Your view: car tech you’d introduce or retire

I can see the usefulness of reversing sensors, very useful until the day they go wrong, and they will. Friend of mine had such a failure on a Rover 75. Quite a big expensive job to repair.
Think I can get by without them.

Sensors on the front to deter tailgating is a very good idea though. So long as these sensors are designed such that replacement is made simple and cheap.
They could be made to only operate above say 20 mph to prevent waiting in a line at traffic lights becoming a pain, and made so that (above 20 mph) they could not be switched off.

As for other gadgets and gizmos I think the main issue is not whether they are present but how useful they really are, how well they are designed for easy and cheap replacement, because they will go wrong, and of course a thought about how quickly the technology employed goes out of date.

Manufacturers have made it difficult to replace failed light bulbs in many cars, so it is not surprising that it can be expensive to replace a parking sensor.

It would be good to go back to the days when simple jobs could be done easily.

I make my daughter get out of the car and stand behind it. Fortunately she’s now tall enough I can see her.

Meaning a full-size spare wheel, I hope.

Damn right. Full size tyre, useable, same type of rubber, full instructions taped to the inside of the hatch/boot…

We certainly should have a spare wheel and all the tools and the manufacturers should also leave a good pair of gloves in the glove compartment. Lifting and applying force to things is always easier and usually safer with gloves on in my experience.

I have discovered that the alloy wheels on my present car are more difficult to refit than any other wheels I wrestled with before. Inserting a couple of pieces of dowel in two of the five holes in hub makes it much easier to align the wheel so that the first bolt can be fitted.

It was so much easier when all that was needed was to hang the wheel on the protruding studs, in the days before bolts were introduced.

I keep a couple of pairs of disposable nitrile gloves beside the spare wheel. I wish I had room in the glove box for proper gloves.

My wife has a Smart car which has no spare wheel. She has to call Smart who send the AA or RAC to take off the wheel, drive it to a tyre depot, fix the puncture and return and refit the wheel. Her last puncture took 2 hours to fix when it should have only taken 10 minutes. Crackers.

Probably, because copious use of the rear-view mirror is one of the most important features of the reverse-parking manouevre – before, during and after. Well-positioned and adjusted door-pillar mirrors can give an excellent view of the rear wheels when reversing and parking but are no substitute for use of the rear-view mirror. They are not much use for seeing posts and bollards but do give good vision of low-level transverse impediments like kerbs or gullies which might be invisible through a rear window [however deep]. Knowing the length of overhang beyond the wheel-base also helps. The experts would say that the key to reverse parking is looking at the space before attempting the manoeuvre and uploading its characteristics [especially any obstacles] into one’s mental spacial awareness programme within the human short-term memory facility; this will then interact automatically with the hands and feet controling the steering and motion of the vehicle. In practice, however, our synapses let us down at the critical moment [because we’re actually rehearsing the shopping list] and we get in a muddle, so a little help from sensors would be very welcome.

This reminds me that the return of car bumpers and side protection strips would be welcome. I now park in the far corners of supermarket car parks to avoid scrapes and dents.

I presume it’s all about crash-worthiness and the absorption of energy thus cushioning the impact by means of a compression or crumple zone. In the case of the front end, this reduces the likelihood of the engine invading the passenger compartment which used to be the cause of serious multiple injuries even where airbags were deployed. The trade-off is that we now have little protection of the bodywork in the event of a minor collision. I think the safety advantages of the energy absorbing front ends far outweigh the absence of rigid bumpers fixed to the frame or chassis. There were frequent complaints that bumpers were not at a universal level and could also give rise to over-riding with a greater risk of injury. Moreover, bumpers wre not kind to cyclists or pedestrians, especially children, hit by a car. Several decades ago some vehicles had rubber [or rubber-encased] bumpers and newspaper vans in London had their entire front wings and wheel arches made of flexible rubber [probably because the drivers did u-turns in narrow streets and tore around at breakneck speed in order to be “first with the news” as the masthead of The Evening News proclaimed].

My comment was not very well phrased. I am not advocating that we go back to the days of metal bumpers or anything else that could create a hazard for pedestrians, etc. I would be very happy to go back to the days when the front and back of cars usually had some form of protection from careless people trying to park, etc. Having body colour coordinated ‘bumpers’ repaired is expensive, or so I have been told.

Yes, they’re more like “fairings” than “bumpers” now and are usually part of a large panel. Cars have also got wider so the space available to manoeuvre in car parks in order to avoid kerbs and posts is significantly reduced and it’s often impossible to open the thicker doors and get in the car without making contact with the adjacent vehicle. Maybe the spaces should be increased in width even at the expense of nominal capacity. I also like the far corners of supermarket car parks where there are fewer trolley movements, which also give rise to biffs and dents. In my experience, the best position is to straddle the dividing line of the last two spaces in a corner. This can always be justified by the pile of litter and slurry of dead leaves lying in the corner and means that no one else can park right alongside on at least one side of the car.

Spot on with the leaves, John. I used this trick regularly where I used to work.

Just buy an electric pump with a screw-on connection, which is likely to be more durable than a lever operated connection. If you are a Which? member, have a look at the Best Buys.

It is best to check your tyres at home rather than at a garage because the pressure should be set when they are cold.

One way of acquiring spare valve caps is to remove the old caps before having new tyres and valves fitted.

Good news! There is extensive ongoing research in progress with all the main tyre manufacturers to produce a commercially viable and safe non pneumatic tyre, the most promising from Goodyear who announced in December 2013 they have come up with a self inflating tyre system! You can log on to http://www.designboom.com/technology/goodyear-amt-self-inflatable-tire-system to learn more……

That does look interesting. We don’t know how well off we are, however: my grandad had to take the horse to the blacksmith every few weeks and the cart to the wheelwright from time to time. Now we just inject some air in the tyres and off we go again.

My way of dealing with this problem is to tap my foot on the brakes to flash the brake lights without slowing down, or to flash the rear fog lights. I have found this very effective in helping drivers to realise that they are too close behind. For obvious reasons I am not recommending this unauthorised use of lights.

It used to be a requirement to carry spare bulbs when driving in France. In an earlier Conversation we were told that this has been dropped, presumably because it’s not much use having spare bulbs if it is difficult to fit them. Commonsense dictates that it should be possible to replace a bulb that is a legal requirement without use of tools.

We should have acted promptly when manufacturers started to produce cars with bulbs that were difficult to replace. There is much less chance of success when the problem has existed for a couple of decades.

It will not be long until most filament bulbs on cars are replaced by LED lamps, which should last the life of the vehicle.

A single light source and fibre optic cabling have been possible for years, I bought an illuminated Christmas tree in 2004 that worked on that principle. But as Wavechange often says, we don’t want cars with skeins of LED’s wandering about all over the bonnet like the Blackpool illuminations. I think it’s best if lights are round, in standardised positions so far as practicable, and limited in number. Misuse of the fog lamps is another thing that annoys me but that’s a whole new educational challenge.

Some years ago, a friend had a Fiat with a single bulb and fibre optics instead of lots of little bulbs behind the dashboard. Unfortunately, the bulb failed and it was an expensive job to dismantle the dashboard to replace it. Clever ideas can have big failings when something is overlooked. 🙁

Hopefully modern dashboards have fibre optics or everlasting LEDs.