Reviewing a textbook in driver education

Irresponsible Publishing

Robert A. Pease

I say: Be careful if you read driver-education books -- you may die of misinformation.

Mark Twain's advice was intended to be funny. Mine is not. Mine is a reaction to my reading of Glencoe's Responsible Driving, a book that teems with errors, misconceptions, self-contradictions and omissions, including some that are demonstrably dangerous. For example:

• On page 101 the writers of Responsible Driving casually say that "Cruise control wastes fuel if used in areas with steep hills or mountains." They say no more about this matter, and a student will infer that, if he is willing to accept a trivial increase in fuel consumption, it's okay to use cruise control while driving over hills and mountains. Well, it's not okay -- it's dangerous. Here is the real reason why you shouldn't use cruise control in such circumstances: If you are cruising up a hill, and if you come to a curve just as the cruise-control apparatus forces a downshift, you can easily lose control of your car.

• On page 246 the writers give a single categorical formula for responding to a skid: "With your foot off the pedals, steer in the direction you want the car to go." That advice is simple-minded, inadequate and wrong. Steering "in the direction you want the car to go" can often be effective during rear-wheel skids, but it is useless during front-wheel skids ("plowing" skids), and it may even prolong the skidding and make recovery more difficult. The writers of Responsible Driving evidently don't know this, and they don't say anything about the actions that you can take to recover from front-wheel skids.

Some of the material in this book appears to mock the very title Responsible Driving. For instance: On page 84 the writers ask, "When Should You Yield the Right of Way?" -- and then they tell the student that he must yield to an emergency vehicle, to any blind person who has a white cane or a guide dog, and to "any pedestrians at crosswalks." That advice is irresponsible and inexcusable. There is no excuse for leading a student to believe that he can intimidate, or drive over, anyone who isn't blind or isn't in a crosswalk.

Some other items are just silly, dumb or careless. On page 20, for example, a boxed article titled "Building Map Skills" includes a small road map of some territory in southern California, and the accompanying text says: "You're going to travel north on highway 79 to Route 10 and then southwest to Indio." Now look at the map. It shows that a driver must go southeast on Route 10 to reach Indio. (Maybe the writers need to work on building their map skills.)

Still other items are noticeably outdated, such as the various passages in which the writers refer to carburetors and automatic chokes. (Automobile-makers abandoned carburetors and automatic chokes in the 1980s.) Even worse is the "Math Connection" box on page 288, which is a leftover from the days before truth-in-lending laws. The writers purport to show how to "Calculate the interest on a car loan to estimate the monthly payments," and they use this example: If you borrow $2000 for 24 months at 12% interest, you can repay your loan by making 24 equal payments of $103.33. Some example! It's based on an obsolete interest-computation formula that is now illegal! (If you were to pay $103.33/month for 24 months, the effective interest rate would be about 19% -- not 12%.)

In one respect, however, Responsible Driving is just as current and up-to-date as it can be. To comply with the fad for warbling about "cultures," the writers of Responsible Driving have plastered the book's pages with silly, completely irrelevant "Cultural Crossroads" items. These items don't have anything to do with driving, and most of them don't have anything to do with any culture, either. Most of them consist of drivel about "cultural" groups which are entirely fictitious. The writers have even invented a "cultural" group consisting of movie stunt-women who are deaf! [See "Meet Deaf Kitty" on page 4 of this issue.]

Does Glencoe really expect us to believe that, at some time between 1947 and 1997, the AAA's staff forgot how to read a map?

Maybe not. Maybe we should believe that the people who cannot read a map, and who invent goofy "cultural" groups, work not for the AAA but for Curriculum Concepts. I say this because another note on the copyright page of Responsible Driving declares: "Editorial Development in Cooperation with Curriculum Concepts, a Division of Dialogue Systems, Inc." What does that mean? I do not know. There is no way to be sure about who actually wrote Responsible Driving, but I do know this: Because Glencoe is the book's publisher, Glencoe must answer for everything that appears on the book's pages.

Glencoe should be ashamed.

The AAA should be ashamed, too -- ashamed to see its name and logo displayed on this shoddy, sloppy book. To show the AAA what I mean, I'll cite some more things that I noticed as I examined Responsible Driving.

• On page 31, in chapter 2, the writers say that "Lack of sleep is now recognized as perhaps the leading cause of traffic fatalities -- even ahead of drinking." But on page 42, in chapter 3, they declare that "at least half of all highway deaths are alcohol-related." (So much for the notion that "the leading cause" is lack of sleep!) Now turn to page 92, in chapter 5: In the boxed item that purports to enumerate the "five leading causes of collisions," lack of sleep isn't even mentioned! (What can a student conclude from all this? That the folks who wrote the various chapters of Responsible Driving didn't read each other's material. Maybe they were too sleepy.)

• Page 74: "Traffic signals keep traffic moving in an orderly manner and to indicate the right of way." Go ahead, read that one aloud.

• Page 84: "Right-of-way laws of all states are based on the Uniform Vehicle Code. Therefore, the laws about when drivers should yield the right of way are the same from state to state." Not true! Right-of-way laws can and do vary among the states.

• Page 88: In an article labeled "The Social Studies Connection," the writers say: "[In Mexico and Canada] speed limit signs refer not to miles per hour but to kilometers per hour. The speed limit sign you see here means 100 kilometers per hour . . . ." What sign? I don't see any sign here. I don't see any illustration at all.

• Illustrations on pages 103, 221 and 224 purport to show the blind spots associated with various vehicles. The illustration on page 103 is pretty good, but the ones on pages 221 and 224 are botched and mislabeled.

• Page 125: The writers claim that one reason for downshifting is "to steer effectively." I'd love to hear them explain that.

• Page 127: "The time it takes to accelerate from one speed to another is the rate of acceleration." Wrong! A "time" is not a "rate." These writers must have flunked high-school physics.

• Page 234: Here the writers begin a chapter titled "Natural Laws and Driving," in which they give more evidence that they flunked physics. Their material is confused and inaccurate, and it includes stuff like this: "The faster a car moves, the more energy of motion it has. If a car's speed doubles, its stopping distance increases by an amount equal to the square of the difference in speed." No! The writers apparently heard, once upon a time, that a car's stopping distance is proportional to the square of the car's speed, and now they have guessed that the square of the difference between two numbers is the same as the difference between the two numbers' squares. It isn't, and any student who can do arithmetic can demonstrate that the writers are wrong.

• Page 239: Here's another item from the "Natural Laws" chapter: "Don't overload your car. Every 100 miles that you travel with extra weight costs you 1 mile per gallon." That is nonsensical because the effect of overloading on the rate of fuel consumption isn't related to the distance traveled. However, the effect is related to the amount of overloading -- a point that the writers haven't grasped. They think that no matter how much (or how little) weight is added to a car's load, the car's fuel efficiency is always reduced by "1 mile per gallon." Poppycock!

• Page 143: "Driving on hills takes special effort, regardless of whether your car has an automatic transmission or manual transmission." This is true, but it obscures a more important point: On hills and in various other situations, driving with an automatic transmission requires less thinking and less effort than driving with a stick shift.

• Page 187: The photograph on this page was obviously taken through the windshield of a car that was straddling two lanes. The caption says: "You are driving through the city during rush hour. What steps would you take to manage visibility, time, and space?" Well, the first step would be to stop hogging two lanes!

• On page 306 the writers say that a fuel-injection system "injects the correct fuel-air mixture into the cylinders." Wrong!

• Page 307: "The pipes that make up the exhaust manifold collect unburned gases from the engine . . . ." No! The exhaust manifold collects combustion products. (These writers -- whether they work for Glencoe or the AAA or Curriculum Concepts -- seem not to have a clue about what happens in the cylinders of an ordinary automobile engine.)

• Page 310: The writers say that "[your car's] engine temperature may exceed 4,000 degrees F." Nonsense! The predominant materials in typical engines are aluminum alloys and steel, and these materials melt at temperatures well below 4,000º F. (Aluminum alloys melt at 1,200º F or so.) In any case, the term "engine temperature" is meaningless without some explanation, because different parts of an engine operate at different temperatures. The best way to describe "engine temperature" is to cite the temperature of the circulating liquid in the engine's cooling system. Typical values range from 180º to 230º F.

• Page 331: Here an illustration purportedly depicts lateral forces caused by the wind that a big vehicle generates as it moves along and displaces air. These forces are shown as a series of identical vectors distributed uniformly along the vehicle's entire length -- but in real life, a large vehicle's lateral-wind effect originates chiefly, and dramatically, at the vehicle's front. (It's too bad that the people who produced Responsible Driving have never passed a big truck while driving on a highway.)

• Page 335 has a summary of the "Key Points" in chapter 17. An entire line of type is missing from the list of key points for "Lesson Three."

• Page 355: Here a car's cooling system is said to force air "over metal cooling vanes that surround the cylinders." If you want to see a system of that sort, you may be able to find one in an old Volkswagen or Porsche -- but not in most of the cars that are being manufactured, sold and driven today.

I have made a point of looking to see what Responsible Driving says about rotary intersections, because these intersections (which are also called traffic circles or roundabouts) can be dangerous. A student needs to know about the special hazards that they present. Moreover, the right-of-way laws pertaining to rotary intersections have been altered, in some jurisdictions, during the past few years. I see, however, that Responsible Driving doesn't mention rotary intersections at all.

Maybe the writers had to skip the topic of rotary intersections so that they would have enough space for their article about deaf stunt-women, or for their blathering about the evils of alcohol.

The discussion of alcohol and of drinking in Responsible Driving is both irresponsible and unacceptable. The writers deal in disinformation and scary double-talk, they deliberately confuse any and all drinking with alcoholism (and being a "problem drinker"), and they preach that the student must never take a drink, ever:

The only way to be sure of not becoming a problem drinker is not to pick up that first drink. . . . choosing to drink guarantees [sic] the chance [sic] of becoming addicted to alcohol. . . . There is no such thing as responsible drinking. . . . Alcoholics Anonymous is listed in your local phone book. AA is an organization for people who feel that they might have a problem with alcohol or know that they have a problem and need help. . . . Alcoholism is a disease. Its consequences are devastating, . . . . The best defense against this disease is to say "No" when you are offered that first drink. [pages 40 and 41]

This strident, quasireligious stuff goes far beyond any realistic consideration of drinking and driving, and the writers squander their own credibility. Most students, I believe, will reject the extreme claim that "There is no such thing as responsible drinking," and most will reject the suggestion that anyone who takes a drink has a disease, or a defect of character, and should immediately dash to an Alcoholics Anonymous meeting. Most students will recognize that the writers of Responsible Driving are seeking to con them. Good! -- perhaps this will help the students to resist some of the writers' other excesses, such as the unexplained, unqualified claim that alcohol can cause "cancer."

[Editor's note: The scientific literature pertaining to the carcinogenicity of ethanol is complicated, and epidemiological studies of the occurrence of specific cancers in heavy drinkers are often weakened by the presence of confounding factors, such as malnourishment and smoking. While many questions remain unanswered, the existing literature seems to justify these statements: Heavy drinking can promote liver cancer; the combination of smoking and heavy drinking promotes oral, pharyngeal and esophageal cancer; and the combination of smoking plus drinking is more strongly correlated with oral cancer than is smoking (by itself) or drinking (by itself).]

I could cite more examples to demonstrate how the writers of Responsible Driving deal in false "facts" and lame illustrations, insult the student's intelligence, devote space to trivia while ignoring things that are important, and preach like a bunch of nannies. I believe, however, that I've said enough to show you why I regard Responsible Driving as a case of irresponsible publishing.

Robert A. Pease is a senior engineer with National Semiconductor Corporation (in Santa Clara, California). He writes a regular column -- "Pease Porridge" -- for the magazine Electronic Design, and he has published two books: Troubleshooting Analog Circuits (1991) and How to Drive into Accidents -- and How Not To (1998). He undertook the latter book after one of his relatives was killed in a traffic accident.

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