“…However, there are situations where that extremely safe drive gets t-boned or rear-ended and there wasn’t a darn thing he could have done to prevent it . . . unless he had stayed home that day.”
True. But a really safe driver would have known to stay home that day.
More seriously… Yes, I agree. I like having the safety features. And I’ll opt to ride with the safe driver in the safe car if I can. I have a friend with the latest safety loaded Lexus. I’m uneasy in the car with him. He tailgates with less than half second distance at freeway speeds.
And sometimes a safe driver will see than T-bone risk develop and avoid it, or know how to get safely onto the shoulder and ruin his undercarriage to avoid the headon with that drunk who suddently crossed the centerline.
All of which drives home my point that the most important piece of “safety equipment” in any car isn’t installed at the factory–it’s the person driving. If you drive sensibly and pay attention to your surroundings, you won’t need all of these new high-tech “safety features” and if you don’t, the computers and sensors and gizmos won’t save you from being involved in an accident. The “safety features” might reduce the severity of your injuries, however.
The manual transmission vehicles my family and I have driven tended to be cheap economy cars, and they didn’t come with tachometers. It’s a weird twist of fate that the cars that should have a tach don’t, and the ones that don’t benefit from a tach often have one for show.
Whitey…
That was pretty much my point when I posted my original pretty long fist post in this topic Way back when .
Simply that on most cars …Especially with automatic transmissions you really have to scratch the bottom of the barrel to justify a tachometer (though a few folks here have tried to) … Let alone justify making it one of the biggest instruments on the instrument panel.
It’s one of the biggest instruments because it’s fun to watch that needle swing quickly.
As it happens it’s also a good diagnostic instrument because it will tell you if your clutch/clutch packs are slipping, and it will tell you if your engine is idling strangely.
Beyond that, I don’t know what I’d replace the tach with. They’re certainly not going to run wiring and install sensors for oil temp/pressure/other useful information. Maybe replace it with a blinking sign that says “quit texting and watch the damn road?”
Well you sure were right about that. I sure got an earful from the 10% of the 1% Who seem to be afraid and I was trying to take their tachometers away.
We used to own a 1995 Corolla DX with the 5spd manual. This was by no means a strippo car. It had power steering, power brakes, ac, power windows and locks, 60/40 split folding rear seat, etc.
It didn’t come with a tachometer, but the wiring was all set up for the cluster with tachometer
The only 1995 Corolla with a tachometer was the LE model . . . with automatic
I found a 1995 Corolla LE cluster on ebay and used that. It worked perfectly “out of the box”
Well they’ve already got the sensors for oil temp/oil pressure in the engine and already sending info to the dash (to the idiot lights) so it’s just a matter of replacing the tach (which is a relatively expensive large analog gauge) with two small ones… Or even a large easily readable digital display (read “cheap”) that combines the oil idiot light and coolant temp idiot light (for those who want only that info) with a numerical real number for temp and oil pressure (for those to whom those mean something.)
Up to now neither GM, Ford, or Toyota have contacted me for this advice.
The small gauges are about the same price as the large ones in big volume. These companies sweat pennies, and few customers want any more than the warning lights. Some cars have more gauges, and if it’s important to you, buy them.
.
