Benz cars had this feature also . . . still might, but I’m not familiar with the current models
Position 1 opened the hood to the typical position
Position 2 opened it to pretty much straight up . . . sure made working on the engine easier
Some of the owners were surprised when I opened the hood further up than they thought it could go
Same thing happened to me, but I also passed.
I think that’s part of the job requirement. I remember on my test, I got dinged for not keeping up with the flow of traffic, which was going 15 over the limit and would therefore have been an automatic fail.
I also got dinged for accelerating too slowly. I was in my mom’s minivan, which did 0-60 in “some day.” Guess I should have rented a Porsche for the test or something.
Based on what others have told me, I think that being an arbitrary “dick” is indeed a part of the job requirement.
The driving course for the road test in my area was the perimeter roadway surrounding the city’s big stadium, and no outside traffic was allowed during the hours of the DMV testing.
That was the good news.
The bad news was that the roadway was pockmarked with really big potholes.
Once I could see what an arbitrary dick he was, I opted to drive right though those potholes, rather than swerving around them, as I normally would have done. More than likely, if I had swerved around them, he would have dinged me for failing to stay in my lane, or some other transgression.
I remember getting dinged on one test for not stopping at a stop sign that was set back from the corner abought 75 feet with big tree;s growing right up to the corner I was told stop at the sign then ease up to the corner then stop again before I could proceed.
I think the vehicle which one should take to a driving test is a manual shift Buick. I took my test in my parents’ 1954 Buick with a manual three speed transmission. The examiner was fascinated by the fact that the car had a manual transmission. He was really impressed when I came up to a traffic signal and had slowed to 5 mph. The light turned green, so I double clutched into first gear (, transmissions weren’t synchronized in first gear in those days). Four years later, my brother took his driver’s test in the same car. By that time, the car had a noise in the rear axle. The examiner had been a mechanic. He had my brother pull over and then the driver got in the back seat and had my brother drive on… He diagnosed the noise as the ring and pinion gear. He was right! Eventually, the differential ring and pinion were replaced to get rid of the noise.
Both my brother and I passed our tests with flying colours.
When I took my first driving test the examiner dinged me for refusing his direction to turn the wrong way onto a one-way street. Of course, had I followed his direction it would have been an automatic fail. He also dinged me for avoiding a huge pothole that would have done damage to the car had I driven through it. But I passed the test anyway to his obvious displeasure.
One reason he might have been fascinated was that by 1954, Buick, as an upper medium price car, was selling 85% of its cars with automatic transmissions.
@old_mopar_guy. My brother bought a 1963 Buick LeSabre at a really good price in 1967. He was driving a 1963: Studebaker Lark and was worried about getting parts. He saw the ad for the Buick in the paper. It was at a Buick dealer. He took a test drive and liked the car. When he got back to the agency, the agency offered such a great price he couldn’t believe it. The sales manager then confessed. We can’t sell a full size Buick that has a manual transmission, no power steering or power brakes. We have a young woman that comes in every week looking for a late model Studebaker. She has already been here and saw your car and asked about it. My brother traded cars and everyone was happy.
That stick-shift Buick was probably as welcome on the dealer’s lot as a skunk at a garden party.
When I was in college in the late 1950s and early 1960s, we used to joke about how to tell if s girl came from a wealthy family or not. The idea was to go out on a date in a stick shift car, and then fake being too ill to drive back to campus and ask her to drive. If she couldn’t drive a stick shift, you knew she was from a wealthy family.
We see those skunks when we’re unlocking the shop just before 6AM
Sometimes they want to walk inside, but we try to prevent that from happening
One day a skunk decided to take a nap underneath a guy’s tool cart
Needless to say, he worked outside that day, until he saw the skunk wake up and leave
We were far from wealthy, and my father had no desire to learn how to drive a stick. With the proliferation of automatics in the 50’s, he had no need to.
What I miss? Visibility. So many tiny windows these days!
Agree small window’s and high seat back’s also while I have never driven one I wonder how much visibility the smaller side mirror’s lose.
Window tint is a geographic problem. We have friends that moved from MD to TX. They got their windows tinted TexS dark after arriving. About two years later, they moved back to MD. They had to sell the car because the window tint was too dark for MD law.
The license to drive a tractor trailer used to be a class 1 license before there was a federal CDL standard. It was good for all lower classes except motorcycle.
Our church bought 2 school buses for Sunday school pickup use and I was the only one in the church that could drive them.
I taught 6 men in the church to drive them, they were standard shift Internationals, I took all six for their road tests and the week after the last one passed, my license needed to be renewed and NY had decided that you could no longed drive a bus with a class one, you also needed a class 2 endorsement and had to take a road test with a bus.
The next week I went back to the road test area with the driver that had passed the week before as my licensed driver and got the same examiner he had. He asked me what we were doing here because he knew he had passed him the week before. I explained things to him and he directed me to pull into a restaurant parking lot two blocks away.
I asked him if I was passing the test and he asked if I was buying the coffee. I said only if I am not being charged with bribery. He was filling out my road test as we spoke and he handed it back to me with several things marked off and an 85 grade. I looked at it puzzled and he said Nobody gets a perfect from me!
Sounds like an excuse to buy a new car, why not simply remove the window tint film?
While it can be done . . . I have removed window tint film . . . I wouldn’t call it simple
I had a 1973 Ford that the rear window tint was peeling in small pieces, removing that tint with all of the scraping needed would have required more labor than it took to install the tint.
Modern tint, tint that is only two years old can be remove in one sheet.
I miss vent windows, a dimmer switch on the floor and push button automatics like the 56- 60? Chrysler cars. There is no reason why cars have the massive center decorations that fill up the space between the two foot compartments and between the seats. We had a couple of Chrysler minivans from the 80’s that had lots of wide open spaces there. Plenty of room for all sorts of stuff and my wife still misses that place where she threw her purse between the seats. Those vans had flop down armrests that worked just fine, and the shifter was a lever on the steering column, they said because it was still a cable system (even though the push button system was a cable system in 1956). Heck, the 57 Edsel had a push button drive selector in the center of the steering wheel.