Jump to content

Dave@Moon

Members
  • Posts

    7,882
  • Joined

  • Last visited

Posts posted by Dave@Moon

  1. A side impact, such as my wife just had, does not trigger air bags. There are some cars now, of course, with side impact air bags.

    Side impact air bags became mandatory with the 2013 model year, however the car manufacturers had many years warning that was coming and discovered that they were great selling points as soon as they were available. As a result they became increasingly available from roughly 1005 on, with the majority of new cars having them by 2009.

  2. As for statistics being an OPINION, well, I'm speechless. I work in a data-driven industry (aerospace).

    Get used to it. All information is an opinion today, unless it is bunk which is most of the time, and bias is the force that binds us all together. The idea that something is right and something is wrong is no longer valid in this country any more. It's just too challenging to consider that the other guy may have a point. Best to dismiss and stick to your guns, sometimes literally.

    I used to work in what was an honored profession in the United States, environmental science. Now it's just part of the white noise of daily life. We all are.

  3. All that to say that its hard to believe that air-bags reduce insurance costs... certainly for that car, anyway.

    In the past year I purchased a new 2013 Toyota Prius. Also my wife had a bunion removed from her left foot. Guess which one cost more.....

    Wrong guess. They were almost the same price, within $500.00 of each other.

    The airbags (yes, there are exactly 10) came with the car. All of them.

    NEVER underestimate the billing power of a medical institution!:eek: That's why air bags save lives and money.

  4. The Geo line were actually rather dependable cars - Look how many Trackers you still see on the road today, you even still see a lot of Metro's. Storms didn't sell in great numbers so you don't see them often now. Prisms are still all over the place as well. None of these cars were GM built, they were all in cooperation with other manufacturers, Toyota, Suzuki, etc.

    "Not GM built" is debatable. Isuzu built the Geo Storm, which at the time was 49% owned by GM. The Tracker and Metro were built by Suzuki, which was 5% GM owned at the time. The Geo Prizm (ne Chevy Nova, ne Chevy Prizm) was a Toyota Corolla derivative built along with Corollas at the NUMMI plant in Fremont, California, a joint venture with Toyota. After the Prizm was cancelled the Pontiac Vibe was built there for a while alongside more Corollas and Toyota Matrixs. GM pulled out in 2009 (when Pontiac died), and Toyota closed the plant in 2010. Part of the plant is used to build Tesla cars today.

  5. I have a problem with safety belts<st1:personname w:st="on">, </st1ersonname>air bags<st1:personname w:st="on">, </st1ersonname>and all forms of idiot protection. These devises stop mother nature from eliminating the stupid. We already have enough stupid people in the world lets do away with all these protections for a while please.

    The concern for our fellow man is sometimes staggering. So how do you feel about insurance rates?

    Back before we all became cowboys in the 1980s, there were ongoing debates about motorcycle helmet law repeal (which today I think no longer exist) across the U.S. When the repeal of helmet laws was first proposed in Pennsylvania I was a college student. The debate went on for several days, and it looked like a no-brainer...the repeal of the law had too much political support to fail. Helmet laws were going away, and Easy Rider types were celebrating in advance already.

    Then the state insurance groups issued their report. They said (essentially) "OK, repeal the laws. Statistically that will result in x number of additional head trauma cases, which will average x number of dollars each. The result will be a $20.00 per car increase in (legally mandatory) insurance rates annually." (That would be about $35/car today.) You can guess what happened then.

    It was another 5-6 years before PA successfully repealed it's helmet laws, in the go-go/"every man for himself" 1980s. It was one of the last states to do so.

    Not using your seat belt hurts me financially. Rationalize that all one wants, it's undeniable.:mad:

  6. Your truck looks like a 1-1/2 ton. It could be any year 34-37.

    It is definitely either a C20 (1 ton) or C30 (1.5 ton) model. The Standard Catalog of American Light Trucks shows a different bumper type in photos for 1936/37 trucks than the one this truck has, so it may be either a 1934 or 35 medel year truck. However the bumpers described in the book's text do not change, and the different (straighter) bumpers shown are not mentioned, so I don't think it can be narrowed down beyond 1934-37 from just this photo.

  7. With all due respect I never said seat belts don't save lives. It's called an "opinion" which I believe I'm entitled to. When someone crosses the line I won't worry because I know how weak most cars are made now days ;)

    Keeping on topic, I say if the car came with them originally they should have them, if they never came with them from the factory the vehicle will lose that aspect of originality that will be an injustice to the classic your enjoying.

    First of all, there isn't a single automotive hobby group of any kind that I'm aware of that deducts points or penalizes cars in any way for adding seat belts. Valuing your life should never be a detriment to enjoying this hobby.

    However, there is also this:

    1. According to Standard Catalog of Light Trucks, the 1930 Dodge truck chassis (plural) used for panel trucks weigh between 1900 lbs. and 2955 lbs.

    2. According to cars.com, the "weak" 2014 Toyota Camry crossing the line in front of you weighs 4630 lbs.

    3. Worried or not, you're the one who's dead.

    That's actually a VERY typical calculation for antique vs. modern cars. You can pretend to be deceived by the "weakness" of modern cars all day long, the fact is they're generally bigger, heavier, and better than any of our antiques...and they have crush zones that don't evolve your chest and the dashboard.

    Anybody care to post that video of the 1959 Chevy BelAir hitting the 2009 Chevy Malibu again?:confused::rolleyes:

  8. I sure wish people would do their homework about the Corvair. It was not the only swing axle car being produced at the time, Porsche and VW come to mind.

    I sometimes think that more people have read critiques of Unsafe at any Speed than have actually read the book. Swing axels were a bad design. They were for all cars.

    post-30638-143142441879_thumb.jpg

    This photo is of an early Triumph Spitfire's swing axels doing exactly what you don't want a swing axel to do. The Spitfire got away with them for a while (like VW and Porsche did) because they didn't have enough horsepower to make this happen in typical driving circumstances. In 1966 the Spitfire design was given a coupe body and a 6 cylinder engine, creating a dreadfully awful handful of a car...the Triumph GT6 Mark 1. The tuck-under created by the new, more powerful engine was so severe that a Mark 2 versiopn was rushed into production ASAP with a completely revised rear suspension.

    Swing axels plus enough horsepower is a formula for disaster. Corvairs had enough. Complicated by an inexpensive wheel design that allowed blowouts understress, this was a bad design. Playing with low air pressures to partially mitigate the problem instead of installing a $14 sway bar (which would have helped more, but not nearly as much as the 1964 suspension redesign) was a half-measure at best.

    GM got what it deserved with the Corvair. It was a good car let down by design on the cheap, and could have been a great car if the 1964 design was the first design.:(

  9. I have always thought the dictionary was in your personal computer/browsers - not on line?

    My spell check has the option to "add to dictionary. Using firefox with dictionary downloaded. (English not USA dictionary)

    venturi & venture are both OK on my computer. carburetor gets corrected to carburettor

    I just added "venturi" to my dictionary to eliminate the autocorrect, and it works. (Also "autocorrect":)). However it shows the correct spelling for carburetor. The double-t version is marked as wrong.

  10. Voltage regulator would be something to check. Also be sure to check ALL connections to those items.

    If that checks out then make sure your belts have the proper tension. I assume the bench testing of the alternator was done using the pulley off the car, but it it's not properly attached that could limit your current generation as well. Finally check the continuity of the cables/wires involved.

  11. Guess we need to see what the new publication looks like to comment....seems most of the old car mags are including resto-mods and outright hot rods, things a lot of us appreciate the workmanship on but don't want to spend money reading about....

    I don't know for sure, but from the web site it looks like not much more than a title change for the former Auto Enthusiast magazine.

    http://www.carsandparts.com/

    http://editions.amospublishing.com/AEW/default.aspx?d=20131227

  12. One young guy in the video touts the "low" insurance rate of " 1,000 per year". This on a car that is probably worth about £3,000.

    Phil

    That's fairly typical in the U.K. Top Gear ran an episode a few years back where, pretending to be teenage drivers, they got annual insurance premium quotes for fairly plebeian cars that were often several times the value of the car. One unexceptional £2500 car had a premium quote from one company of over £8000.

  13. I don't see why the Chinese (or us Americans for that matter) can't just sell the damn thing with an Opel badge in Buick showrooms. It's hardly the first time that's happened.

    Nostalgia, an untarnished name, European panache, uniqueness, catchy, youthful appeal,... It would sell like hotcakes.

    It won't happen.:(

  14. Tomorrow (Tuesday 3/4/14) will be a somewhat chilly Mardi Gras Day, and then a chance of light rain later in the afternoon for an hour or so -

    we can handle that

    I was there last week and caught 2 parades (and about 10 lbs of beads) between shifts doing drywall on a house in the 7th Ward. On Thursday (according to the only news report I saw all week) it got down to 34 degrees. We actually had frost on our windshields (and all of us had left our scrapers at home in Ohio). It was 2 degrees short of the record for February 27th, 32 degrees.

    I already miss eating Buttermilk Drop breakfast rice under a palm tree, especially when I didn't even need a jacket at 8 AM.:cool:

×
×
  • Create New...