Just one foot, please

As a driver trainer, I always feel uneasy when I teach senior males.

Some of them have an awfully bad habit of driving an automatic transmission with two feet: the left foot on the brake and the right on the gas pedal.

In a panic situation while applying the brake with the left foot, the right foot is braced on the gas pedal. We all know that this kind of "pedal misapplication" will cause the gas pedal to win all the time. To the driver, it will seem as if the vehicle does not want to stop, and in fact, it will feel as if it is accelerating in an unwanted manner.

By the way, I find the same problem with some immigrants who have had previous driving experience only in standard shift cars, who do not know what to do with their left foot in an automatic transmission vehicle.

Rest assured that I am talking with authority on this matter. Please see my photo of my former driving school, where a senior who was a two-foot driver drove through the windows by "pedal misapplication."

Dez Miklos, Hamilton

Car sounds and smells

are for the dinosaurs

Too small a car, too high a cost

Robert Herjavec, Feb. 20

Thank you for your thoughts on the Tesla Roadster. It's always interesting to hear what a non-journalist thinks.

I'd like to offer a counterpoint to Robert Herjavec's main assertion that the Tesla lacks the critical ingredients of smell, sound and sight (looking at an engine) that a traditional sports car brings to the driving experience.

His perspective is coloured by a generationally induced belief in what a sports car is, or should be. To a certain extent, as a 40-year-old, I share those beliefs. But we are dinosaurs.

The linkage between performance and any of our senses other than feel, is arbitrary – based as it is on decades of cars that sound, smell and look like beasts from the underworld. Awesome, aren't they?

But that was then. The most recent batch of car buyers didn't grow up with Steve McQueen, Sean Connery or David Hasselhoff driving pure-blooded horsepower monsters. They will judge performance based on the only criteria that matter on streets or on the track: speed and handling.

As long as their car looks the part, the smell and sounds won't matter at all. In fact their absence might be a new standard against which all other vehicles are measured.

So while I also feel the roar of a V8 is something wonderful to hear, it is no longer a sound associated purely with power – it now sounds like callous disregard for the rapidly diminishing resource of oil and a rapidly warming planet.

That thought will be more than enough to relegate it to curio status among future car buyers.

Simon Cohen, Toronto

Please don't let Norris

write about NASCAR

Norris McDonald is obviously a fan of open wheel racing. If he is going to write a column on racing, don't let his prejudice show every time he writes about NASCAR. Please let someone write about NASCAR who cares as much as Norris cares about Formula One.

There is a saying: "If you can't say anything nice, don't say anything at all." To write in his Feb. 27 column that NASCAR is a "big, dirty business" is completely uncalled for. His Jan. 2 column also presented such a negative view of NASCAR that one would wonder what realm he lives in.

This organization is in as good a shape as any open-wheel group. NASCAR has gotten along for 60 years without his input. I'm sure they will survive when things are tough for all parts of the economy.

Jack McInnis, Paris

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