That’s gotta be in the top 5 most painful things I’ve ever watched.
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How about this one?
The portrait video is worse than any parking, though.
I got my first license in New York, where the rules and test regimen are presumably dictated by New York City, but I was on the other end of the state. The test felt suitably difficult, and always includes parallel parking.
I took the test in October or so (my birthday is in September), and in those days there was fairly often snow in October, and there was a fair amount of snow. At the parallel parking moment of the test, I thought I had run over the curb, because the rear right wheel noisily went up on something - so I asked the test giver if I should try again, but it turned out to be a pile of ice and they said it was fine and to get going. Then they took points off for not stopping completely at the stop sign right after that, the only thing I lost points for.
When I moved to California, I had to take just the written test to get a California license. Driving there did not help my habit of rolling through stop signs (“California Roll”), though I heard they’re tough about that on the test there.
I do know many, many people in both NY and CA who failed the driving test, some multiple times (I believe the CA test is similar to the NY one). And I’ve driven in vehicles with people who I really can’t believe passed the test. Or, at least, the test must have required way more concentration and effort than they’re normally willing to expend, I guess. And most people I know have trouble parallel parking… as do I, but only if I’m not concentrating.
So - the whole point of my comment is, the guy’s right, it’s really not difficult. But it’s difficult to get in the mindframe required to do it - and since most people don’t even get in the right mindframe to be driving at all, it’s no surprise most people can’t do it.
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Ontario has graduated licensing. You do a written test at 16 for a permit that only allows driving with someone who has had their full license for 5 years. Then you wait 8-12 months (8 if you take driver’s education, 12 if not) and can take a 15 minute test. Passing that allows you to drive by yourself with the only restrictions being a zero blood alcohol level and every passenger must have a seatbelt (I think it’s technically legal to ride in the back of a pickup truck). Then you have to wait another 12 months before you can take a 45 minute test for your full license.
When I booked my tests, there was a long backlog. I had to book each one months in advance. One of them ended up being just after a major snowstorm. I suspect that actually worked in my favour since the flow of traffic was actually below the speed limit. One of the gotchas they could use is you were supposed to both follow the flow of traffic and stay below the speed limit. On most days, the flow of traffic is 5-10 km/h over the speed limit. Exceed that and it’s an automatic failure, don’t and they ding you for not keeping up.
Thanks. I didn’t know that. I went back to the site to try it and this time there was no popup.
Yes, and some, e.g. 60s Jaguars, were quite capable of blowing the PAS seals without any help from the driver - you usually left some nice red patches of fluid on the road after any sort of parking, parallel or otherwise (to go with the patches of engine oil from the cam covers and timing case, and the gear oil from the leaking diff seals).
I don’t really see that holding the steering against the stops for short periods should do too much harm - the noise is just from the pressure refief valve. Though I dare say if you held it for minutes at a time the fluid would overheat.
Don’t forget: in most places in the US, it’s impossible to go to school, work, the grocery store, etc. without a car. A 16-year-old with a driver’s license means the parent doesn’t have to deal with getting them to school, team practice, and friends’ houses anymore.
The fact that you know the name of the local DMV tester says it all!
Ah, Jaguars. My Series III XJ6 certainly left a rainbow of various drippings on the driveway until I did the Chevy conversion and replaced the radiator.
My experiences with older Fords is what led me to handle the power steering with relative care. Rapid stop-to-stop steering in my 1970 Cougar ripped the hydraulic ram bracket right off the frame.
Maybe faster than you think. KRC had this to say about their power steering pumps:
“The pressure relief valve inside the pump is designed in such a manner as to give the steering system protection by sacrificing the relief valve, instead of blowing up the pump and/or seals throughout your steering system. If you put your steering system in a bind or at full lock, the pressure will increase until the resistance is removed or reaches the preset 1450 psi pressure relief. When the pump reaches pressure relief it does not send the fluid back to the tank, it recirculates the fluid inside the pump and in less than one minute the fluid will overheat and can cause permanent damage to the pump.”
Now, granted their pumps are made for racing rather than everyday use, but the same thing happened to me at a McDonald’s drive-through, to a stock Ford pump.
But you’re right that it’s not something to worry too much about. Newer cars are engineered to be relatively idiotproof when it comes to driver behavior. You can’t easily get your new Chevy truck stuck in two forward gears simultaneously, like you could in 1965. You can’t get your car out of Park without your foot on the brake anymore, nor can you start the car while it’s in gear. And leaning on the power steering lock these days probably does cause much more noise than harm anymore.
Sometimes all that babysitting can backfire. I remember when I was a kid we bought a new 1974 Renault 12 station wagon. It had black vinyl upholstery, no power steering, and the engine put out a whopping 65 horsepower, but the most irritating feature of the car was the seatbelt interlock system. Like all 1974-model year cars sold in the states, by law it had this system whereby you couldn’t even start the car without buckling your seatbelt. You couldn’t even just keep the belts latched and sit on top of them; you had to get in, sit down, buckle up, and then start the car.
Pretty sensible behavior, that, but in 1974 everyone was pissed about such regulatory overreach. At the time, there was no federal law (and I don’t think there were any state laws; not in California at any rate) requiring you to wear a seat belt. But suddenly your car was requiring it, which seemed… rather impertinent at best. So the regulation soon went away, and everyone took their cars to the dealer to get the interlock system disabled.
And I had a couple of late-70s Honda Accords when I was a teenager. Honda had designed the doorlocks so you couldn’t lock them while the doors were open, in order to prevent locking your keys in the car. See, in other cars, you could get out, whack the inside door lock button with the palm of your hand out of habit, close the door, and then belatedly realize you left the keys in the ignition. To combat this, some automakers got clever. If you locked the door and then closed it, the door lock would automatically pop up, requiring you to lock the door only with the key. But then, in the interest of convenience (since locking with the key is a minor hassle), people figured out that they could just hold up the exterior door handle while they closed the door, thus preventing the lock button from popping up, thus freeing them to keep the keys in their pocket (or safely dangling from the ignition… oops!).
So Honda did it one better. You couldn’t actually slide the door lock button at all while the door was open. That way, you’d have to lock the door with your key and you’d never lock your keys in your car. But we clever Honda owners figured out that if you held open the inside door handle with your index and middle fingers, you could then slide the door lock button with your ring finger, then release the inside door handle and close the door, and voila! Keys successfully locked in the car. Again. Oops.
My brother in law thus managed to lock his keys in his Honda twice that way, once while it was still running. Boy, did he feel stupid.
So anyway, no matter what the automakers do to save us from ourselves, we’ll find a way around it so we can go to hell in our own way.
The End.
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Just remembered – his name was Christensen (not Williams - Williams was a prof whose daughter was in my grade)… Christensen’s daughter was in my grade and his son was a year ahead.
Arf. An old Jag.
I don’t know anyone who has a good word for those. Sounds like they all fell apart as you looked at them. Still, they looked pretty.
Yep, I’ve actually driven on all three kinds! But I haven’t owned a car with anything but steel-belted radials since I was old enough to (legally) drive on the street.
The tire industry’s supposedly going to change everything again soon, to introduce truly uniform grading. I hope they get rid of the insane SAE/Metric/alpha system used now and just go all metric, with real values instead of codes and percentages. But they’ve been saying “real soon now” for years and I see no real progress.
There are many funny moments in Mad Men when Sterling Cooper Draper Pryce landed Jaguar as an account. One character, in a fit of existential and professional despair, decides to kill himself, so he climbs into the brand-new E-Type that his wife purchased (in the mistaken belief that they could afford it), runs a hose from the exhaust in through the front window, and turns the key.
And the damned thing won’t start.
My Jag wasn’t even from the good years. it was a 1987, one of the very last of the Series III XJs, with the fancy Vanden Plas package and everything. $35,550 in 1987 dollars, and I got it for free from the original owner. He’d sunk $5k in repairs over the last several years, and it was running on five cylinders and wouldn’t shift out of first gear until the tranny had warmed up for ten minutes.
Still, the best free car I ever had. And installing the engine and transmission from a 1993 Chevy Caprice gave it new life. Gorgeous… and it runs!
I’d buy another old Jag in a heartbeat, but I’d always want to do the Chevy conversion. I like my cars to run.
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They used to say Jags were built up to an engineering standard and down to a (remarkably low) price, hence their tendency to self-destruct as soon as they left the factory.
That said I had a Mark 10 for several years and it never actually failed to complete a journey - all sorts of things would go wrong but it never actually stopped (even when you put your foot on the brake…).
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On Long Island, there was one particular testing site with a much higher than average failure rate, simply because it involved a left turn at a weird intersection and lots of people ended up in a lane facing the wrong way. (No, I did not test there)
Exactly, great point. Americans clamor for cars post WW2, infrastructure follows, suburbanization follows. add in a little hyperactive media “pedos and kidnapperz R ererwhere!” FUD and even walkable distances are forbidden. Suddenly “All I am is a chauffer for my kids.” The “solution,” of course, is make them drive themselves :\
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I love how so many people in this thread are advocating only turning the wheel while in motion. Didn’t really work out too well for this driver, did it? [@daneel, too]
I think that person’s problem was more about not turning the wheel enough when they did turn it, coupled with no idea what they were trying to do - although oddly, they did seem good at judging distances.
My youngest sister failed twice. Because the … inspector(?) hated her. She wised up and went to a different office for the third test and passed with flying colors. To those who are wondering, she’s in a three-way tie for lowest number of accidents in the family (my mom and I are the other members of the tie).
My state is one of the ones that doesn’t require parallel parking on the test. I guess before I move coasts, I’ll have to bone up on it. I’ve literally never parallel parked. Honestly, I’d rather just never drive again (regardless of the contents of the test) but where I live and where I’m planning to live, public transit isn’t up to snuff.
I failed my driving test in the U.S…
The speedometer in the borrowed cruiser didn’t work, which the tester only realized at the last minute, after the test drive was practically over. Damn.
I knew very few people that owned legal, insured, safety inspected cars I could have borrowed. County Police at the time estimated that about 60% of the vehicles in the county were legal. Didn’t seem like it. I guess if they included the tourist’s rental cars and taxis.
I retook the driving test the required week later in a rusty behemoth of a limo, much older than myself, slightly bigger than a full-size truck.
This second test was literally around the block and took about five minutes.
I was gonna do it, but was waivered from having to parallel park that ship.
Because I had to retake the test, my entire cost of attaining a drivers license ran up to the sum of 17 dollars.
Interestingly, insurance cards made at the Kinko’s copy shop even worked in court to avoid the mandatory thousand dollar fine.
Or so I’ve heard.
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