Choosing The Right Driving Posture

When I learned to drive, I wasn’t told much about correct driving posture apart from ensuring that my feet could reach the pedals (obviously) and that my hands were in the “ten past two” position*. However, as time went on and I drove more, I soon came to learn that there’s more to sitting comfortably, and there’s a reason why car manufacturers take so much trouble with designing seats and making them adjustable in many different ways.

If you’ve felt stiff and sore after driving for a long time, then your driving posture might have something do to with it. Sitting down in a car seat is no different from sitting down in an office chair from some perspectives, and it’s important to allow for regular breaks during a long drive so that you can stretch your legs, etc. – just like you would if you were at work. Your office chair is probably not as comfy and cushy as the driver’s seat, unless you’ve done what I’ve done and converted the seat from an old Ford Falcon into an office chair (it’s a pig to move in and out, though, as I haven’t put castors on it).

Although the idea would be to get up every 20 minutes, we all know that this isn’t always possible when driving (every hour is more like it).  However, you can reduce the strain on your body – and it is strain – from holding in one position for ages by ensuring that you’re sitting correctly. If you’ve felt stiff after a long drive, then this might help you.

Everybody’s body is different, so I can’t give precise measurements and angles.  You may have long legs in proportion to your body, a big bum or a long back.  You may be a massive great big dude over six feet tall, or you may be a petite woman reaching five feet in her high heels.  This means that what’s ideal for you probably won’t be idea for someone else.  In fact, what’s best for you might not even be possible in some vehicles, so always test out the seats before you buy a new car.  This means that in the case of a couple consisting of the big dude and the petite lady, you’ll need to compromise (not ideal) or even buy two cars.

OK, to make sure you’re sitting comfortably, let’s begin with some basics. Take your wallet and/or phone and anything else out of your back pocket, because that will have an effect.  Now take time to find out what a neutral spine feels like.  A neutral spine is not a straight back, as the human spine is supposed to have a nice gentle S-bend shape to it.  Stand up and, if you can, check in a mirror side on.  Ensure that your weight is evenly distributed on both feet and don’t fully lock your knees.  Now imagine that there’s a string attached to the top of your head and that it’s pulling you up. 

For more help with knowing what a nice neutral spine feels like, I suggest chatting to your friendly local physiotherapist, taking up Pilates or both.

Now to get into the car.  Oddly, you need to start with the seat in completely the wrong position and then bring it into the right position.  If you’re doing this for the first time in a new car (or a car that you’re considering buying) then move everything as far as it can go – seat angle, steering wheel and all. Push the seat right back as far as it can go.  Now you’re ready to adjust it.

Let’s start with the seat height. In fact, the seat height is the least adjustable thing in many cars, so if you can’t get the height right, you may have to consider another vehicle. Your hips should be about as high as your knees or just a smidge lower (but not too low).  However, you shouldn’t be so high that you hit your head on the top of the car or that you have to crane your head down to see the instrument panel.  If you are too low down, you can use a cushion to get you high enough.  Also check where the edge of the seat is relative to the backs of your knees. If the edge of the seat pushes into your knees, this will restrict your circulation, and riding in that car will be very uncomfortable. Seriously, this matters.  I once owned a car that did this to me. It was great in other ways but the problem with circulation in the feet and legs was so bad that we sold the vehicle (hope it suited the new owner better). Reach down and see if you can fit two fingers between the edge of the seat and your knees. If you can, you’re all good.

Now bring the seat forward so you can reach the pedals (and the footrest) while keeping your back snugly against the seat.  You should have a small bend in your legs, as locking your legs for long periods isn’t all that good for them.  Your heels (in bare feet or ordinary shoes, not high heels) should be on the ground rather than dangling, and you should be able to push the pedal down with your heel on the floor as the fulcrum of a lever.  It’s possible to buy pedal extenders so you can do this if the car is perfect in every other way.  Of all the things that make driving tiring, an accelerator pedal that you can’t operate with your heel on the floor is the worst, and I’ve driven a couple.

If you can adjust the tilt of the seat, play around a bit until you find the position that gives you a neutral spine.  Women will naturally have a more forward tilt than men thanks to the shape of the female pelvis (high heels were invented to exaggerate this) but not too extreme.  Modern car seats have been designed to prevent “submarining”, which is when someone slides out under the seatbelt during the sudden stop in a crash, but this slightly backward angle isn’t all that good for our backs.  There’s not much you can do about this, so get the tilt as close as you can to what gives you a neutral spine.

Now for the seat back. This should not be at right angles to the ground (straight up and down) but it shouldn’t be so far back that it forces you/allows you to slouch your chest, head and shoulders forward.  Keep that spine in neutral position.  If you have lumbar support, this should sit snugly into your lumbar lordosis (the curve in your lower back just above your pelvis).  Some cars don’t have height-adjustable lumbar support (bad luck), and just have lumbar support that’s adjustable in terms of depth.  If your car doesn’t have lumbar support or if it’s in the wrong place for your body (I have a long back in proportion to my legs, so this happens to me a lot), then a lumbar cushion is worth buying and fitting to your car.

Moving on up, make sure that your shoulders can press against the back of the chair, then adjust the head rest. The head rest is supposed to be a head rest, not a neck rest, so sit with a neutral spine and ensure that the head rest touches the back of your head.

Now to adjust the steering wheel. You should be able to get both hands on it with a slight bend in your elbows – driving with straight arms puts strain on your shoulders and neck.  The best position isn’t “ten to two”, as I was taught, but quarter past nine (nine and three) down to seven and five.  Adjust the height of the steering wheel to suit you.

In a perfect world, we’d be able to customize everything so that it suited our bodies perfectly, especially when it comes to female bodies. Traditionally, car seats have been designed to fit the average male, but manufacturers have seem to have woken up to the fact that half of the population has a female body and are factoring this into their seat designs and safety features (Mazda and Volvo, for example).  That’s a topic for another day (and one I’ve discussed before) but in the meantime, if you aim to have a neutral spine and to keep a gentle bend in your arms and your legs while driving, you should be about right.

And don’t forget to allow for regular breaks to get up out of your seat during a longer journey.

So You Want To Be An Uber Driver?

Quite a few of you may have considered getting a few extra bucks out of your car by signing up as a driver for the rideshare scheme Uber or one of the similar schemes, such as Ola. But is your car suitable for this?  What’s more, if you are seriously considering the possibility, then what do you need to know when you go to buy a new car?

First of all, let’s get the disclaimers out of the way. I’m not affiliated with Uber, have never been an Uber driver, haven’t even been an Uber passenger, and get the urge to spell it the proper German way as Über.  My family members aren’t Uber drivers, although my son once thought about it and my brother used to operate a bicycle rickshaw taxi (and he’s not even Chinese). I’m not saying that you should be an Uber driver or that you shouldn’t be an Uber driver, or that you should consider some other rideshare service such as Ola or DiDi, etc.  It’s completely up to you whether you should or shouldn’t, and I’m not going to give you any advice in that direction. 

However, what I’m hoping to do with this article is to let you know what sort of car you’ll need if you want to sign up to the programme as a driver.  Because this company values its reputation – and no wonder, as it involves (a) getting into the car of a stranger (b) who you have only met online – it has strict requirements for the vehicles as well as the people who drive them.  So if your car doesn’t meet the grade, you won’t be able to hire yourself out as a driver.

The first requirement is that the vehicle in question has to be no more than 15 years old, with the age limit dropping to no older than 7 years for the Uber Comfort service and no older than 6 years for the Uber Premier service.  So if you own an old classic, I’m sorry: Uber isn’t for you.  However, if you own a classic car in good condition, you can still get into the car hire game by making your classic available as wedding car – something that really deserves an article of its very own.

The next thing that this rideshare company looks at is the number of doors your car has.  Sorry, but if you own a hot three-door hatch or a two-door sports car, it won’t meet the requirements.  The minimum number of doors is four.

Seating is also one of the factors that is important, for obvious reasons. Single-cab utes are out of the picture and not just because they usually only have two doors.  They’re also out because they can only seat a few people, and the minimum number of passengers that an Uber (or should that be “a Uber”? Depends on whether you pronounce it Oober or Youber) can take is four.  Surprisingly, there’s also a maximum number of passengers that eligible cars can have as well, namely seven, meaning that the car can have up to eight seats (one for the driver, of course).  If you own one of those minivans that seats up to 12 people, it won’t be eligible.

All cars have to be in proper working order, which includes the windows and the air-conditioning (which would have ruled out one second-hand van I once owned and was very glad to get rid of).  It also should not have any cosmetic damage, as nobody wants to turn up to a party in a shabby rustbucket.  It also has to pass its roadworthiness inspection, but that’s true of all cars. 

Safety, as you can imagine, is very important, so one of the requirements for Uber cars, in Sydney at least, is that they must have a five-star ANCAP rating.  If you’re not sure if your vehicle does or doesn’t, you can use the handy search tool provided by ANCAP.  

Quite a lot of vehicles meet the criteria, so a wide range of vehicles is part of the Uber “fleet” (you could quite justifiably call that a private fleet, but we’ve bagged that name!). Of the many cars that are part of the system, the most popular are the following:

• Toyota Camry
• Toyota Corolla
• Mitsubishi Outlander
• Mazda 3
• Toyota RAV4

Well done, Sherlock… you’ve probably already figured out that this list of the most popular Uber cars overlaps with the most popular cars in Australia.  Which makes sense, statistically speaking. 

Different types of Uber service also have other requirements.  For example, Uber Premier likes not just late-model four-door saloons, but they also have to have extra legroom for passengers, take no more than four passengers and be what Uber calls “high end” vehicles.  What it considers to be “high end” is subjective, but all the usual suspects make the grade: BMW, Mercedes-Benz, Lexus, Porsche, Volvo… 

Uber has a list of eligible cars for each category on one of its information pages (you can find it at this link). This list is pretty extensive and quite frankly, if you own a Ferrari, then you probably don’t need to pick up extra cash by joining a rideshare scheme. Unless you want to, of course!

An Anti-Stick Spray To Stop Boy Racers?

There’s a small part of most drivers that sympathises with boy racers. However, this small part tends to become miniscule to non-existent when you’re kept awake into the wee small hours by screaming engines on what is normally a quiet suburban (or rural) road, when you have to pick up debris left behind after the local boy racers have had a meeting, or when you’ve had a close call with a souped-up Subaru Impreza racing an equally souped-up Nissan Skyline.

However, they may have found a solution to this problem on the other side of the Tasman, where one local council, fed up by complaints, has decided to try spraying the roads with an anti-skid spray surface that increases the traction. This, they hope, will stop boy racers (and girl racers – let’s call them street racers from now on) having their competitions that involve skidding and loss of traction, which, as far as I can tell, tends to cover most of their antics.

Certainly, having a high-traction anti-skid spray on the road will discourage dangerous skidding. It will also help cut down on burnouts (which are usually more annoying than dangerous unless a handbrake gives way unexpectedly). The only snag is that these surfaces will make drag races easier, as all that extra grip would make for better acceleration.

This spray is not some new invention that this town council has dreamed up. Instead, it’s something that’s often used on highways in areas where more traction is needed, like tight corners. These sprays are also used in urban areas on approaches to pedestrian crossings, where cars are likely to stop suddenly.  According to Austroads, such sprays and coatings use binders modified by polyurethane and epoxy, and they are best applied to very clean and slightly worn asphalt surfaces. They’re used around the world. The only reason why roading authorities don’t use them on all parts of the road is that they are quite expensive to apply (they require a lot of prep and can only be applied to a perfectly clean and dry surface) and take a long time to cure.

Is there any place that these street racers can go to do fun manoeuvres like doughnuts, snakies and skids without risking their own necks or the necks of others? I’ve come across the solution in rural communities, where paddock racing is fairly popular. Paddock racing is fully legal, although the cars used for this bit of fun are usually ones that have been taken off the road. Ideally, paddock racing should be done on a nice wet field that’s due for ploughing and reseeding. As an added bonus, all those moves tend to spray up mud in a very satisfactory fashion – although attempts at burnouts tend to end up digging holes and getting stuck (and everybody laughs). Perhaps we could make use of vacant sections in towns?

However, many of those in the street racing scene get a buzz out of defying authority and because they tend to trick out their cars to look good – which doesn’t suit the mud. Therefore, we’ll still have to put up with late-night engine revving mixed with heavy bass speakers (at least we get an audible warning to watch out for street racers). It remains to be seen whether the attempt to stop street racing by applying high-traction surface treatments will be successful – but at least it’s less intrusive to the majority of road users than measures such as speed bumps and the like.

Opening Windows Versus Air Conditioning

When the weather gets hotter, it’s important to stay cool when you’re driving.  However, these days, it’s important to consider fuel consumption as well and get the most out of what you’ve paid for – and what we’re going to talk about in today’s article applies to electric vehicles as well!

The two best choices for keeping cool inside the car are using the air conditioning system and the old-fashioned method of opening the windows (if you’re over a certain age, you’ll always try to pantomime cranking a handle to indicate opening a car window.). However, you may have heard people tossing around the idea that opening the window is less fuel efficient. Or you’ve heard that using the air conditioning increases fuel consumption. Which of these is true?

It is certainly true that running the air-conditioning puts extra demands on the engine and consumes more energy when it runs (and this is true of internal combustion engines, hybrids and electric vehicles). This means that when you ask the system for some nice icy-cool air to flow through the cabin and keep you fresh rather than hot and bothered, you increase your fuel consumption.

However, opening the windows affects the drag and aerodynamics of your car. When they design them and test them, designers try to get the drag as low as possible, and they study the way that air flows around the vehicle at speed (usually using wind tunnels as well as computer modelling). This is done to reduce the amount of friction affecting the car, because the more friction that needs to be overcome, the more energy will be required, which requires more fuel, etc. etc. All these tests assume that the exterior of the car is rigid. However, when the windows open, all bets are off and the equations go out the window (almost literally). The open window affect the flow of air, which is how opening the windows cools you down, but it also increases turbulence.

The big question is which is worse in terms of fuel efficiency. Sweltering in the heat just isn’t an option – that’s downright dangerous, especially given some of the temperatures reached in some parts of Australia during summer. So what does the fuel-efficiency-minded person do?

The windows versus air conditioning debate has been going on for some time. In fact, the popular TV show Mythbusters had a go at it. They got both guys driving around a track in similar SUVs, one with the windows down and one with the air conditioning on to see which one ran out of fuel first.

The one with the air conditioning did, which looked like that case should be closed, but it’s not as simple as all that. Firstly, the Mythbusters test wasn’t a strictly controlled one. Even two vehicles of the same make and model will perform differently, depending on a range of factors, including the condition of the engine and the inflation of the tyres. Secondly, the two presenters have different builds and probably have different driving styles, simply because they’re different human beings. To be a more rigorous scientific test, the only thing different should have been the choice between air con and windows open. In other words, the test should have been conducted with the same vehicle driven by the same person with exactly the same conditions – which possibly wouldn’t be the case if you only drove the car once with the air con on and windows up, then with the A/C off and the windows down, as the operating temperature of the engine (cold start vs. hot start) also affects the fuel efficiency. Lastly, one test isn’t enough in the world of science – one result could be just a one-off exception. The ideal is to run test after test after test and see what the general tendency is.

It also gets more complex than that. It turns out that the more aerodynamic a vehicle is to start with, the bigger the effect of drag will be. In other words, in a smooth, sleek sedan, the effect of opening the windows will be greater in terms of percentage than opening the windows on a big chunky 4×4.

To cap things off, speed also has an effect. This is because the faster you go, the more air resistance your vehicle encounters, so the drag increases, and they increase exponentially. This means that if you’re driving at 100 km/h, the effects of drag are four times greater than what you experience at 50 km/h.

The problem was put to a team of actual engineers who ran a proper scientifically rigorous test* to solve the problem. They used two vehicles, a 2009 Ford Explorer to represent the big SUVs and a 2009 Toyota Corolla to represent the sedans. They were tested in the lab and on the road at a variety of speeds and at idle. Here’s what they found:

• At 40–70 miles per hour (that’s 64.4–113 km/h), in both vehicles, turning the air conditioning up to the maximum (which is how they ran the tests) used more fuel than opening the windows.
• Above 70 miles per hour (113 km/h), the two cars behaved very differently.
• At 75 mph (121 km/h), in the Toyota Corolla, there was no difference between having the air con on and having the windows down.
• In the Toyota Corolla, at 80 mph and above (that’s 129 km/h – did they test this legally on an actual motorway or did they have their own circuit somewhere?), having the air conditioning on was more fuel efficient than opening the windows.
• In the Ford Explorer, having the windows down continued to be more fuel-efficient than using the air conditioning.

The study also tested the air conditioning at different settings other than full blast, but you have to pay to see those results!

Of course, not all cars are Toyota Corollas and Ford Explorers, and each has its own drag coefficient and intrinsic fuel efficiency. However, a good general rule of thumb is that if you’re travelling around town, windows down is more fuel efficient. In small sporty vehicles, using the air conditioning is best at open road speeds, but having the windows down is more efficient for big chunky ones.

Here, I will have to add that there are some other advantages of using the air conditioning rather than opening the windows. Firstly, if the outside air is already hotter than comfortable, you’ll only feel a small drop in temperature if you open the windows. It might not be enough to drop temperatures of 40° or more to a nice comfortable room temperature of 18°C. However, the air conditioning will really drop the temperature to this ideal level.

The other problem is that it isn’t just air that can get through the window when its open. Having half a swarm of bees going through the window isn’t the best for safe driving. Nor is having a wasp fly through the window a good idea. Worse still are stones flying up. I’m not making this one up. Last summer, when we were towing a caravan with the windows down and had pulled over to let someone pass, a stone flicked up, glanced off the wing mirror and flew through the open rear window and hit my adult daughter in the face.  A freak accident, I know, but I know that from now on, both she and I will be using the air conditioning on the open road.

* Huff, S., West, B., and Thomas, J., “Effects of Air Conditioner Use on Real-World Fuel Economy,” SAE Technical Paper 2013-01-0551, 2013, https://doi.org/10.4271/2013-01-0551.