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Electric car thread


spenaroo

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Louis Strange wrote about responsibility after WW1:

 

Many of the things I learnt will apply in the next war, for in some few thousand respects the science of navigating the air is as immutable as that of navigating the sea. As pilot of a machine you are responsible for that machine all the time, and it is always your fault if you crash it in a forced landing occasioned by any failure, structural or otherwise, of the machine or its engine. It is your fault if in thick weather you hit the top of any hill that has its correct height shown on your map, for the worst offence you can commit is to lose your way across country. Therefore until altimeters are more reliable, always give them a good margin on the right side, and never fly above clouds without two of them on your machine, in addition to making sure that you know the exact height above sea level of the aerodrome from which you take off. In war it is entirely your own fault if you run out of petrol when coming home against a head wind after a four or five hours’ reconnaissance, or if you fail to come down on the right spot after a couple of hours cloud flying. It is your own fault if enemy aircraft spot you first, and it is likewise your own fault if after spotting a hostile machine you get shot up by another formation streaking down from out of the sun just when you have your opposite number nicely sighted. It is, furthermore, your fault if you allow your Squadron to drift too far down wind in a dogfight and leave its machines with no margin of petrol for emergencies when they have to fight their way home again. It is your fault if you have nowhere to make a landing when the engine fails just after you have taken off; in the event of a forced landing your machine is a glider that should take you down safely on any possible landing place. It is your fault—well, it is a golden rule to assume that whatever goes wrong, is your fault. You may save yourself a lot of trouble if you act accordingly.

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I train SES drivers for 4WD courses and what we call DOV (Drive Operational Vehicles). It is all about thinking ahead and at the end of the 2 day DOV course each participant must drive the vehicle around a course they have never driven before in light and heavy traffic and must provide a verbal commentary of what they see ahead and what they plan to do and what they are actually doing. Some people do this easily but others do struggle to keep their mind on driving while looking and thinking ahead.

 

Some fail this test, well we call it "Not yet Competent" and they need to do the course again and some of those do not even have a second go. Watch out for drivers like that.

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How can it be the pilot's fault if a motor self destructs while being operated according to  the Book or something breaks because a previous "pilot" had overstressed it? Louis Strange  is a bit  over reaching there. .  The PIC is where the buck stops for all things a human is capable of and trained for. Plenty of pilot's could do with better training.  They can't be expected to know  what they have no knowledge of. Nev

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Regarding following distance in urban traffic. Determining the distance between two objects is difficult when one of your reference points is not clearly visible. That's the situation you find when you are trying to determine a distance from the driver's seat. I know that, with experience, you develop the ability to get a pretty good and functional estimate, but as people who have developed this ability, we must find some technique to develop it in student drivers.

 

What is a "car length"? I'd say it's about as long as a piece of string. I posted earlier a figure of approximately 5 metres for the average length of a passenger vehicle in Australia. But how many are able to determine a length of 5 metres (or 5-1/2 yards) on the move, let alone 10 metres (11 yards) unless your a are cricketer who bowls.

 

I have found a way to establish a practical space between my vehicle and the one in front. Nowadays close on every passenger vehicle has a left side external mirror. The way they are mounted results in a gap between the body of the mirror and the side of the vehicle. If you pull back until you can see that gap from your driving position, you'll find that you are about that magical distance. 

 

At 60 kph, you are travelling at 16.6 m/s. Therefore a 2-second gap give you a space of about 30 metres. At 80 kph, the numbers are 22 m/s and about 45 metres.

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6 minutes ago, facthunter said:

How can it be the pilot's fault if a motor self destructs while being operated

I think what the author was suggesting was that no matter how the aircraft got bent, the accident investigation will return a finding of "Pilot Error". I think he was expressing the idea of "guilty until proven innocent" - bemoaning the hopelessness of the pilot when each and every frame of the video is scrutinised by second-guessers.

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 Maybe. Greece behaves like that. The crew go to Jail. I've been on many Investigations supporting pilots in a past life. When it's done properly, the term "Pilot Error" is not used. There's ALWAYS A reason why the pilot did what He/She did and finding that out makes it possible to change things to avoid a repetition. of something similar. 

 OME how you quoted me makes  it look stupid. It needs the entire sentence for context. Nev

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3 hours ago, facthunter said:

OME how you quoted me makes  it look stupid. It needs the entire sentence for context.

I just did that so that to direct reader to your post. A bit of "forum shortcutting". If you read what I wrote, I was answering the core of your question without picking out your example of the result of someone else's actions  "or something breaks because a previous "pilot" had overstressed it".

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Did you read each word of the post? Were you able to comprehend the idea expressed by the words used in the post? 

 

In future I think I'll just draw down the quotation I want and replace all the words with ................ if I want the original poster to know that I am responding to their post. That method removes the influence of the original post from my post.

 

The point I was trying to make was that no matter that a failure was completely not due to the actions of the pilot, the pilot is still going to be blamed.

 

Yesterday it appears that either the alternator or the battery in my car failed after 200,000 kms as I was cruising at a constant speed on a level road. Are you going to shoot home the blame for that to me? I suppose you could if you knew that had experienced a minor failure with the battery a couple of months ago, but that it had been operating correctly ever since. Should I have replaced a battery that is three years old? What information can I find to determine a use by date for a battery?

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Spacey, alternators never need servicing. The carbon brushes never need replacing in the life of the alternator, and the diodes can be covered in crap, and still work O.K.

 

Alternators die because bearings fail because they hold very little grease - or the electronic components fail due to internal faults.

 

In just about all the alternators I've replaced in recent years, it was usually the electronic voltage regulator that failed.

 

Even then, it's rarely worth replacing an AVR, the new alternators are so cheap, no-one even bothers fixing them, just like starter motors of today.

 

Edited by onetrack
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How can I make it crystal clear to you that I only copied a few words so that a notification would come up beside that little bell on your screen to tell you that there was something in that thread that you might care to see. Thereafter you plucked a few words from the quote the PCM had posted and went on about engine operation. It is clear that you didn't see the quote for what it was - a litany of things that can possibly go wrong and because the pilot is guilty until proven innocent, everything is the pilot's fault.

21 hours ago, facthunter said:

A motor is not likely to self destruct IF it's not being operated and "according to the Book" was a critical element.

That is utterly correct. "Not Likely" = a possibility but one with a low probability. Still, the pilot will initially cop the blame.

 

As for my choice of "forensic", the implication is of an intense, detailed examination. Perhaps you would prefer, "picking oakum" to describe the task?

 

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