime, DRL's, low beams, whatever weather, great! glad you can be seen, drive safe, have a great day. High beams? even in bright daylight these can blind temporarily. Turn them off! you ARE NO MORE VISIBLE than DRL's and low beams, but more likely to cause an accident and generally annoy everyone else driving.

In reply to snailmont5oh :

My idea of aggressiveness is definitely interchangeable with competence. An example is a 4-way stop. You go in the appropriate order but don’t wait one second beyond your turn (because you know someone will jump the line).

It also means getting up to speed as quickly as you safely can. Not changing lanes over the course of a mile. Getting the job done quickly and precisely.

On and off ramps seem to scare everybody so everyone around here takes them at 30 and makes merging onto i65 in my SL1 pretty annoying and sketchy. 

In the Mustang they annoy me because like we discussed getting downvoted for apexing off ramps. Idiots are blocking my line. 

I have GRM and Autocross stickers across the back of my focus ST. They scream car nerd...

I've stopped counting the amount of idiots who want to race and be idiots on normal roads. 

Every other time I see a focus ST on the road... it's a forgone conclusion that I'll groan at a modification done to it. Great cheap cars.. But so much so... that the facebook groups give me migranes.... With the stupidity..

working on my disco at work, I was doing it in a stealthy manner as not to attract security's attention. I had the tools in the back of my fiat, so I would close the hatch every time I went back under the truck. Even though the car was unlocked, the hatch re-locks when it closes, meaning you need to hit the key fob to unlock it before you can hit the latch to open it. Leaving it unlocked until the doors are locked seems like a much better idea to me

If someone drives a Patriot, Compass, Caliber, Pontiac G5 or non-boosted Cobalt they're usually a trainwreck of a person.

In reply to G_Body_Man :

The girl I knew that had a Cobalt LT was a nice lady. Somewhat well adjusted college athlete that broke up with my musician friend because he drank to much for her liking. I also know a former owner of a Patriot that is a firefighter, minister, and overall decent dude. He has a Grand Cherokee now though. 

When every car has DRLs they cease to stand out.  So it's only a safety feature if half the vehicles don't have it. 

In fact, bright light can actually be used as camouflage on tanks and stuff under the right circumstances. The US Army experimented with it in the past.  In WW2 several forces used diffuse light as effective camo on planes and ships. At night. Let that one sink in for a minute.

What you need are the headlights on my SL1 at the moment. The brackets are only mostly attached so they bounce around a lot. The resulting flicker that can be seen is annoying enough from behind the wheel that there is  no way others don't notice.

ultraclyde said:

When every car has DRLs they cease to stand out.  So it's only a safety feature if half the vehicles don't have it. 

This.  DRLs have been shown to help visibility in places with lots of dim, grey weather (where you're bordering on the point of should have headlights on anyway).  But in places as bright as most of the US during daytime, they help visibility slightly when only some cars have them, but once all cars have them, they no longer make any significant difference.  

FWIW, disabling the DRLs on my silver BMW didn't seem to make a difference in terms of how often people do dumb stuff in front of me.  If anything, they seem to be worse about it in dark or bad weather when my headlights are on anyway.  Now the dark grey Jeep?  That thing might as well be invisible with how often I get cut off, etc.  

DRLs are the devil because...people see that the road in front of them is illuminated when dusk and darkness approaches. They do not realize that the rear of the vehicle is blacked out.

Two more:

Anyone driving a ZipCar will have absolutely no sense of what speed is appropriate on a highway, thus whizzing past traffic on a straight only to slow to a crawl when the slightest of curves approaches, repeated ad infinitum.

Any vehicle with a rubber bumper protector thing flapping in the breeze behind it will be driven poorly in virtually every way imaginable, and probably one or two you hadn't thought of yet.

Appleseed said:

DRLs are the devil because...people see that the road in front of them is illuminated when dusk and darkness approaches. They do not realize that the rear of the vehicle is blacked out.

This is the only argument I've seen against DRLs that is good.  It is also why I hate digital/always illuminated dashboards.  Night rolls around and there is no indication that your lights are not on.

Dusterbd13-michael said:

Mopar guys are hoarders. And obsessed with originality and production numbers. 

Unless its latemodels (last 10 years or so), who are obsessed with looks and horsepower. The two sides dont mix well.

So let me tellyou about the 500hp heavily modified 70 duster, or my 1 of 40 lapis blue acr neon.....

+1 on this. Im level 50 hoarder. 

In reply to 02Pilot :

Rental vehicles in a city are always going to be driven poorly, but Uhaul has ZipCar beat by a mile. We lose an unfathomable number of left side bus mirrors around Uhaul facilities especially the first and last weeks of college.  

Dusterbd13-michael said:

Mopar guys are hoarders. And obsessed with originality and production numbers.

One of my favorite articles from Car Craft was about Charlie Cheshire, who basically bought up all of Chrysler's stock of Hemi parts when they were phasing it out of the parts network.  This was in the mid 1980s, so Hemis were still only a decade and a half old minimum.  Picture buying up all the dealer network parts for, say, Aussie GTOs, and you get the idea.

I remember the first article I saw in Mopar Action about restorations with lunchbox parts.

You see, factory replacement parts aren't good enough for a proper restoration.  They were sometimes different from what was on the assembly line.  What was best, were actual assembly-line parts that "found" their way into line workers' garages in their lunchboxes.  "Lunchbox" batteries, for example, are worth more than 90% of the field at any given GRM Challenge.

This is why I had Fords growing up.  I like Mopars, but I didn't choose my parents correctly to enjoy them.  (and I'm not inbred so I don't like Chev.... oh hi there, banhammer!)

Wally said:

In reply to 02Pilot :

 

Rental vehicles in a city are always going to be driven poorly, but Uhaul has ZipCar beat by a mile. We lose an unfathomable number of left side bus mirrors around Uhaul facilities especially the first and last weeks of college. 

I'm sure, given that most people aren't used to driving something that large.

There's something different about the ZipCar driver than other rental drivers, at least around here. On any given day on the Taconic (a 1930s-era parkway through the Hudson Valley, for those of you not local), but especially on the weekend, it's a damn near sure thing that any car flying past you at 90mph in the right lane on a straight will be driven by a thirtysomething hipster couple from Green Point who haven't driven regularly in close to a decade (since they moved from outside Ottumwa to Brooklyn to follow their dream of being yoga herbalist maker micro-somethings) and are "really enjoying driving again!"; they will be the same hipster couple who panic and drop to near walking speed at the first hint of a corner (let alone the Wall of Death or the switchbacks in Fahnestock) because "wow, this road is dangerous!"

In reply to 02Pilot :

I thankfully haven't seen many ZipCars on my commute but I did stop to help a similar hipster a couple weeks ago when he ran out of road northbound near Fahnestock. While waiting for the wrecker we had an amusing conversation about how much Brooklyn had changed and how people were moving in from out of town and driving up the prices after they worked so hard to clean it up.     

At 5:45 today, I had to wait through most of a green light to turn left.  During that time, two vehicles went by with their high beams on, and four had fog lights glowing.

ebonyandivory said:

In reply to snailmont5oh :

My idea of aggressiveness is definitely interchangeable with competence. An example is a 4-way stop. You go in the appropriate order but don’t wait one second beyond your turn (because you know someone will jump the line).

In Minnesota, no matter who has the right of way people will sit at four way stops for ages, waiting for someone else to go first.  "You go first."  "No, you go first."  It's very annoying.

Except when they don't...a few years back, I was halfway through the intersection when another driver jumped the gun and T-boned my mint 325iX.  

Streetwiseguy said:

At 5:45 today, I had to wait through most of a green light to turn left.  During that time, two vehicles went by with their high beams on, and four had fog lights glowing.

If you can turn them on with the headlights on, or rather, if you must have the headlights on to turn them on, they are not "fog lights".

The whole point of real fog lights is for situations where you cannot use your headlights because they will glare back at you.  Fog lights will cut under the fog, and will preferably be yellow or amber, which has less blue in it, for even less glareback.  If you must have your headlights on for the "fog" lights to work, they are useless in fog.

Mostly, OE-equipped "fog" lights are there to indicate that the vehicle operator is a moron and should be given a wide berth.

I used to rant that people who used them were the shiniest and happiest of people, because auxiliary lighting was not subject to the (rather crude) DOT lighting regulations and could throw light anywhere they wanted.  That was before the latest round of horrible headlights that aren't merely indifferent to other traffic, but seem to actually be actively trying to make life hell for anyone else on the road.  As such, the "moron lights" on 90s cars are quaint in comparison.