My Toyotas, 2012 vintage, have a little button that lets you disengage park when the engine isn’t running and no key is in the ignition. Is this a left/right pond thing?
Years ago - 1970s - a friend inherited a load of money and bought a Rolls-Royce. He asked his wife if she wanted one too, she said no, she wanted a Honda Civic.
The Royce was nice when it was going, but spent 7 months of its first year being fixed. The little Honda went to 40 000 miles with nothing but routine services and a few tyre changes before his wife put her foot down, pointed out that he was doing most of the driving of “her” car, and she wanted it back. So they ended up with new his and her Civics. Did I mention the depreciation on the Royce? More than two new Civics a year.
They can’t really take account of things being in the garage waiting for parts for 7 months, though. However, these people weren’t like that. His mother and father had left Germany in a great hurry in the 1930s, and survived. The had instilled into their children that it could happen again, so for instance they rented rather than owned their house. I think at the back of his mind was that in an emergency he could pack the family and essentials into the cavernous Royce and head for the ferry.
His children used to say “Don’t be ridiculous, it won’t happen here.” Since June 2016 I am not quite so sure of that any more.
If you don’t want to be spoiled by the Wikipedia summary, the full story is available on project Gutenberg.
Actually, the Leaf is very small
You bring up a good point, I need to look up what it takes to move it when it’s off, as I can imagine that’s still necessary in order to tow it, etc.
This. At full charge, my car estimates ~70 miles, but this is absolutely an estimate. If I drive on the highway, use the heat or A/C, headlights, etc. they all have a negative impact on usable range. My needs are such that I can work within these restrictions, but it’s also not my only car. The usable range of this vehicle is not enough to be most peoples’ only form of transportation. The 2018 Leaf has significantly more range, and is therefore usable by a larger percentage.
Might be, but I’m not sure. My current Toyotas are 2004 and 2007, and they’re the newest cars I’ve owned, and they don’t have it. But the newest vehicle I owned that would let you shift out of Park with the key off was a 1968 F250 pickup (you could even remove the keys while it was running). My 1970 Mercury will not let the shifter move out of Park with the key off. Stick shift cars never had this issue, of course.
I do think I’ve seen a couple cars with the Park release button you describe, but I’ve never owned one.
Ok how about we take the suspension replace the spring setup with a solinoid and a magnitized bar as you go over a bump this resists the movement and generates a current charging you as you bounce.
Actually, my RAV4 does have it, but it’s concealed under a cap. You need a small screwdriver to get to it. I imagine that’s a U.S. import safety requirement.
I sometimes wonder if complication is an inevitable trend. Adding features, improving safety and efficiency, etc. …does that always mean that the scope of the original thing has to expand to the point where nobody can understand the whole thing?
In my job, I have little more than a general understanding of what it is our company’s main product even does. I have the vaguest grasp of some of the engineering terminology, and no clue at all about some of it. Most of the math is far beyond me, while some of it I grasp in a more general sense but can’t make any intuitive sense out of it. Conversely, the details of how to implement it, and the techniques we use to do so, are outside the scope of what our engineers can do well. Even just talking about the code itself, there’s some in our product that I make no effort to understand as a whole, but am capable of debugging it when necessary – probably more efficiently than the people who wrote it and understand the bigger picture.
I’ve noticed this in electronic music and sound synthesis too; people focus on certain levels of knowledge and intuitive familiarity, without grasping the next level up or down – and sometimes not realizing there even are levels that they’ve missed.
You work for HP or IBM? HP white papers in particular used to make pronouncements of Marxist-Leninist doctrine by the Central Committee of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union look like masterpieces of simplicity.
Actually that’s not the problem. The reason regen is only around 40% efficient is that the battery cannot absorb energy fast enough. Braking takes more energy (usually) than accelerating.
I’m not an engineer, but, just given my rudimentary knowledge of physics, that sounds wrong…
Given a spherical cow in a vacuum, accelerating from 0 to a given speed at a given rate should take exactly as much energy as decelerating from that given speed to 0 at the same rate. After all, deceleration is just acceleration with the vector pointing in the opposite direction.
Add air resistance and friction to the equation, and it should tip the balance the opposite way to what you suggest: it should make accelerating require more energy than braking, rather than less.
It is wrong. My chimaera was bombinating in a vacuum.
I was imprecise but I’m probably being boring enough. I should have said that typically braking uses more energy per second than acceleration. It’s the rate at which the batteries can accept current through the charging circuit, and the circuit losses, that is the limitation. In a hilly region it’s often necessary to apply brakes going downhill and when that happens the power generated may be much more than the charger can handle. My 40% was a Nissan statistic.
Obviously in total the energy available to return via braking is much less than the energy being used in propulsion (sine cacum Sherlockus).
Hey, don’t look at me. I never implied that my country’s import regulations (to say nothing of their safety regulations) ever made as much sense as NHTSA thinks they do. But why else would UK-spec (or ROW-spec) Toyotas include the button, and US-destined ones omit it?
Also, accidentally knocking the car out of Park is probably more likely to happen in parking lots, garages, and driveways than on actual motorways.
I wasn’t looking at you, just commenting on the way that when it comes to safety politicians like to mandate things that don’t really matter (like removing the disengagement button unless a mechanic needs to access it to tow) but not things that make a big difference like seatbelts or really enforcing a ban on texting while driving, which will inconvenience people who might vote for them.
In the UK motorcycle helmets became compulsory before seatbelts because politicians rightly judged they were visible and easy to enforce and most of the people affected didn’t vote for them. But most serious bikers used them anyway, and it was the casual users like mobile nurses who initially fell foul of the law. There was actually a publicity campaign making exactly this point.
The autoadjusting thing on my bmwMini works fine. I use it at every stoplight, not because I was trained to but because my right knee aches. This is why I prefer manuals—the left knee is fine but I can’t tolerate constantly holding the brake with my right. I suppose with an auto I could two-foot it. The gas pedal takes a lot less pressure to operate.
Why would you need to hold the brake?
At the lights I just engage neutral and if necessary use handbrake. Neutral is one stop away from drive. In fact my cars don’t even have a creep function in D - lift foot off, forward progress stops.
For a few years I reverted to manual in the early 2000s - I had a long commute most of which was in 5th gear and the fuel saving seemed worth it. I disposed of the car when I realised it was causing bursitis of the right knee, pelvic ache due to clutch operation, and a left shoulder problem. I’m not really a wimp but I do have fibromyalgia.
Any cost saving on fuel was greatly outweighed by the physiotherapy I was having so I bought a Prius which I kept till I stopped commuting. All the symptoms disappeared quite quickly.
But the odd thing was that the physio speculated that the right knee problem was being caused by the unconscious bracing you do to operate the clutch. The fact that it went away without my using cruise control was to my mind suggestive.
