Interesting…it was my mechanic who told me that. Any idea what his motivation could have been?
How the hell does anyone quantify what “excessive” means?
Tires are going to wear out no matter what you do with them, that’s why we replace them every handful of years. No one complains that acceleration or turning generates “excessive wear” even though those things happen dozens of times a day and people habitually jam on the gas or blaze around bends above posted limits. There’s no way any of that is less damaging than spinning your wheel around in a stopped car.
There is an argument for straining a power steering system when a car is stopped, but my theory would be that this is only an issue for old or poorly maintained vehicles.
The only person I know of who failed her U.S. driving test was the younger sister of a friend: she had the misfortune of turning 16 right after the megadump of snow in the Chicago area in January of 1979. As you probably know, it is crucial to get one’s license on one’s 16th birthday or as close to it as humanly possible. So, off she went. The roads were slick and still not properly cleared…she swerved a bit and ended up on top of a major snowbank.
So apparently it IS possible to fail the driving test in the U.S. Takes some doing, though.
US drivers license tests are done at the state level, and vary wildly by state. I had some rich neighbors growing up and the wife was absolutely terrified of parallel parking, so she flew down to Texas to take her test and then flew back to West Virginia to convert her new Texas license to a WV license. In general the more densely populated a state is, the more rigorous its driving test is, although that is only a rule of thumb, there are exceptions everywhere.
The WV test had a written part on computer when I took it in the early 90s. IIRC there were 40 questions and you had to get a 90% or better to pass. Then there was a driving part where you had to go around a course they had built with a 4 way stop, parallel parking, angle parking, and a reverse around a curb bit. The road was also deliberately built narrow and touching any of the lines while driving was an instant failure. I remember the parallel parking part being difficult because you couldn’t see where the spot was–it was just lines on the ground, however you were allowed to touch the lines up to three times in the parallel parking test without instantly failing, unless you hit the curb line.
I don’t think it was particularly rigorous as far as driving tests go, but it was quite a bit tougher than what some other states have apparently. I had taken a driving class that taught us how to do all of that so it was basically just a final exam. I hear that most European countries have much more stringent driving exams for example.
To chip in the EU experience, here in Slovenia before you take the any of the driving parts you have to do a 10 hour first-aid course (which I think is a handy thing for most of the country’s population to go through). Then it a 20 hour set of classes on theory with an exam at the end with the same 90% or better to pass, followed by at least 25 hours of driving time on roads with a licensed instructor and then the final exam with your instructor and a seperate official that does the actual grading. The exam lasts about 45 minutes and it goes from parking lots to highways and they don’t really let you slide by on anything. Apparently parallel parking has been excluded for the past couple of years, though you still need to reverse park, as well as drive a couple dozen of yards in reverse. Because of all the hours you need to put in and other various administritive fees you’re probably out about 800€ when you first take the driving exam. Two or three attempts at the on it are not uncommon, with another 80€ going per attempt.
Within the first two years while you have your beginners license you are required to take an extra safe-driving course, where you spend a day on a track with sprinklers learning about aquaplaning/understeer/oversteer and spinning your car around repeatedly.
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I was referring to the video embedded in the comment I was replying to. You lay down a lot of rubber doing 180s (and I was being somewhat facetious as well, duh).
Ouch, I don’t know where I would have come up with $1,100 when I was a teenager. IIRC my paycheck back then was ~$450 every two weeks and most of that had to go into insurance (even with my parents helping out on this) because I was a teenage boy and thus guaranteed to maim or kill someone and destroy my car in the first couple of years according to the insurance company.
Ironically the girls rates were much lower, and weirdly it was always the girls at school wrecking their cars, not the boys.
I also think that the worry about “you’ll ruin your tires if you turn the wheel while not moving” is utterly overblown. Even some kind of freakjob that lives in the city but drives everywhere and always parallel parks is going to parallel park how many times per year? It should be possible to measure the amount of damage to the tire by cleaning it off, making a full stop to stop turn while parked, and then collecting and measuring the amount of rubber dust you find on the road and tire. I wonder if this is a leftover tip from back in the days when tires were crappy?
Like so many things here, the rules are state by state. Connecticut doesn’t make you parallel park. New York technically doesn’t require lane changes (though some DMV test courses include them and you lose points if you do it wrong). In NY, at least, the official procedure for parallel parking does include the “complete stop” and “turn fully” bits, FWIW.
My older sister forgot how to parallel park after seven years living in Manhattan, and my (now ex) girlfriend got nervous practicing the day of her road test. I was able to teach each over the phone, and they were fine. It really isn’t hard if you can actually think through the geometry.
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Recent enough? You’d have to go back a very long way indeed to find a car that didn’t have some form of lock stop, like a century or more, to the days when they were really trying to figure out what exactly a car should be. Even then, only the cheapest cycle-cars would have been without such a basic engineering requirement.
Note that in the absence of lock-stops, it would be possible to (a) jam the steering in the full lock position* and/or (b) cause the wheels to foul the vehicle’s structure, so their inclusion is a no-brainer to even the most parsimonious of engineers.
Note also that they might be internal to the steering box, or be a raised pads on the suspension forgings and thus not very apparent to a casual inspection.
*Depending on the design of the steering box.
No idea. Unless there’s some known weakness in the particular vehicle you have, see dacree’s post above, though I should have thought you’d have to do an awful lot of full-lock manoeuvring to make any difference.
Totally agree with you that most of the time you can keep moving while winding on lock (though I have to admit, when I’m trying to squeeze lorries (trucks) into tight spaces, I screw the wheels round when the thing’s stationary - not something you could do in the days before PAS. Mind you, I’m not paying for the tyres).
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Interestingly, the author of this advice, Yishan Wong, is the CEO of Reddit. Which just goes to show you what a weird place Quora is.
I agree: don’t turn the wheels while stopped. You can spin the steering wheel very easily while is slowly moving in reverse.
Parallel parking isn’t difficult - I learned how in Montreal, where there’s a maximum allowed distance (30cm?) from the curb, and there’s all that snow…
The first time you do it, just relax, and listen to the instructor, and remember that most of the time, you can just release the brake pedal, and not use the gas pedal. Later on, as you get the hang of it, you can go for the really tight places.
/Also: couldn’t Mr. Wong’s instructions have been stretched out to, say, 39 steps? Then make a movie out of it?
//My driver’s ed story: First time ever parallel parking, listened to instuctor, did it. Instructor said: “OK, you don’t need any more training, you know how to do it.”
You can certainly say that modern cars are built with stops or snubbers to limit the steering travel safely and if nothing has been modified from stock they will prevent you from destroying the car by turning too far, but I wouldn’t try to go any further than that, personally.
Allow me to introduce you to the 1967 Pontiac Catalina Station Wagon, “Midnight blue”, with 400 cubic inch engine and single-throat carburetor. Very popular among proprietors of funeral homes. I drove it for thousands of miles, at between 8 and 12 miles per gallon, and if you turned the wheel too far the inside of one tire ground against the inside of the wheel well, and the inside of the other tire rubbed against the suspension.
This was because it was built for American sized tires, which were no longer made after about 1970. No tire made in the new sizes (which are still in use today) will fit that car without rubbing. You quickly learned not to turn too far, because it was very loud and disconcerting and obviously bad for the car. When I was a teenager this was a common thing to have to deal with.
You can’t blame the engineers for failing to anticipate the lack of availability of the tires millions of cars were designed for. But you also can’t say that it’s impossible to harm your car by turning too far, because that’s not true if it’s impossible to obtain the right size tires. And you certainly don’t have to go back a century to see this problem.
varies state to state, but the idea is to put as many people behind the wheel at the earliest age because the oil must FLOW! FREEDOOOOOOOMMMMM!
so as you can imagine, the tests are easy; we sell a lot of oil, the drivers suck, and we sell a lot of insurance, too.
Possibly the issue is anisotropic wear. I think that turning the wheel while the car is stationary might give you a “flat spot” on the tyres where they met the ground, as only that bit wears. Fast acceleration wears the tyre evenly, as does hard braking as long as the wheels don’t lock up, so the tyre remains circular.
Obviously, non-circular tyres aren’t great for handling or ride quality. I’ve heard of people ruining a set of tyres with flat spots by locking up the wheels under the wrong conditions.
Fair enough, I write from a UK perspective; in the era you mention there was a change from cross-ply to radial tyres but in most cases there was a direct equivalent in overall dimensions (though sometimes the ride was considerably harsher and noisier).
In many cases older vehicles had adjustable lock stops, probably to deal with looser production tolerances, so you could use them to deal with any clearance problems (though I never had to).
I remember that American cars often had rather strange looking tyres (from a European point of view), and used a construction called bias belting which seemed to be part way between cross-ply and radial.
Nope: just click in the whitespace around the login box… This works for a large number of sites with these annoying login splash screens.
Ah, so that explains IL drivers – they give the licenses away… 
Up in the boonies of northern WI, the local DMV failed what seemed like over 90% of the first time drivers (I think mostly to just make a point – also, Mr Williams might have just been a jerk).
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I’ve had a couple of cars near that vintage as well, with relatively primitive hydraulic power-assist systems which didn’t take too well to being spun lock-to-lock too terribly fast. I’ve been through more pressure hoses and control-valve seals than I care to remember.
Another issue is holding the steering against the lock for too long. You can hear the groaning caused by the effort of the pump pushing against a gear that has reached the end of its travel. Spending too much time pushing up against the steering lock can certainly cause premature wear and/or failure of pump seals.
Fuuuck. You still only do one maneuver on your test here, but they’ll decide which one. reverse round a corner, bay park in reverse, or parallel park (oh, or emergency stop, if you’re lucky & the roads are dry). And a 45-minute drive through whatever is the most fiendish bit of road near the test centre. Best hope is to get stuck in a traffic jam for as long as possible.
