Nigel Grainger brings together a related set of skills that all fleets require, to greater or lesser
degrees, but which may not have the staffing or the skills to fulfil those needs.
Bringing his wealth of experience in all areas of fleet management he offers a bespoke service through his company Fleet Risk Consultants, providing you with a cost effective fleet that complies fully with your 'duty of care' requirements.Why you really SHOULD read the manual.
Last week I attended the scene of a minor collision within the confines of a car park. The incident was caused because the driver of one of the cars had failed to apply the handbrake in accordance with the instructions provided by the manufacturer.
The trouble with modern cars, which generally are now fitted with disc brakes at the rear, is that when the vehicle is parked with hot brakes and the handbrake applied without being fully tightened, when the brakes cool down the handbrake then releases and the vehicle will roll freely.
This is what happened in the case last week, the lady had parked her car facing down a small slope and it rolled down into another vehicle. It was obvious after the incident that the handbrake was still applied, but obviously not correctly. The really silly thing is that it was an easily avoided incident.
As I explained to the lady, if she had left it in gear (Reverse in this case) the car would not have rolled down the hill at all as the gearbox would hold the car stationary. This is the case will all vehicles and is why I always leave my car in gear, just in case.
As we are always saying here, read the handbook and know the rules.
Nigel Grainger
Senior Consultant
Fleet Risk Consultants
August 19th, 2009 at 10:26 am
Hi Nigel,
I am the inspiration behind blindedbixenon and similar to your handbrake story but far worse was trying to find drivers that had read their handbook on the headlight scroll switch if they had one. I have spoken to about 30 Police officers so far and two were driving vehicles at night and did not know they had a switch and because they were officers of the law I did not pursue those that were able to tell me and I am sure some more of them just had it but did not use it properly.
I am hoping with your help to found who invented the headlamp scroll switch and what car company and vehicle was it first used on and is the inventor still alive.
My aim is safer driving at night and to reduce that 40% of all accidents that happen in the hours of darkness.
It would be a bonus if you and all your colleagues would vote on my e petiton at number 10 which can be found on my website on the legislation & contacts page. I have support from [ADI's] Driving Instructors and many others and the miss use of lights at night plus the out of date RVLR1989 is inadequate for the bi-xenon headlamp as instances of blinding are reaching epidemic proportions.
Ken Perham
blindedbixenon.co.uk
Ps I have a brilliant story on a driver who works for onstream gas and drives a Vauxhall Vivarro Van and many more if you find my studies interesting. In fact I have over a years work on the subject of poor night driving and have driven myself at night for almost the last 37 years.
August 22nd, 2009 at 11:05 am
Isn’t it a pity that some manufacturers cannot design an effective handbrake system. Leaving a vehicle in gear whilst stationary (although an accepted safety measure) is not always failsafe, I have been involved with several accidents where cars were started whilst in gear, even one or two where someone was crushed between two vehicles because a vehicle was started whilst in gear and jumped forwards or backwards.
October 22nd, 2009 at 8:46 am
I once had the misfortune of driving a Daewoo hire car in which the handbrake had the opposite problem – when you released it and lowered it to a horizontal position, it wasn’t fully off, you had to lower it BELOW the horizontal to fully disengage it. It wasn’t obvious that this was even possible. I figured it out eventually having generated some smoke
The real problem here is archaic handbrake design, it surely isn’t rocket science to design something that latches and unlatches simply and which has a visual indicator of whether it is properly locked/unlocked.
November 14th, 2009 at 2:36 pm
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