1998 Oldsmobile Aurora Owner's Manuals

Power Antenna Mast Care
Your power antenna will look its best and work well
if it’s cleaned from time to time.
To clean the
antenna mast:
1.
2.
3.
4.
5.
6.
Turn on the ignition and radio to raise the antenna.
Dampen a clean cloth with mineral spirits or
equivalent solvent.
Wipe the cloth over the mast sections, removing
any dirt.
Wipe dry with a clean cloth.
Make the antenna go up and down
by turning the
radio or ignition off and on.
Repeat if necessary.
I NOTICE:
Don’t lubricate the power antenna. Lubrication
could damage it.
I NOTICE:
Before entering an automatic car wash, turn off
your radio
to make the power antenna go down.
This will prevent the mast from possibly getting
damaged.
If the antenna does not go down when
you turn the radio off, it may be damaged or
need
to be cleaned. In either case, lower the
antenna by hand by carefully pressing the
antenna down.
If the mast portion of your antenna is damaged, you can
easily replace it. See your retailer
for a replacement kit
and follow the instructions in the kit.
3-27

@b NOTES

@ 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.
Driving in Rain and on Wet Roads
City Driving
Freeway Driving
Before Leaving on a Long Trip
Highway Hypnosis Hill and Mountain Roads
Winter Driving
Loading Your Vehicle
Towing a Trailer
4-2
4-2
4-5
4-6
4-
10
4-13
4-13
4- 14
4- 16 Defensive Driving
Drunken Driving
Control
of a Vehicle
Braking Steering
Off-Road Recovery
Passing
Loss of Control
Driving at Night 4-
17
4- 20
4-2 1
4-22
4-23
4-23
4-25
4-29 4-3 1
4-1

“A
Defensive Driving
The best advice anyone can give about driving is:
Drive defensively.
Please start with a very important safety device in your
Aurora: 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.
Defensive driving requires that a driver concentrate on
the driving task. Anything that distracts from the driving
task
-- such as concentrating on a cellular telephone call,
reading, or reaching for something on the floor
-- makes
proper defensive driving more difficult and can even
cause a collision, with resulting injury. Ask a passenger
to help do things like this, or pull off the road in a safe
place to do them yourself. These simple defensive
driving techniques could save your life.
4-2

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:
0 Judgment
0 Muscular Coordination
0 Vision
0 Attentiveness.
Police records show that almost half of all motor
vehicle-related deaths involve akohol. In most cases,
these deaths are the result
of someone who was drinking
and driving. In recent years, over
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 U.S. 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:
0 The amount of alcohol consumed
0 The drinker’s body weight
0 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 - 1/2 ounces
(45 ml) of a liquor like whiskey, gin or vodka.

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 U.S. 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 BAC 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!

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.
~
Control of a Vehicle
You have three systems that make your vehicle go wher
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.
Avoid needless heavy braking. Some people drive in
spurts
-- heavy acceleration followed by heavy
braking
-- rather than keeping pace with traffic. This is a
mistake. Your brakes may not have time to cool between
hard stops. Your brakes will wear out much faster
if you
do a lot
of heavy braking. If you keep pace with the
traffic and allow realistic following distances, you will
eliminate a lot
of unnecessary braking. That means
better braking and longer brake life.