Nope, they were all drums, front and back.
I’m not sure why it matters though. Aren’t disc brakes better in most respects?
Disc brakes are better in all respects, but you wouldn’t want to have to stop a disc brake-equipped vehicle weighing anywhere from 4k lbs to… perhaps 10k lbs… without power assist.
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E Z go gas golf carts have had this feature for decades. The starter was also the generator. Step on the gas and the engine starts and the cart goes, let off the gas and the engine quits. No EPA mandate needed.
On mild hybrids, it may actually save on costs, not needing a dedicated alternator and a separate dedicated starter. Another side benefit might be not needing an electric radiator fan although you would still need one for the AC condenser. I found that by switching my air cooled motorcycles off at long red lights and then starting them when the light turned green, I didn’t end up with a heat soaked engine that detonated with the slightest throttle opening on those triple digit temperature days.
With mild hybrid technology, the engine shutoff and restart is so seamless that you may not even realize it’s happening. As soon as you press the accelerator, your car moves, under electric power at first until the engine starts, which is almost instantly.
I think it will be well received by the public once they experience it.
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However, on an EZ Go golf cart, there is a slight lag when you press the gas pedal.
…manually switch off the engine and then manually restarting at every stop.
That would amount to mental illness I think.
I once milked 56 mpg out of a Kawasaki ZRX1200 by hitting the kill switch and holding in the clutch whenever the engine wasn’t needed.
I would expect that to have more than erased fuel savings with increased wear&tear on several other components.
Don’t underestimate the idle fuel consumption of a gasoline engine.
The figures I’ve seen are well under a quart per hour with a small 4-banger.
Isn’t mental illness stigmatized enough without mentioning it in such a flippant and inappropriate context?
Other than the starter, what components would you have in mind?
A lot of the time, I restarted the engine simply by releasing the clutch. Only if I had to start from a dead stop did I use the electric starter.
Since then, I traded that gas guzzling motorcycle in for a much smaller bike, one that doesn’t miss the whole point of a motorcycle, being an economical alternative to a car.
When people ask me why I went from a stupid powerful 1200 cc motorcycle that literally had more horsepower than the car I own, to a little 300 cc bike, I reply “because I need to get 70 mpg a whole lot worse than I need to double the speed limit”.
Yes, I’m one of a very small group of crazy people who take gas mileage and energy efficiency seriously.
The rest of the sane world seems to be divided up into two opposing camps, those the deny climate change, and those that think climate change is caused by big oil, Walmart, and the NRA, not by 300 million individuals who all need to drive to their suburban mansions in huge SUVs because it fits their “lifestyle”.
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True, but the EZ Go golf carts also were pretty low tech.
In high school I had a mo ped. I was very conscious of gas mileage (not really) it didn’t take much. But it had pedals and no clutch. So if you shut it off, you had to pedal it to get it started again. No electric start. I think that was before electricity was invented. More than once it wouldn’t start so I ended up having to pedal it home from school about 5 miles. Not fun. Maybe that’s one reason I don’t like things to shut off on me. But I believe people should have the choice. I also believe golf carts should be legal on the streets if they have lights so then we wouldn’t need cars with the start-stop feature.
Have you thought about a golf cart’s top speed, and how they would clog up traffic on busy two-lane roads?
Neighborhood electric vehicles have been around for years but you may not see them if you live in farm country.
Yeah there are a couple around here but it was a big deal a few years ago whether to allow them or not. So now they have to buy a city permit. One guy has the big snow tires on for the winter and the side curtains. I don’t know what he does for heat or a radio.
I suppose he is as comfortable as those who ride snowmobiles. He could migrate south where people ride motorcycles and dune buggies year around.
You have a point there, a lot of fuel would be saved if a million new vehicle each year came with this feature but it is not that common on non hybrid four cylinder cars, it doesn’t save much fuel. The start/stop feature saves more fuel with trucks, SUVs and 450 horsepower vehicles like the OP’s Mercedes.
Texas allows neighborhood use of golf carts on roads that have speed limits lower than 45 mph if I remember correctly. There are several of them in my lakeside community. You don’t really want to drive faster than golf cart speed in my neighborhood anyway unless you want to hit a deer. We’re overrun by suburban livestock also known as “big stupid squirrels”.
I’m actually tempted to hack an old car alternator into a go-kart motor like in that video I posted to run down to the lake with. I’m thinking it could be powered by the same lithium ion battery pack that runs my EGO lawn mower.
Might not be perfectly legal but if nobody cares, it doesn’t matter.
Customers don’t always demand what’s necessary, as the Pinto memo should suggest to you. Laissez-faire looks great in Ayn Rand economic-porn novels but as with most “revolutionary” ideas spun up by people who have no actual experience with policymaking, it simply doesn’t work. Waiting for customer demand is what leads to superfund sites.
I would hope the cops aren’t driving S-class Mercedes. 
I think that in Dubai, they use the S-class for meter maid duty, and the cops get the really expensive cars.
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Ha ha. In high school my boss at the greenhouse was also the mayor at the time. It was an early lesson in keeping an eye and a leash on leadership. When talking about a controversial issue at the time he said: “It’s not what the people want, it’s what we think the people should have.”
I might be old but I have 50 years of experience to make me shudder.
Are you saying you’ve been around long enough to personally witness companies abusing a lack of regulations, or are choosing not to acknowledge that part of our collective history?
I’m willing to accept there are flaws in the ways our government regulates private industry, and I’m even more willing to accept that democratic public policy formation is messy and imprecise, but I’m not willing to accept that dropping all regulation would lead to better outcomes. We tried that, and it failed.
When it comes to public policy, I’m willing to trade the pursuit of perfection for pragmatism, especially since you seem quick to criticize, but slow to offer a better solution.
I’m saying you’d better keep your eyes on those rascals or they’ll have you in chains.
My solution is simple instead of mandated. It’s called an on/off switch. You like it, turn the switch on. You don’t like it, turn the switch off. Very pragmatic and a lesson to all those eager idealists out there determining public policy.
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