Maintain your contact patch — all of them

Auto enthusiast magazines use a two-word term to describe a vehicle’s connection with the driving surface: the contact patch. This refers to the total area of tire tread resting on the roadway at any given moment — about one square foot for the average four-wheeled vehicle.

This is obviously an important patch, since it’s the only physical connection your vehicle has with the surface, and you must maintain it to remain on the roadway. Loss of adhesion at the contact patch leads to stopping failure, slides, rollovers, and other misfortunes. Good tires with proper inflation, along with sound steering and suspension systems (alignment, shocks, etc.), are mandatory for a good mechanical contact patch.

I like to keep another contact patch in order too: the driver contact patch. Just like the vehicle, the driver has a physical contact patch — the hands on the wheel, the butt in the seat, and the feet on the pedal. The driver has something that the vehicle doesn’t have, though: the mental contact patch — attention to the situations at hand, and knowledge of the vehicle.

Your driver’s contact patch must be as constant as your vehicle’s contact patch. A driver who loses grip with the physical or mental connection to his vehicle may easily suffer a loss of the vehicle contact patch, leading to trouble. Your body parts — arms, hands, legs, feet, and brain for example — are your indirect connections to the roadway.

Your body gets a huge amount of sensory input regarding vehicle performance simply from sitting in the driver’s seat. Acceleration, deceleration, lateral G forces and other cues are all subconsciously processed while driving. These forces, aided by visual stimuli, are so powerful that they are the basis for many of the new virtual reality rides at theme parks. Exposing our bodies to sudden, short, changing G forces, along with accompanying video, these “rides” (that go nowhere) can simulate a rocket launch, or a lap on a NASCAR track without moving our bodies more than one inch.

That’s why our driver contact patches are so important — they allow us to receive data, and send the appropriate responses to our vehicles. After all, our Washington Driver Guide describes driving as “…one of the most complex things that people do”. The guide further reminds us, “It is also one of the few things we do regularly that can injure or kill us”.

Besides death or injury, a driver’s failure to maintain a proper contact patch may simply create aggravation for others (more pet peeves). For example, the apparent indifference to fully understanding one’s vehicle accessory controls is a flagrant driver shortcoming. As I’ve written before — your owner’s manual contains some valuable information — please refer to it.

One page in the manual skipped by many drivers is the one that describes lighting operation. Plenty of modern cars, trucks, and SUVs have auxiliary lighting in the form of fog, road, or driving lights. Fog lamps have a low, wide, bright beam that helps you see below the fog, while the road and driving lights give the driver longer range of sight on isolated roads at night. That’s great, but those lights are supposed to be turned off for oncoming traffic as with high-beam headlights.

I’ve talked to many drivers who are regularly annoyed and partially blinded by these lights that many drivers run at all times. Vehicles have a separate switch for these extra lights, but once that switch is on, these supplemental lights go on and off with the main lights. Some people evidently don’t remember, or don’t want to turn that extra switch on and off as driving conditions and traffic dictate, leaving those bright driving lights perpetually on, even when their high beam headlights are dimmed.

Some would say this is nitpicking, but I believe that proper operation of your vehicle lighting is one of the many elements of precision driving. You can avoid the temporary blinding of oncoming drivers by keeping your main lights properly aimed, and shutting down your auxiliary lights when not needed, or when other vehicles approach you.

For sure, your vehicle’s safety depends on a good contact patch with the road — but please remember the equal importance of the contact patch with the driver.

Driving pet peeves — Please keep them coming. I hear a lot of pet peeves from people when I’m out and about, and via e-mail — these make terrific column fodder, so let’s hear more. Another one I heard this morning: Why do some vehicles have that darker-than-dark window tinting? It’s disconcerting for some drivers to sit next to a blacked-out car at the stoplight. And further, since the law only allows a 30% dimming of the glass, why is the darker stuff being sold and installed in the first place?