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A few things to know before stealing my 914 (2022)

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Re: A few things to know before stealing my 914 (2022)

#71

Post by mikestew »

toast0 wrote: post #19
selimthegrim wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Isn’t this why you cannot push start cars anymore?

You should still be able to push start a newer manual transmission car. Put in the clutch, put the key to run, put it in 1st (or so), get it up to speed, let the clutch out, and now the engine is turning, which should turn the alternator/generator which should now be able to run the engine. If your electrical system is really bad, maybe the alternator can't get the voltage high enough to run everything; if your car i…

...which should turn the alternator/generator which should now be able to run the engine.

Depends; what's lighting up the field coils in the alternator? A generator, which probably went out of cars in the '60s, sure. But something has to power the parts that create the magnetic field in an alternator, and if the battery's dead...

On top of the fact that the coils on top of the plugs these days are more finicky about the amount of power they receive. A battery with 11.5V probably isn't going to cut it. And as you point out, the ECM may want a healthy 12V, too.

I would hedge the original statement and say you could push start a newer manual transmission car, but don't count on it. Even as far back as 1999, I had a Honda VFR motorcycle that could not be push-started until its battery had some juice in it, for the reasons stated above.

Re: A few things to know before stealing my 914 (2022)

#72

Post by red369 »

fallinditch wrote: post #6

This story reminds me that I have a recurring nightmare: I am driving a car and the brakes hardly work at all, so I am in constant fear that something will go terribly wrong. This nightmare was born from a real experience with my first vehicle, a VW micro bus that had horribly squishy brakes.

I've had that recurring nightmare too - I forgot about that! I've only had a little real world experience with it. I'm curious if anyone has had the nightmare without having experienced it in real life.

I owned a late 80s Corolla which had drum brakes on the rear, and they would fade by the bottom of a particularly long, windy, descent from a mountain range to a beach we used to go to. That was even with using lower gears to control speed. Everyone else on that road seemed to be in a modern pickup, following as close as possible to encourage me to drive faster.

Oh! And one traumatic towing experience. I'd forgotten what a real-life nightmare that was. I was helping a friend tow an early 90s Honda City with his pride and joy, Mitsubishi GTO. I was driving the tiny Honda. The rope we were using wasn't designed for the job. I think the ropes specifically designed for it have a little give. When this particular rope got slack, it snapped when tension was reapplied. And then it was retied, even shorter. It wasn't as long as I would have liked to begin with. I had to ride the brakes lightly to keep tension in it. And then of course, when it came time to stop at the traffic lights, the brakes were hot and faded. I would repeatedly, barely stop in time, coming slowly to a halt inches from the bumper of the GTO. Obviously, complaining to the kind of person who would think this was a good idea, wasn't particularly fruitful.

Re: A few things to know before stealing my 914 (2022)

#73

Post by ztetranz »

firecall wrote: post #66
wingspar wrote: post #9

“ Since there is not a clutch safety switch on the starting circuit, make sure to press the clutch down before you try to crank the engine.” Growing up, a friends dad would use this as a ‘feature’ on his Datsun to move the car out of traffic when it wouldn’t restart. Put it in first, release the clutch, crank the starter, and move the car out of the way.

IIRC The British Highway Code* used to suggest this as a method to move a vehicle stuck on a level crossing! (Train crossing). They did note that it’s only good for manual cars. Automatics were not standard in the UK in the 80s. All from memory, so might be mangling the details :-) *Or could have been the Australian version.

I remember that in the New Zealand code too.

Re: A few things to know before stealing my 914 (2022)

#74

Post by red369 »

fallinditch wrote: post #23
RHSeeger wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Many years ago, I was driving down the highway on my way to work and, when I pressed the breaks to slow down, the pedal just... went straight to the floor. I had to use the emergency break to slow down, get off the highway, and pull over. Luckily that still worked (I've owned many a car where that was the first thing to go). So, it turns out the breaks rotted off and fell off the car on the way to work. I had had it…

Wow you were lucky. There was a driver in the UK whose accelerator got stuck, then his brakes burnt out and he was on a notoriously busy road traveling at 135mph - he survived! See https://www.the-independent.com/news/uk/this-britain/help-i-...

I was with a friend in a 5L V8 Mercedes, and we were doing a quick drive around the block after some sort of maintenance. He floored the accelerator - I can't remember why that was required, except I assume it wasn't. I assumed he was only going to do it momentarily, but the car rapidly reached, and passed, stupid speeds for that road. Just as I started to say something about preserving lives of us, and anyone else on the road, he suddenly shifted to neutral and brought the car to a stop with the engine screaming away at the redline. He then calmly reached down, unjammed the accelerator, and then continued driving back home.

That car was automatic, but he drove cars with manual transmissions a lot, so that would make it an obvious thing to do. I think in some of the famous unintended acceleration crashes, it has been unclear whether the person tried to change to neutral. A lot of newer cars have a much less intuitive method of doing so as well.

There's nothing as good in this regard as cars with manual transmissions though, in terms of having a dedicated pedal which disconnects the engine from the wheels, which you practice constantly during daily use.

Re: A few things to know before stealing my 914 (2022)

#75

Post by dreamcompiler »

psadri wrote: post #43

I feel like this could be adopted for your homegrown "whatever" framework (eg: UI framework, Auth framework, …) Congratulations on getting hired to this team! You probably count yourself lucky, but don't. We had been trying to fill this role for the past 5 months and every candidate would run away as soon as we showed them our homegrown auth framework. But don't run yet please, do give it a try. So, you are still her…

> Make sure you don't have anything else relying on Python because they will probably never work again.

This is why when I see some clever open source tool discussed on HN and I go to the repo and see it's written in Python I close the browser window and pretend I never saw it.

Yes I know there are ways to protect yourself when using Python in much the same way that lead-lined glove boxes protect you when working with plutonium, but I can never remember the proper CLI incantation to make the lead-lined glove box appear.

Re: A few things to know before stealing my 914 (2022)

#76

Post by red369 »

wat10000 wrote: post #31
fallinditch wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Wow you were lucky. There was a driver in the UK whose accelerator got stuck, then his brakes burnt out and he was on a notoriously busy road traveling at 135mph - he survived! See https://www.the-independent.com/news/uk/this-britain/help-i-...

This is what happened to quite a few people with the Toyota unintended acceleration issue. There was speculation that it was caused by bugs in the engine control unit. Officially the cause was found to be floor mats coming loose and holding the accelerator down. (I bought a new Toyota shortly after this and the dealer was very careful to show me how the floor mats worked and how to make sure they were properly attach…

I agree with what you said about brakes overcoming the engine. I've seen tests which show it works on even monstrously over-powered cars, but it can feel like it's not working and if the driver reacts wrongly to that, then it may no longer work.

I think stopping the power from going to the wheels needs to be an easy option. I wish there was more importance given to being able to easily do this.

I think the two options are shifting to neutral, or turning off the engine. I tested in a late-00s automatic BMW, and you had to hold the start/stop button for what felt like a very long time to turn the engine off if the car was in Drive. In an emergency, I think most people would give up long before it turned off. In that car, it was easy to change to neutral though, so I don't have a criticism about that design. What concerns me is cars with the same approach for the start/stop button, but where it is hard to get to neutral. I think in the Toyotas which had unintended acceleration issues, it wasn't easy/intuitive.

Edit: Another comment reminded me of something I forgot to mention above. You don't want turning off the engine to be the first resort because you lose power steering, and eventually, power assisted brakes.

Re: A few things to know before stealing my 914 (2022)

#78

Post by dreamcompiler »

BLKNSLVR wrote: post #70
psadri wrote: post #43

I feel like this could be adopted for your homegrown "whatever" framework (eg: UI framework, Auth framework, …) Congratulations on getting hired to this team! You probably count yourself lucky, but don't. We had been trying to fill this role for the past 5 months and every candidate would run away as soon as we showed them our homegrown auth framework. But don't run yet please, do give it a try. So, you are still her…

Stop it! ... you'll need to refer to these pages on Confluence, but they haven't all yet migrated to the new Confluence documentation structure, which is here, so you'll need to search both. And then the really detailed documentation is in Sharepoint here, but when we update these documents we'll also need to convert them to PDF and publish them to our Customer-accessible ticketing system using this specific ticket n…

...and keep in mind that our self-hosted Confluence instance is several years old and since someone finds a new Confluence vulnerability every three days the data you need may vector some malware to your machine so you probably should only look at the docs on a sandboxed VM. Atlassian has been bugging us to convert to cloud hosting for 5 years and management won't let us but that's another story.

Re: A few things to know before stealing my 914 (2022)

#79

Post by technothrasher »

geoffeg wrote: post #38

I used to own an MG B GT, which was always in a state of disrepair I have become accustomed to with older British vehicles. One day I drove it to a nicer restaurant where I learned they only allowed valet parking. I urged the attendant to make an exception for me, but he refused. I shrugged, got out and it immediately stalled. I explained a few things to him, like not being shy about using the choke even after it was…

That must have been a while ago. The last time I encountered a "valet only" parking lot, I told the 20-something valet it was a manual, and his face turned white, he paused for a few seconds, and then he said, "go ahead, you can park it yourself."

> a state of disrepair I have become accustomed to with older British vehicles.

Figures. You MG owners! Did you have a hammer with you for when the points in the fuel pump needed smacking? ;) I drove a '65 Triumph Spitfire for about five years back in the early 00's and it was reliable as a top (after I repaired all the hack work that previous owners had done to it).

Re: A few things to know before stealing my 914 (2022)

#80

Post by wtallis »

dreamcompiler wrote: post #75
psadri wrote: post #43

I feel like this could be adopted for your homegrown "whatever" framework (eg: UI framework, Auth framework, …) Congratulations on getting hired to this team! You probably count yourself lucky, but don't. We had been trying to fill this role for the past 5 months and every candidate would run away as soon as we showed them our homegrown auth framework. But don't run yet please, do give it a try. So, you are still her…

> Make sure you don't have anything else relying on Python because they will probably never work again. This is why when I see some clever open source tool discussed on HN and I go to the repo and see it's written in Python I close the browser window and pretend I never saw it. Yes I know there are ways to protect yourself when using Python in much the same way that lead-lined glove boxes protect you when working wit…

These days, if I'm feeling generous I'll spend a minute or two to see if I can get a promising Python tool to install with uv. If it's not going to easily submit to a `uv tool install`, then I move on and forget about it.
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