Safe Speed Forums

Most "racing car" wheels can stand a bit of rufty-tufty. I know this considering some of the roads I have driven on with low (ish) profile tyres, and I have not buckled my wheels. It is the craters of which you speak which will are more likely to damage lower profile wheels. Have you ever driven though wallsal or sheffield?

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Oct 11 Birmingham Half Marathon. I am running for the British Heart Foundation.
http://www.justgiving.com/Rob-Taylor

I can certainly attest to reuse/repair philosophy. However, I struggle with this on cars thanks principally to the fast advances in engineering.

My boiler? A Wilson Wallflame 1965 (I think) vintage. Spares are still available (though getting in short supply!).

My preferred radio? A Roberts portable. Wooden case.

Cars? No longer do I drive an Austin 2200.

I see what you are saying, and I partly agree. But regardless of whether cars may or may not be damaged, surely we need a reasonable standard of road to at least give a comftable ride? It's not just car drivers that benefit, bus passengers, cyclists, motorcyclists etc all benefit.



Damn, I thought I was doing well with a Glow Worm boiler from c1975. I needed to replace a boiler in one of my other houses and the installer just laughed when I asked if this was likely to last 33 years! He said it would be lucky to last 10. Progress?

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In a former life I was Capri2.8

I think it's a sign that our hard-earned (over)taxes are being squandered on the wrong things.

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Only when ideology, prejudice and dogma are set aside does the truth emerge - Kepler

Has anyone tried weighing a typical "light" alloy wheel off a road car? My feeling is that you need a pretty darned big wheel before you see any significant reduction in weight compared to a steel one! Proper "racing cars" (and I've a feeling VC isn't refering to "real" racing cars) have a great deal of magnesium in the alloy and they really can be very light indeed. The alloys fitted to most road cars, however, are surprisingly heavy. In any case, because the alloy wheels generally have a larger diameter and wider section tyres than the lower-spec version of the same car with steel wheels, there is almost no appreciable weight saving.

I agree that lower profile tyres improve handling, but I am not sure that it's fair to say "but is it worth it round town?". The thing is, I don't know anyone who keeps a set of wheels & tyres for pootling round town and a different set for motorway work! People use the same set for everything and therfore, although we don't, of course, "need" the extra handling precision at low speeds round town, we use it at (surprisingly modest) speeds outside town - even without realising it. We need to remember that on modern cars with electronic stability control and other whistles and bells, the mass of the wheel and tyre, and it's moment of inertia (not to mention the tyre characteristics) will have been taken into account in the setting up of the car. If anyone has access to an old Marina or Hillman Hunter or Mk. II Cortina or... whatever of that golden era when cars were simple and cheap to fix, it is well worth trying to drive one for a day the same way as we drive a modern car just to remind ourselves how far we've come!

Finally, lots of people who (in my view) don't really "need" their "fatty" 4x4s tend to cite poor road quality and the proliferation of speed humps as two of the main reasons why they chose a 4x4! I'm sure if the roads got any worse, they'd be off looking for something with Caterpillar tracks!

Real driving, in a real vehicle! Bliss!

Get another one - you know you want to!

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Save a cow - eat a vegetarian

Well the 16" Momo alloys that were bent by the badly filled in roadworks in London on my GFs car were not exactly light. The 17" Rotas that replaced them weigh much less by my estimation (which is to say I can pick them up without hurting my back)

Fortunately the roads where we live now are much better maintained than the ones in London, so hopefully they'll be fine.

There are other things to consider about larger wheels with low profile tyres. They allow you to fit much bigger brakes and to cool them more effectively that you can do under steel wheels. Anything that reduces brake fade and reduces the chance of a wheel locking up is a good thing for safety in my book (yeah, I know about ABS, but it's still better to not have them lock in the first place)

Absolutely agree with the last bit. That's why drum brakes are such a lousy idea - initial "grab" and then poor heat dissipation.

I'm not sure that poor ventilation on steel wheels is "because" they are steel. It should be possible to make steel wheels with bigger holes in them but I think nobody bothers because they know they'll be covered up with wheel trims anyway. Similarly, I don't think there is anything (other than "fashion") stopping anyone from making an 18" steel wheel to put bigger brakes in!

On thing that does worry me somewhat is that there doesn't appear to be a decent legally binding European standard for aftermarket wheels. When you think how safety critical they are, that strikes me as odd. I had a feeling there was a draft EC Directive on it but I don't know what happened to it. Certainly some of the "big boots" I see on Maxxed-out chavmobiles strike me as not having enough metal in them to do a decent job for a decent length of time but I guess it's important to have as little metal there as possible to show off one's 10" red-enamelled brake drums to best effect!

You know, I was really very fond of it! A LWB ex-military with a canvas top. Mind you, if I ever did it again, I'd give the 2 1/4 petrol engine a miss, I reckon!

And I have to say that if it's cheap, durable, easy-to-fix, unpretentious motoring that VC is after, other than the thirst, it really was the cheapest, simplest, most durable vehicle I've ever owned. I even sold it at a profit when we got rid of the boat!

Better still, as 4x4s go, they're very narrow!

(Still wouldn't want to drive one for more than 20 miles at a stretch though)!

My view on "advances in engineering" is that they have barely maintained some of the most important characteristics, in particular robustness/ reliability. The electronics (and in particular, the computer) has been utilized in a parallel way that makes it an unnecessary source of single point failures. All the other advances mean little, if the "computer says no"! From what I have heard, I'm starting to think that wheels are becoming too hi-tech as well.

Well, the overall design is different. The metal is generally thinner and there is more of it. I'm guessing they get their strength at least partially from their shape, though honestly I have no idea.

On a related note, is it possible to get aftermarket steel wheels anywhere? I'd like to go to a full size spare in my Legacy, but don't really want to shell out for a 17" alloy that's only going to get banged up and scuffed about in the boot.

I've seen this before, and am truly struggling to reconcile it with my own perception at a top level. when I first started doing long journeys back in the early seventies, it was almost impossible to complete a journey without at least one or two stranded motorists with the bonnet up and either a puzzled look or a toolbox out and greasy arms with rolled-up sleeves of either an enthusiastic indivdual or one of the (then two) "fourth emergency services". Now it is a real event to see a conk-out despite the progressive increase in volume of traffic. This has happened progressively not overnight.

Whilst it (parallel computer etc) might be true for catastrophic failure of the ECU (eg processor failure or similar), there are so many dual redundant features in both hardware, software or both that a let-down failure is almost unheard of. If an engine sensor fails, the ECU will recognise it and go into "get you home" mode, where it sets the mixture to a slightly rich but workable state and timing to approx correct (or slightly retarded to be on the safe side of damage). If a brake pipe fractures or gets yanked off, the dual ciurcuit arrangement ensures you still get braking to both front wheels, and the clever old ABS makes sure you don't slew around in a circle until you've got it to the garage. If the automatic gearbox fluid pressure drops for whatever reason, rather than burn out the clutchpack, it selects a "get you home" mode, diverts all available pressure to the default (usually third) gear, and turns engine power down where necessary. Seat belt pre-tensioners... air bags.. I could go on.

Granted I believe that secondary safety has interfered with primary safety (eg thick A pillars), but on the whole I'd far sooner have a more modern car for all the reasons above and more.

Those things remind me of the space shuttle. Every glitch gets another round of high-tech engineering, with patches piled on patches until the time comes when the whole lot is too complex to keep going. Eventually, you have to simplify the concept to the bare bones, because simplicity is elegance. The problem is that there’s no money in simple elegance. For some reason, probably related to marketing, people prefer baroque complexity to simple elegance, in almost every area. It’ll be the end of us.

With respect to breakdowns – yes, you no longer see oily handed fellows under the bonnet at the roadside. But you see hundreds of AA and RAC vans zooming around instead. Now we have to pay someone to do the things that we could have done ourselves 30 years ago. We aren’t any more useless than we were, but the cars are many times less mendable by the average Joe, which basically removes about half the fun of motoring. Have you ever laid in the snow and fixed your own brakes? Now that’s what I call motoring!

Oh I don't know about that BW, I suggest that people today are not as practically skilled as they used to be. Washing machines for example are the simplest devices on the planet to fix but an ex work colleague of mine now earns his money fixing piffling faults (such as changing motor brushes) on machines owned by people to whom they are as complex as Space Shuttles!

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Political Correctness is a doctrine, fostered by a delusional, illogical, liberal minority and rabidly promoted by an unscrupulous mainstream media, which holds forth the proposition that it is entirely possible to pick up a turd by the clean end.

The last one I had was a Candy. I could fix it, it had a mechanical controller. I mended it about 5 times times over an 8 year period, usually small things (broken switches, wire fell off etc.). Saved a bundle. Your chum would have made nothing from me! Fixed my brothers hot point, too.

Now I've got a Bosch, with a computer. When it goes wrong, I'll have to dump it in a landfill and buy a new one. We are moving backwards, RigPig, at a good rate of knots.

While everyone is writing about alloy wheels with low profile tyres are the reason the poor roads are causing more damage what about the dangers of the poor roads to cycles and motorcycles.
If the roads are in such a poor state to damage a car wheel alloy or not they must be in such a state they are dangrous to the other road users.
The roads are now in such a state due to lack of investment they cant afford to repair them, so what happend to all they money they should have spent on the roads?
They collect enough from the motorist in one tax or another.

Warranty Direct claim that, on Jeeps in the UK, the suspension breaks five times more frequently than on Jeeps in North America.

Yet, at the same time, our roads are way up there, while America has "probably the poorest roads of any civilized nation" so I am told. (Although Canada is even worse, in my recollection, after along time there.)

If these cars get wrecked on our roads, they shouldn't last 10 minutes in Canada, yet they do. So either they are selling lemons to us here in the UK (which is quite possible), or we don’t drive them well. All this talk of potholes and road bumps and high tax is misleading us. We are wrecking our own cars, by the looks of things.

I think the type of road damage has something to do with it "poorest roads" covers a whole range of faults. In the USA this likely includes insufficient capacity or congestion and not to mention dirt tracks, but both of these are going to be a lot kinder to a jeep's suspension than a pot hole from a badly filled in roadworks because the latter imparts a sudden sharp shock and typically involves a 90 degree angle, wheras a subsided road or a dirt/gravel track will still be somewhat smooth in comparison. There will be more shocks in total but the forces involved are much less, and well within what the suspension is able to cope with.

True, but how many of those vans are on their way to help someone who's driving an ancient banger which would be easily repairable by someone with a bit of basic under-the-bonnet knowledge, and how many are on their way to rescue someone with one of your over-specified technomobiles which is more likely to require a laptop than a spanner to get it moving again? In my experience, most of the vans I see on the hard shoulder are attending older vehicles, or commercial vehicles where the driver probably needs an extra pair of hands to help out even if they know how to do the repair themselves.

In the 4-n-a-bit years I've run my own cars as opposed to driving parents/fleet/hire vehicles, I've had to call out the cavalry twice. Once for a battery which had mysteriously flattened itself overnight to the point where, although it could still power all the electronics, lights etc., it didn't have enough kick to get the starter motor going. Unfortunately we didn't, at that time, have a battery booster at home, it was too early in the morning to ask a neighbour for a jump-start, and push-starting an automatic is something of a non-starter... Second time was when the drive belt tensioner disintegrated on the M25, shredding the drive belt and putting the power steering pump, alternator, aircon and - critically - coolant pump all out of operation.

Neither of those problems would have been avoided had the cars in question been pared down to the basics - flat batteries and broken drive belts have been staples of the car repair business since the year dot (or at least the mid 70's which is where my car-related memories begin). And as Roger points out, the technological additions we now have sitting on top of the basic vehicle design tend to offer fall-back/limp-home modes so that when they do fail, they do so in a way which doesn't render the vehicle inoperable. It might not run as efficiently as before, but it's not the end of the world.

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Chris

...or that Warranty Direct are talking out of their "exhaust"!