the good old days

Apparently I’ve been driving around for eight years with this bit of insanity in my steering wheel.

If an affected inflator deploys, the increased internal pressure may cause its casing to rupture, possibly sending metal fragments through the cloth airbag cushion material and into vehicle occupants.

With my luck, my first head-on collision will be the day after I learn about the Shrapnel Airbag, while I’m driving to the dealership to have it repaired.

And the Honda site about this says I can’t take it in for repair until I get an official notice in the mail about it. I better not get the same story from the dealership when I show up with my deathtrap and ask nicely for it to be fixed now please.

With the cheerful music in the introduction and the images of various games of chance, it first looks like Chance to Lose to is a bizarrely upbeat film about gambling. Nope — it’s a 1930’s drivers education film (one of the few I’ve seen from that era that wasn’t made by Chevrolet).

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It’s amusing/annoying that many of the example drivers are being nagged by their wife. “Slow down, dear! How fast are we going? Oh, look out!” Those crazy woman drivers passengers!

More notable than the subtle sexism is that the accidents all imply dangerous consequences, but don’t bother showing blood ‘n’ gore. One car ends up in a pigpen; in another crash, the driver wobbles out of his smashed vehicle holding his steering wheel and looking befuddled. And the slapstick just can’t stop, even when you wish it would.

Why did the chicken cross the road? Well, why do intelligent human beings take their lives in their hands and dart across a congested street against the traffic light?

Rather an existential answer…

Finally, I liked the manufacturing scenes, even if they were brief and at the end. Car factories are fun. (A steel foundry is more impressive, but dirtier )

Yes, that steering wheel is on the wrong side of the car! We’ve across the ocean in 1960’s Sheffield this week, to take a lesson from Jack Clare’s Driving Schools. I was in the mood for a British accent and cheery music this week.

The film is fairly decent. It uses a combination of shots inside a car and models of the interior workings of an automobile. It certainly isn’t thorough enough to train an auto mechanic, but it’s certainly adequate to teach a beginning driver the basics of what their car is doing. And if you’ve never been behind the wheel of a car, this is a good introduction to the fundamentals.

I particularly appreciate that they’re approaching the car as manageable, instead of an instrument of death which will kill them if they don’t pay attention. A bit of variety is good for any educational approach…

As an added bonus for Drivers Safety Films day, enjoy this campaign ad in which Eisenshower explains that good bus driving is critical to America’s future.

Crazy women Democrat drivers!

Driven to Kill has the title of a psycho thriller flick, but the plot of an average 50’s scare-the-driver film. It doesn’t live up to its name.

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I didn’t really like Hal Johnson in this film. “Women will do the darndest things!” Yeah, Hal, I’m sure she climbed up on that stool just because she has breasts. “That knife is for fun, son!” What a great way to introduce safety to your kids. Backbone of the nation? Go drive into a tree, Hal.

Unfortunately, Hal isn’t a respectful, interested-in-safety guy when he’s behind the wheel of an automobile. “He changes from a careful, considerate citizen, to a menace!” (Which rather makes me doubt that Hal is such a wonderful guy in all other aspects.) Even more unfortunately, Hal isn’t the one who meets his death due to his carless driving… and it’s hard to take comfort in the idea that Hal will be sad forever because of the bad thing he did.

THE GENERAL TIRE & RUBBER COMPANY present The Chance You Take, complete with funky sixties music.

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I’ve never seen a commercial trying quite so hard to scare the crap out of its viewers. The window washer falling off the skyscraper is truly just the beginning — there’s something surprisingly effective about showing pictures of happy people and then drawing a big X over them. But are disaster, death, and terror really words you want associated with your product? I know I don’t like to buy something just because somebody says I’ll be killed if I don’t buy it — and the only safety advice here was “buy General Tire & Rubber Tires or your family will DIE!!!” Merging terrible melodrama with the technical design of a tire just comes off as strange.

I wonder if Groucho Marx was able to sue them for saying, “You bet your life!” so frequently.

And you thought cell phones distracted drivers… what about animated annoyances? In We Drivers, produced by GM in 1936, Reckless Rudolph and Sensible Sam harass a driver while standing on his shoulders; not to be outdone, the narrator constantly provides detailed explanations of good driving techniques.

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This is actually a fun film. It does a good job covering the basics, and aside from “use hand signals” its tips are still fully relevant. Rather than scaring drivers with tragic deaths or gory highway smears, it keeps their attention by being wacky. Reckless Rudolph is a classic movie villian — complete with top hat, cape, mustache to twirl, even complaints when he’s foiled. Sensible Sam is a goody-two-shoes, whose comments are all the more annoying because you know he’s right about the behaviors he recommends. There are even basic descriptions of physics (how momentum affects cars on curves) with a giant pushing the car around. I was pretty impressed.

We expected that today would be spent putting up with the drizzly remnants of Hanna coming through South Carolina. Instead, it visited my brother in Virginia (HAHA!) and so we went to the zoo to enjoy the sunshine. After watching a kookabura eat its dinner, a gorilla make angry faces at the crowd and then turn its back in disgust, and tortoises sit around, it was time to call it a day.

We were getting on the highway when Buzz said, “Oooh, that car looks like it’s in trouble.” I look behind us and see an immense blue cloud of smoke coming out of some car. “I think it’s on FIRE!” he says (with a rather inappropriate hint of excitement in his voice).

As the car passes us (going about 65 mph), we notice that the car has no rear right tire. What looked like “on fire” was a massive shower of sparks kicked up by the wheel rim against the pavement. There had been a tire at one point — little teeny bits of rubber were still flying off and it smelled like the Goodyear plant had caught fire — but it was long past “flat”.

She did have damage to the left side of the car, leading us to suspect she’d already been in one accident… whether she blew out the tire while fleeing the scene, or crashed into someone else as a result of being unable to control her own car, clear. Or maybe she was just so thoroughly drunk (at 5pm, no less) she didn’t notice the horrible grating noise and massive smokescreen…

This is perhaps one of the worst drivers I have ever seen. I’ve seen idiots speeding, cutting people off, tailgating, driving over my lawn to do U-turns, and even once managing to flip a car and land it in a neighbor’s backyard. But driving a car with only three tires is hard (anybody who’s ever had a blowout knows that) — voluntarily driving a car with only three tires at interstate speeds is bat-shit insane.

Sadly, there doesn’t appear to be any extant Driver’s Ed Film entitled “Don’t Flee The Scene of an Accident If Your Tire Is Missing.”

Time for another round of Try To Scare Them Straight!

Joy Ride – an Auto Theft, from 1976, shows exactly what it promises: a dull, dull auto theft. (Yes, Bobby, your car will probably get stolen if you leave it unlocked with the keys in the ignition.)

First the two underage thieves get something thrown at the car while they’re driving, resulting in a huge crack in the windshield (and no, Timmy, you can not wash a crack out with soap and water, but nice try). Then they decide to pick up “the girls”. The foursome leisurely goes up to “the hills”, pretend to drive a defunct old car that’s up there, and then suddenly realize they’re running late. Tragedy ensues while they’re speeding to get the car back before the owner finishes baseball practice — a police car begins to chase them, and Underage Idiot Driver decides he can outrun the cop… and you can probable guess what happens then.

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I wonder if this is the reason every 16-year-old in the universe seems to have their own car nowadays — so they won’t be tempted to steal their friend’s boat car and drive up to the hills to see yet another car… weird, weird plot.