CitroJim's AX, C3 Picasso, Cycling and Running Tales

[CitroJim]

I found an interesting little 'feature' on the Pug of Love I first noticed it on Wednesday and again last evening on the way home from my normal Thursday evening run with the Redway Runners...

If it's raining and the front wipers are on, when you engage reverse gear the rear wiper starts up!

I think that's incredibly neat and clever

[elma]

The scenic had that feature. I also liked it very much.

[CitroJim]

The scenic had that feature. I also liked it very much.

I understand, from a FB post I made about it, the Clio has it too...

I only got a few pages read last night. There were some plumbing problems I had to resolve which took my evening up. First impressions are promising, the book was researched by interviewing people who actually worked at Bletchley. I hope to get properly stuck in tonight.

Hope this evening allows a bit more relaxed reading James Interested to hear your final review of this book... It really sounds promising if uses first-hand accounts from people who were there at the time...

[RichardW]

I found an interesting little 'feature' on the Pug of Love I first noticed it on Wednesday and again last evening on the way home from my normal Thursday evening run with the Redway Runners...

If it's raining and the front wipers are on, when you engage reverse gear the rear wiper starts up!

I think that's incredibly neat and clever

See, there are some advantages to the witchcraft that is multiplexing!! You can probably turn it off via the screen menu if you can find the right bit....!

[mickeymoon]

The Berlingo and 207 I have both have this feature. It's very useful!

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[CitroJim]

I agree it's useful Mike I'll be leaving it on even if it can be disabled in the witchcraft! I love that description of Multiplexing Richard

[van ordinaire]

I hit on this idea years ago, when thinking of retro-fitting a rear wash/wipe. My idea was that if the rear wiper was on, selecting reverse would switch it from its normal, effectively delay, mode to something akin to normal wiper speed. Of course, the switching is actually the easy bit!

[myglaren]

The rear wiper on the C5 estates do that too. Mine did - occasionally

[Hell Razor5543]

On my C5 the rear wiper stopped working. I found that the fuse had NOT blown, but had (on the fuse and the contacts in the fuse box) got a load of tarnish. Swapping the fuse in and out several times seems to have sorted that problem out.

[Zelandeth]

You think multiplexed electronics are a pain on a car - wait till you've tried to figure out a multiplexing issue on a bus - especially one where the engine and all the control units are at the back - but all the control inputs are of course at the front!

We had fun sorting that out...turned out to be dodgy wiring was causing one of the clock lines to periodically glitch, suffice to say that resulted in all manner of garbage appearing on the data bus and some truly bizarre faults appearing as a result.

Of course it was an intermittent fault as well wasn't it!

[Mandrake]

I found an interesting little 'feature' on the Pug of Love I first noticed it on Wednesday and again last evening on the way home from my normal Thursday evening run with the Redway Runners...

If it's raining and the front wipers are on, when you engage reverse gear the rear wiper starts up!

I think that's incredibly neat and clever

I noticed on my Ion that the front intermittent wipe settings are speed sensitive!

The delay is about twice as long when the car is stopped than when you are moving. Not sure that I see the use of that on the front window.

What would be more useful is an intermittent wipe on the rear window that stops above about 40mph when the slipstream diverts the rain from the rear window, but I haven't seen a car with that seemingly obvious feature yet...

[CitroJim]

What would be more useful is an intermittent wipe on the rear window that stops above about 40mph when the slipstream diverts the rain from the rear window, but I haven't seen a car with that seemingly obvious feature yet...

Good thinking Simon! It is obvious when you think of it... It's one of those thing that so far, nobody has.. I'd have thought it would be easy to implement too...

Patent it quick - you could make a fortune from it

You think multiplexed electronics are a pain on a car - wait till you've tried to figure out a multiplexing issue on a bus - especially one where the engine and all the control units are at the back - but all the control inputs are of course at the front!

The stuff of nightmares Zel, especially what caused it and the fact it was intermittent... The very worst!

Did it put any good messages on the destination boards or did they just go all corrupt?

[Zelandeth]

Don't get me started on destination blinds - especially the hellspawn to come out of the factories of Brite-tec. Don't think I've ever come across one that behaved.

What we had was basically a total and complete corruption of the data stream between everything in the cab and the bus itself. You'd be driving along all fine, then suddenly all hell would break loose, the ventilation system would develop a mind of its own, half the dash would light up like a Christmas tree (or just die entirely), and the engine would either decide to stop responding to the throttle at all, would decide that dropping into neutral and bouncing itself off the rev limiter was a good idea, or would sit there ramping itself between idle and max rpm repeatedly. You'd pull the engine stop lever, turn off the master switch, wait ten seconds, power the bus back up and it would all be back to normal.

Problem was that nothing showed up in the fault logs, and it took us forever to actually make it do it so we could witness the madness for ourselves.

Root cause of the issue? Poor quality cable loom clips.

[daviemck2006]

Was it an Alexander Dennis Zel? I found them always to have a mi d of their own.

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[Zelandeth]

Nope, worse! Optare Versa.

Have you ever had the misfortune as to ever have to figure out how on earth to start an Optare Solo? I still reckon to this day that they couldn't have made it more obtuse if they had honestly tried.

If it was meant to stop kids nicking the bus it didn't work either - few years back someone nicked a Solo from Bluebird's depot in Aberdeen in the middle of the night - not left running either, they actually started it and made off with it. No bus drivers in the family either...Few of us had a good brainstorming session as to how on earth they figured out how to start the thing!

Best Optare moment I've encountered though was in an ex-demonstrator Spectra (based around Scania running gear if I remember rightly, *might* have been DAF though). Being an ex demo vehicle, it had *all* the toys fitted, including cruise control (yes, on a city bus). While this initially just seemed an amusing curio, it didn't take long for someone at the depot to figure out an unexpected "feature" to the cruise system. If you set it to a given speed and then pressed resume, the computer system would proceed to calculate the fastest possible way to get back to that speed - completely irrespective of the normal gearbox behaviour, conservative rev limiter settings, available traction or G-forces that the human body can tolerate. I was told on that occasion away from a set of lights to let the brake off, and hit resume as soon as we were rolling. I got the fright of my life as the thing catapulted itself off the line faster than anything weighing north of ten tonnes has any right to. You should not be able to out-accelerate cars off the line in a double decker bus...

Sadly that one was a rental vehicle so it was only in our area for a couple of weeks, during which I only got to drive it twice. Comedy cruise control aside, was actually quite a nice thing to drive - Seem to recall my main irritating was that the indicators had a habit of not self cancelling and there was no (sufficiently) audible tell tale for them, and the light on the dash was tiny. Apparently the fuel economy was dire as well...I wonder why...