1997 PONTIAC PONTIAC Owners Manual

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Section 4 Your Driving and the Road
Here you’ll find information about driving on different kinds of roads and in varying weather conditions. We’ve also
included many other useful tips on driving.
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4-3
4-6
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4-9
4-11
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4-13
4-13 Defensive
Driving
Driving Drunk
Having Control
of Your Vehicle
Your Braking System Information
Anti-Lock Brake Information
Trac System
Braking in Emergencies
Steering Tips
Off-Road
Recovery Tips
Passing Other Vehicles 4-
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Losing Control of Your Vehicle
Night Driving
Driving in Rain and on Wet Roads
Tips Before Leaving on a Long Trip
Avoiding Highway Hypnosis
Driving on Hills and Mountains
Winter Driving
If You’re Caught in
a Blizzard
Loading
Your Vehicle
Helpful Hints for Towing a Trailer
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Defensive Driving
The best advice anyone can give about driving is:
Drive defensively.
Please start with
a very important safety device in your
Pontiac: Buckle up. (See “Safety Belts”
in the Index.)
Defensive driving really means “be ready
for anything.”
On city streets, rural roads or freeways, it means
“always expect the unexpected.”
Assume that pedestrians
or other drivers are going to be
careless and make mistakes, Anticipate what they might
do.
Be ready for their mistakes.
Rear-end collisions are about the most preventable of accidents. Yet they are common. Allow enough
following distance.
It’s the best defensive ‘driving
maneuver, in both city and rural driving. You never
know when the vehicle
in front of you is going to brake
or turn suddenly.
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Drunken Driving
Death and injury associated with drinking and driving is
a national tragedy. It’s the number one contributor to
the highway death toll, claiming thousands of victims
every year.
Alcohol affects four things that anyone needs to drive
a vehicle:
Judgment
0 Muscular Coordination
Vision
0 Attentiveness.
Police records show that almost half of all motor
vehicle-related deaths involve alcohol. In most cases,
these deaths
are the result of someone who was drinking
and driving. In recent years, some
17,000 annual motor
vehicle-related deaths have been associated with the use
of alcohol, with more than
300,000 people injured.
Many adults
-- by some estimates, nearly half the adult
population
-- choose never to drink alcohol, so they
never drive after drinking.
For persons under 2 1, it’s
against the law in every US. state to drink alcohol.
There are good medical, psychological and
developmental reasons for these laws. The
obvious way to solve this highway safety problem
is for people never to drink alcohol and then drive. But
what if people do? How much is “too much”
if the
driver plans to drive? It’s
a lot less than many might
think. Although it depends on each person and situation,
here is some general information on the problem.
The Blood Alcohol Concentration (BAC) of someone
who is drinking depends upon four things:
The amount of alcohol consumed
The drinker’s body weight
The amount of food that is consumed before and
during drinking
0 The length of time it has taken the drinker to
consume the alcohol.
According to the American Medical Association,
a
180-lb. (82 kg) person who drinks three 12-ounce
(355 ml) bottles of beer in an hour will end up with a
BAC of about 0.06 percent. The person would reach the
same BAC by drinking three 4-ounce
( 120 ml) glasses
of wine or three mixed drinks if each had 1-112 ounces
(45 ml) of a liquor like whiskey, gin or vodka.
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It’s the amount of alcohol that counts. For example, if
the same person drank three double martinis (3 ounces
or
90 ml of liquor each) within an hour, the person’s
BAC would be close to 0.12 percent.
A person who
consumes
food just before or during drinking will have a
somewhat lower
BAC level,
There
is a gender difference, too. Women generally have
a lower relative percentage of body water than
men.
Since alcohol is carried in body water, this means that a
woman generally will reach a higher BAC level than a
man of her same body weight when each has the same
number of drinks.
The law in many
U.S. states sets the legal limit at a BAC
of 0.10 percent. In a growing number of US. states, and
throughout Canada, the limit
is 0.08 percent. In some
other countries, it’s even lower. The BAC limit for all
commercial drivers in the United States is 0.04 percent.
The B’AC will be over
0.10 percent after three to six
drinks (in one
hour). Of course, as we’ve seen, it
depends on
how much alcohol is in the drinks, and how
quickly the person drinks them.
But the ability to drive is affected well below a BAC
of
0.10 percent. Research shows that the driving skills
of many people are impaired at a BAC approaching
0.05 percent, and that the effects are worse at night. All
drivers are impaired at
BAC levels above 0.05 percent.
Statistics
show that the chance of being in a collision
increases sharply for drivers who have
a BAC of
0.05 percent or above. A driver with a BAC level of
0.06 percent has doubled his or her chance of having a
collision.
At a BAC level of 0.10 percent, the chance of
this driver having a collision is 12 times greater; at a
level of 0.15 percent, the chance is 25 times greater!
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The body takes about an hour to rid itself of the alcohol
in one drink.
No amount of coffee or number of cold
showers will speed that up. “I’ll be careful” isn’t the
right answer. What
if there’s an emergency, a need to
take sudden action, as when a child darts into the street?
A person with even a moderate BAC might not be able
to react quickly enough to avoid the collision.
There’s something else about drinking and driving that
many people don’t
know. Medical research shows that
alcohol in a person’s system can make crash injuries
worse, especially injuries to’ the brain, spinal cord or
heart. This means that when anyone who has been
drinking
-- driver or passenger -- is in a crash, that
person’s chance of being killed or permanently disabled
is higher than if the person had not been drinking.
. Drinking and then driving is very dangerous.
Your reflexes, perceptions, attentiveness and
judgment can be affected by even a small amount
of alcohol. You can have a serious -- or even
fatal
-- collision if you drive after drinking.
Please don’t drink and drive or ride with
a driver
who has been drinking. Ride home in a cab;
or if
you’re with a group, designate a driver who will
not drink.
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Control of a Vehicle
You have three systems that make your vehicle go where
you want it to go. They are the brakes, the steering and
the accelerator. All three systems have to do their work
at the places where
the tires meet the road.
Sometimes,
as when you’re driving on snow or ice, it’s
easy to ask more
of those control systems than the tires
and road can provide. That means
you can lose control
of your vehicle.
Braking
Braking action involves perception time and
reaction time.
First, you have to decide to push on the brake pedal.
That’s
perception time. Then you have to bring up your
foot and
do it. That’s reaction time.
Average reaction time is about 3/4 of a second. But
that’s only an average.
It might be less with one driver
and as long as two or three seconds or more with
another. Age, physical condition, alertness, coordination
and eyesight all play a part. So do alcohol, drugs and
frustration. But even in 3/4 of a second, a vehicle
moving at
60 mph (100 km/h) travels 66 feet (20 m).
That could
be a lot of distance in an emergency, so
keeping enough space between your vehicle and
others
is important.
And,
of course, actual stopping distances vary greatly
with the surface
of the road (whether it’s pavement or
gravel); the condition
of the road (wet, dry, icy); tire
tread; the condition of your brakes; the weight of the
vehicle and the amount of brake force applied.
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