Are driving aids dodgy?

[Levo-Lon]

Our last car had rain sensitive wipers which did my head in. When replacing the car I confirmed first that this could be overridden and work as a conventional intermittent wipers.
Unfortunately I subsequently discovered that the auto dimming rear view mirror can't be turned off. This is even more annoying. What's the point of a mirror if you can't see what's behind you?

I had a hire car with an electric handbrake but couldn't do a hill start without rolling backwards and ended up having to heel and toe the brake and accelerator.

The thing with leccy hand brakes is the brake Releases when you press the accelerator.
Most newbie users struggle with them.
Once you lose the old habit of footbrake clutch and throttle it's brilliant.

As soon as you get to bitting point and press the accelerator the handbrake auto realeases..

 

[smutchin]

you just know

No you don't. HTH.

 

[Deleted member 26715]

HTH.

Not in the slightest

 

[Nibor]

@Phaeton adaptive cruise control is great when you are in average speed areas on motorways, if the car in front slows so do you to maintain a safe distance if it speeds up so do you to the maximum you have set. If it slows a lot it beeps and tells you to brake.

 

[KEEF]

My dodgy driving aid .. Hard as nails chauffeur Pierre Dohrmann

 

[Levo-Lon]

View attachment 414436

My dodgy driving aid .. Hard as nails chauffeur Pierre Dohrmann

He looks a proper old time villain..

 

[Black Sheep]

I've not tried the latest driver aid tech, but I once engaged the speed limiter to 70mph on a DCW with average speed cameras, but then forgot to turn it off. I then accelerated furiously from 60 to overtake and was met very abruptly with no power. It scared me. I'm all for safety features, but I think anything like that should not operate above 30mph. There are too many poor drivers (perhaps in my example I was one of them) who forget to turn on/off these aids and it's the surprise aspect that is the danger rather than the aid itself.

The wife's car has that, it's very handy in the endless 50mph average speed motorway roadworks round Manchester as you can concentrate a bit more on watching your surroundings and other drivers than constantly checking your speed, if you floor it then it does ignore the restriction and let you accelerate, likewise with the cruise control, you can accelerate above speed if required.

 

[Piemaster]

Can you get fixed wheel cars? And if not, why not?

My wifes electric car is, well possibly more a single speed.

My car has an automatic speed limiter - its a finger that comes across the dash and taps the speedo.

 

[Mr Celine]

The thing with leccy hand brakes is the brake Releases when you press the accelerator.
Most newbie users struggle with them.
Once you lose the old habit of footbrake clutch and throttle it's brilliant.

As soon as you get to bitting point and press the accelerator the handbrake auto realeases..

And that is, in a nutshell, why electric handbrakes and many other 'aids' are rubbish.

Compare an electric handbrake with an electric accelerator. I think the last car I had with an actual accelerator cable was a mark 1 Mondeo, everything I've had since has been electronic 'fly by wire'. To me, as the driver, pressing the accelerator pedal makes the engine produce more power and I don't care if the connection between pedal and engine is mechanical or electronic.

So I experience my first electric handbrake, in a hire car at a Swedish airport with a swedish handbook. I expect an electric handbrake to work like a mechanical handbrake, where I choose when to release it, except it doesn't work like that and I eventually discover through experimentation that it appears to go off if I drive away. My next reasonable expectation is that having taken the decision of when to release the handbrake from me that the automated system will release it when I would, which is when the torque provided by the engine at the wheels is equal to the torque, if any, caused due to gravity, which surely could be done using the ABS sensors. But no, I soon found when doing a hill start that it doesn't work like that.
You shouldn't have to lose an old habit only to have to replace it with a new one.