« Previous How Internet Tubes Deliver LOLcats | Sports Truck: Not As Cool As It Sounds Next »
Submitted by: zoeperzazke via Submit a Kludge!
Favorite Comment: Fixer Chad says, “Its the missing link! This is how cars started to evolve into ones that could drive on the left side of the road.”
 | John on How It’s Made: Wooden La… |
 | Sarge on How It’s Made: Wooden La… |
 | Tom on How It’s Made: Wooden La… |
 | eurocrap on Moving Priorites |
 | Sandflyer on Hungarian Heating |
 | Triklops on Softcover Collectors Pay No… |
 | Juro Maia on How It’s Made: Wooden La… |
| Juro Maia on How It’s Made: Wooden La… |
 | Vaelin on Spin Spin Spin Spin Spin… |
 | Will on Softcover Collectors Pay No… |
Uh-huh. That cliche bumper sticker, “Forget world peace, Visualize using your turn signals”?
That said, though, pretty impressive work-around. Wonder if it’ll pass inspection.
Isn’t this what driver’s education instructors use? Although they leave the wheel on the driver’s side too. And they add pedal extensions so basically they have a complete redundant set of controls on the passenger side. I think it’s legal, though. That’s the point I was trying to make
They use a double set of pedals, but not a double steering wheel. If they need to, they can grab the steering wheel out of the student’s white-knuckled grasp.
Then what is going on here?!?!
This is a conversion kit to make a vechicle right hand drive so that postal workers have better control of the wheel, I used one when I was a rural carrier.
Why don’t they just get cars with bench seats and a column shift auto like they did when I was a kid?
cuz that would be cheaper…. they have to find ways of meeting their fully allocated budget
All I can say is “The Frick”. That is so crazy and cool at the same time. American Wannabe’ British People.
This is for the mail-people. Since the driver side is on the left (in America), and the mailbox is on the right, putting stuff previously stated mail reciprocal can be a bit difficult without some aide. Thus, this wonderful work came to be.
Your posties drive the mail in cars? How odd. Ours either walk or ride motorbikes.
Some have many miles to cover. Mine may have 50 each day, maybe more.
Yep. I live out in the boonies and the mail routes cover nearly half the county.
and this stops you using a “postie bike” (small capacity scooter good for 50-60mph, with a good sized topbox)… how, exactly? ‘specially when a fit person could cover that distance on a pedal cycle in the space of a working day…
Because where I live, Temps can get anywhere from -20ºF to 115º in the summer. And, not to mention, most of the counties near me are very hilly and covered in gravel. Have you ever ridden 60 miles on a bicycle in those conditions?
Not to mention, I’d like to get my mail before dusk sets in. I live in the boonies in Ok, and I know exactly what you’re sayin, dude. I’d feel sorry for our maildude if he had to ride a bike down one of the endless dirt roads around here. They don’t pay enough for that.
ssssssssssssssssssssssspppppzam
They also tend to leave a wheel behind for the student to use…
I was taught in a dual control car, all they get is a brake (and in manuals, a clutch). The idea seems to be that student drivers can generally be trusted to point the car in the right direction (kids can do it in powerwheels after all) but they might not be entirely familiar with the pedals. In a panic they’ll either mash the gas or just do nothing and let it freewheel (proving you can actually handle an emergency stop is a fairly common test item after all). The instructor therefore only really needs, in an emergency, to slap on the anchors (e-brake isnt good enough) and optionally remove power by hitting the clutch or pushing the shifter to N. There may be a little steering correction needed, but that can be done with a slight tweak by one hand.
I guess this guy got too tired of hearing his wife nagging about his driving?
That’s much funnier than whatever I was going to come up with!
Much funnier than tell your wife to STFU?
And then you go to bed without sex?
Both This Picture and This Comment are WIN
Well… This works with steering.
The pedals are still on the other side… As are the other important things, like the light switch and the windshield wipers.
Sorry for not knowing the correct terms for those.
I see rods and gears going to the pedals…
Take a closer look, there is a cantilever linkage for the pedals.
Ah, true.
Another import from the continent…
thats awesome, he should sell it!
even the pedals are done!
shame about the gear stick and dials
All he has to do is wear some Pimperfish-eye glasses and those gauges and dials will appear straight ahead in his field of vision, right below the horizon.
Actually, it’s an Automatic with the “gear stick” in the middle console.
What would be the problem with the gearstick? Unless of course this comes from some backwards part of the world where column shifts are still common
As for the dials, what, can’t you see the speedo from the passenger seat in a normal car? The other ones aren’t so important to keep a constant vigil on, so long as you have temperature and fuel warning lights.
For the UL Emigre who simply cannot abide the American custom of port-side steering, we bring you The Encyclodrivica Britannica.
This may be a good way to teach driver’s ed. Maybe.
That does not look like a cheap job. You know, a second-hand import from Japan would have solve this problem.
Not if it’s a particular vehicle for a commercial purpose. Plus you have all the ball-ache of getting the thing imported, which adds lots of hassle AND cost even if it does get through your draconian emissions tests. Whereas a few bits of metal, a sturdy drive-belt and a couple hours of fitting labour? Not so much.
Pretty well done!
I guess that they don’t plan to use the wipers, horn, turn signals or look at the dials that often..
As mentioned elsewhere, this is a pro kit for postal deliver drivers.
Many keep the headlights and hazard lights on all the time, so it’s not like they need switches for those, and turn signals don’t work when all four are flashing already.
Sure, the wipers aren’t as convenient as stock, but it’s not THAT difficult to reach across for those few times when you need to change that setting.
It wouldn’t be real hard to swap over some of the controls in general. Hell, use some cheap toggle switches if need to.
So why not just get the car built with RHD? Over here (UK) street sweepers are LHD so the driver is closest to the kerb, but they are built that way, not converted with little more than a hammer post-production…
Anyway, Why can’t the lazy postman get out of the car?
I know here in Ontario, Ca street-sweepers and garbage trucks have dual controls. Hasn’t stopped them from still smacking into curbs and cars. My car for instance.
It’s a Jeep Cherokee XJ … they came from the factory with the option of right hand drive. Granted this person probably bought it used.
This looks like some sort of professional kit to convert a US car for left-side road driving.
My mother (who is a rural mail carrier) said that that’s exactly what it is. I was like, “Darn…”
Indeed, it is, as others have said. I’ve lived in a very rural area of the US for many years, most postal vehicles are outfitted this way – though some only use pedal extenders and don’t add a second steering wheel. Wouldn’t much trust driving amongst the maniac here with the steering wheel on the other side of the car/truck though. Bleh.
That’s what I was going to guess.
Could be a US-Euro conversion.
This is a commercially avalible kit, its not anything he came up with…
What happens if the airbags go off?
If they’ve got their hands at 10 and 2, some spectacular palmface!
I don’t get the title, is it that someone is using their own car to deliver mail, so they’ve put the driver’s side on the opposite? ‘Cause I assumed this was a Brit “fixing” an American car.
FedEx and mail vehicles also have their steering wheel on the wrong side in the States… I think…
Here (in continental Europe), I’ve seen UPS delivery vans with the driver on the right hand side (and a sliding door, reducing damage to pedestrians).
And the ice cream truck! Mustn’t forget about that one!
Rural mail drivers in the US don’t usually get an “official” postal service vehicle, so I imagine stuff like this happens a lot. Next time I see such a vehicle I ought to take a closer look, because now I’m really curious.
This is a standard jeep conversion kit. Many of my co-workers have this set-up. Second set of pedals below and airbags are disabled. not very comfortable to drive, have to reach over to use wipers and horn…
Right. As an extra tidbit, newspaper delivery drivers are allowed to drive on the opposite side of the road in some locations. It took me forever to get used to that.
Yeah, thanks for explaining. I didn’t get it, either.
Rural mail carriers are contractors, and not USPO employees. They also drive their own cars.
Because rural mailboxes are on the side of the road, and often, very very far apart, it’s not an option to walk. If you can’t get a RHD car, you have to modify what you have.
In Southern Oregon, RHD (or conversions) Subaru wagons are very popular. I have a friend who is a mail contractor, and also drives her Subaru as her daily driver. She sits on the right side and drives, and her husband sits in the back seat (driver’s side), because she has removed the passenger seat to hold the mail bins.
Oncoming traffic tends to freak out. It’s beautiful.
Ahhh…I’ll jump on the ‘thanks for explaining that’ bandwagon. I kept reading the comments about this being a conversion for postal delivery, and was wondering why they were using a converted car instead of the ‘normal’ postal vans (I’m not rural, obviously.
) Now if you could just explain why someone’s posting a picture of a professional conversion kit on a site for fails and horrifying or dangerous kludges, I’ll be all set…
My dad was a rural mail driver for a while, and he had to use our regular van to deliver mail. The post office (the one in our town, I don’t know about others) doesn’t provide anything like that (I’m going to assume the people who say it’s a professional package are right). So he ended up sitting in the passenger seat and using the driver’s side pedals and steering wheel.
No, we’re not that stupid. Those of us who HAVE to have an unusual import that never got a RHD conversion just drive the back-to-front car as-is and suffer the increased insurance costs and occasional reduced visibility. Means little if you spend a lot of time in dual-carriageway or one-way-street environments anyhow, and overtaking opportunities on single carriageway roads are rare these days…
is that osha approved
only if a “competent person” has signed off on it.
But that “competent person” keeps tipping a small flask over their coffee mug.
OMFG, a 100% plausible post posing as a joke!
How many people do you think actually will get your reference?
I’ve seen this before. Yes, many rural route mail delivery folks in the USA work under contract driving their own vehicles. However, most I’ve seen don’t remove the steering wheel from the normal place, but do have something like this professionally rigged-up (in other words, two steering wheels) so they can make mail deliveries.
I’ve seen the same thing, Moxie Man.
Getting tired of having to tell the passenger, “Here…take the wheel!” all the time, an inventor constructed this proof-of-concept car. Without an effective means to signal or read the instrument panel, however, all it really proved was that you should steer clear of making these modifications to your own vehicle.
All it’s missing is the beer holder.
Why not just buy a car from Europe and bring it back home?
Why do people keep suggesting to “buy a car from Europe”? Europe drives on the same side that the States does. Britain =/= Europe. Every year, some number of European tourists die on British roads trying to go the wrong way ’round in a roundabout. True story. The suggestions about Japan or UK make more sense.
funny that you don’t much hear about brits doing similar though. i wonder if it’s some kind of conditioning thing, that a lot of us become used to the idea of swapping sides when travelling…
first time out that i had to operate a LHD car on the right-hand side of the road, it wasn’t too bad except for positioning (tip: regardless of what side you’re on, line up your nearest headlamp housing with the centre line) and completely confusing what lane I had to be in to exit a small and badly made spanish roundabout. It’s not particularly difficult to see which way you should be following around the road features. Consider it a particularly complicated left hand bend, if needs be…
I thought it was some sort of European life assimilation kludge.
Actually, every car in Europe has the steering wheel on the left side, only the Brits (and Irish) drive on the wrong side of the road…
uh … ok… hope that’s a joke
wait ….. no… sorry, got distracted. ignore that.
Because most of Europe drives on the right side… (only a car from Britain would work)
Or Malta! Don’t forget about Malta!
They also drive on the left, but then again, they’re almost British as well.
And Japan and Australia. Think that’s it. Oh and South Africa.
Ancient Rome drove on the left. Cyprus, Guernsey, Ireland, Isle of Man, Jersey, Malta and the United Kingdom all drive on the left. As do Australia, Hong Kong, Singapore, New Zealand, Bangladesh, India, Pakistan, Sri Lanka, Malaysia and South Africa . Thailand, Indonesia, Bhutan, Nepal, East Timor, Japan, Samoa, Guyana, Suriname, and the Pacific Island Nations do too. In total, 76 nations, dependencies, and territories drive on the left.
and taking a car from any of those to the united states would still be more expensive and more of a pain in the butt than doing this conversion
if it was that cheap & easy, you think kits like this would exist? I mean, we have RHD Jeep Cherokees ourselves. come. take one. you can have it with the far more efficient (for delivery duties) V6 turbodiesel, or at least a small-capacity straight 4. Good luck getting either of those buggers through the compulsory tests.
I’ve seen people importing unique VW models that have had to ditch the excellent engine that was the entire reason for shipping it over in the first place, and make do with some lesser shoe-in (slower, less efficient, noisier, far older design… that somehow meets the regs when the newer one couldn’t) because the only alternative is a total loss – paying to ship the car back to europe or abandoning it to the authorities’ tender care.
this is why you don’t get stuff like the Lupo, (small) Fox, Polo, (proper) Fiesta, or Yaris/Echo/Fit without something of a fight, or TDis from anyone but VW despite pretty much every manufacturer except SOME american and japanese marques offering them over here. never mind the buyers market itself – it’s not worth their while getting something that’s not a large capacity gasoline model through all the red tape and BS.
NZ as well as Oz. And Singapore and a few other west pacific nations. And quite a few other African nations, ie ones that were former british colonies (Botswana and the like)…. it’s quite a list actually. It’s just that the RHD ones tend to be those which get a lot of attention on the world stage.
Because that would be expensive.
Some English just refuse to fit in
Too right!
How is this ghetto?? There were two Jeeps like this last month alone on craigslist…
many jeeps on the road are (or were) official postal delivery vehicles. a lot of them end up sold to public when they get replaced. i’ve seen quite a few right hand drive jeeps driving around… many of which only get a can of paint sprayed over the postal logo.
often bought by individuals or small businesses that do a lot of roadside deliveries.
I AM referring to jeeps manufactured as right hand drive though.
The old AMGeneral “Jeep” Dispatchers (DJ-5) trucks that the USPS sells off are thoroughly clapped out by the time they get rid of them some are a long way north of a Million Miles.
This kind of kludge is the only other option to doing a frame-up restoration on an old DJ-5. Think “Overhaulin’ ” without the 500-HP V-8.
And you can’t just import a European RHD car – they don’t meet FMVSS standards for sale in or import to the US. The DJ’s fall through the cracks, as they were purpose-built for the USPS.
Also, I think the USPS stopped selling them a few years ago. Something about not selling cars to the public that don’t meet normal safety standards.
The steering wheel position counts as a safety standard?
Where do they stand on stuff like the McLaren F1, then?
This is a standard conversion kit for rural mail cars. Nothing to see here move along.
I hope this scares more people than just me
You should see them trying to deliver mail without the kit. Now *that’s* scary.
I dunno, get something with a sliding door on both sides and a column shift / footwell parking brake, lose the passenger seat, it’s not so bad?
Odd thing is, I haven’t seen anything equivalent to this in the UK (or in europe). We also have door to door deliveries by van but seem to get along ok. Not sure how the difference comes in. Maybe it’s that our guys just draw up on the opposite side of the road anyway and we dodge them like we would any other parked vehicle.
“Well, we could have gone two ways. We could have ordered an European jeep, had it shipped over at great costs, gone through customs, and gotten it here in the middle of the country, again, at great costs to taxpayers. Or we could find an old steering wheel, a belt, and given you a stick to work the pedals. We chose the latter.”
yeah, rural drivers do this often – but the kits i’ve seen usually use a chain. That belt could slip, which would be bad. The pedal linkage looks sketchy, as well.
i’d bet that the wheel detaches and plugs back onto the left side for normal operation…
Wait a second, this heap would be “perfect” for the 24 Hours of LeMons! O gawd, lets not give them ideas!
Or could that be Le Mans perhaps?
I’m going to assume you don’t know about the wonderful and dangerous American hobby of racing $500 dollar cars for 13 hours. Lemons = LeMons.
Greatest racing sport, this side of rally cross!
http://www.24hoursoflemons.com/
I remember my Dad telling me about some sort of modified road cars used for racing (maybe stock cars? Not sure) where the steering wheel was in the middle of the car driven by a bike chain.
I’d be concerned about the V-belt slipping too. They could at least use a toothed belt. Or, as other posters have said, buy RHD vehicles. Over here in the UK we buy LHD trucks for things like road sweepers so the driver can easily see to follow the kerb.
A “toothed” V-belt is for increased flexibility, not engagement with any toothed pulleys.
V-belts are more than adequate for delivering tens to hundreds of horsepower (think commercial air compressors, many pumps, many gocarts, etc) without slipping. I think they are more than adequate for delivering the sub one horsepower you are likely able to enact upon the steering wheel.
On the other hand, if you mean a “toothed” belt in the style of many motorcycle engine->transmission or transmission->drive wheel – those teeth are present because it is a flat belt and flat belts are more efficient. A v-belt is less efficient than a flat toothed belt, while only a little less resistant to torque-induced slippage.
So you mean the teeth on my car’s cambelt and the matching cutouts on the pulley ARENT there to allow it to keep an absolute relationship between the crank and the cams, thus avoiding the pistons mangling the valves (and the water pump stopping) even if e.g. I drive through a ford and suffer brief, noisy, but ultimately harmless slippage of the non-toothed accessory belt?
Jog on…
However the accessory belt doesn’t slip in any appreciable fashion either, if kept dry and appropriately tensioned – and that has to deliver at least 3 or 4 horsepower (to the alternator, power steering pump, aircon compressor…) with high rpms. This belt is about twice the width of a typical one of those and is responsible for much lower duties. I wouldn’t worry about it.
The detachable steering wheel idea has legs though. It would explain the wierd, but matching design of the two pulleys.
It needs an extension lever for the turn signal.
This would make a great race car.
One driver doing the steering, the other doing the braking and accelerating.
I think I’ve seen in Top Gear but they stack two cars on top of each other.
re: Top Gear– that episode was especially hilarious!
Good Idea, but….
You sir, are screwed when you need to use the wipers or the headlights.
assuming you have very restricted upper body mobility that means you can’t lean over for half a second and tweak the control sticks, that are easier to get to without the wheel in the way.
Or… take the kludge further, all they do is operate contact switches that run through the fuse box, it’s a comparitively simple job to wire in secondary ones that leave the originals in place. Three 3PSTs for the turn signals, side/dipped headlamps, and wipers (off, intermittent, low speed – if you need high speed then the post’s going to get soaked anyway) and a couple SPSTs for main beams (flash by just turning it on and off quickly) and washer jets. I managed to do this in my brother’s car for the IGNITION after all (one switch for accessory, one for main systems, a third for the starter) when his lock was mangled by an unsuccessful thief…
The UK has always been slow to change.
And here we see one of a number of metamorphoses that the Pimperfish undergoes as it migrates from its native shores of the Western U.S. to the European coasts.
Its the missing link! This is how cars started to evolve into ones that could drive on the left side of the road.
Fail…. Driving on the left hand side was how things started, so it would have evolved to driving on the right hand side, not the other way.
yeah, horseback riders had to have their arm with the sword on the right side …
…except that passing on the right is actually the mutation, and passing on the left is the original form? Jury’s out on whether it’s actually an improvement, detriment, or if it just doesn’t matter (for automatics, anyway).
Wow… Used to be a nice Jeep Cherokee…
It reminds me of all of Red Green’s car modifications.
Dear Diary,
Today I decided I wanted to be a mailperson. Why, you ask? Simply this. They have a spinning piece of rubber on the wheel! Not only that, the wheel is on the /wrong side of the car/!!! How awesome is that? I could totally pretend I was in Scotland! Then I’d be the Scottish Mailperson!!!! Still not sure how I would make the car go, with the peddles on the other side, though…
this kludge is for a giant hamster who drives around in clockwise circles for exercise.
normally they leave a wheel on the left as well.
Just buy a Jeep or Subaru and get a real right hand drive.
There are a couple rural carriers in my area that have RHD Jeeps or older AMC Eagles and such. Definitely easier to drive than this add-on kit.
As for RHD vehicles being road-legal in the US, they are indeed if they meet the foolish US vehicle standards that seem to keep decent vehicles out of the country. lol
What? This is nothing! I worked at McDonald’s on the drive through for a while, and a post officer worker would come through on occasion who had a similar build… only made out of plywood and duct tape! I am disappoint.
Actually this is pretty common for Post Office workers who use their own vehicles on rural routes. My brother used to deliver mail for USPS, and he put one of these in his Honda CR-V. Before that he’d sit in the middle of his car and steer and control the pedals. He decided to get the conversion kit when he noticed how often he’d smack into mailboxes doing it.
I wonder if they have anything like this for a motorcycle.
herds789, you actually made me laugh…………
I once took my brother’s handlebars on my bike. He came home 4 hours later fuming mad. I couldn’t steer it from mine.
They have sidecars made so the “passenger” controls the rig. Most are for wheel chair confined bikers.
very odd. the motorcycle class machines i’ve seen for the differently abled tend to be standalone trikes that you wheel your existing chair up onto… though having a back-to-front sidecar arrangement would be useful for actually taking (terrified, with nothing to hang on to) passengers!
So this is what they meant when they said we’re gonna buy a convertible…
Share the driving experience
Now this car is half way to being able to drive in Australia.
Unsafe! Even the police will tell you that the last place you should take a big belt is behind the wheel of a car.
“You work the pedals and ill steer”
There’s an actual kit you can get to do this, …
Just order a Right Handed Jeep Wrangler!
$20,000+ brand new automobile, meet $250 universal kludge.
All I can think of is, that belt is a hurtin’ waiting to happen. The thing could snap of course, but also imagine if that driver touches it with his thigh….
wow! that’s so incredibly dangerous! i mean, it’d be almost as bad as touching the moving steering wheel with your leg! or the seatbelt!
… what?!
That’s nice and all but what do you do about the dashboard? Is driving that even legal? >.>
This setup is pretty common for delivering mail. Not seeing the kludge I guess. Maybe I’ve been living in the woods too long.
Nice….so much better than my mom sitting on the center console to be able to deliver the mail in a standard jeep.
Agreed. That’s the same thing my mom has to do.
OK.
So I get that this is for mail deliveries but I still don’t understand why.
Why does delivering the mail mean you need to be on the wrong side of the car?
Because mailboxes are seldom found in the middle of the road. To insert mail into a mail box, you either need to reach through your passenger-side window, or get out of your car.
Because that’s the side the mailboxes are on.
Because most mailboxes are on the side of the road. Now if we started putting mailboxes in the center of the road, right on the yellow lines, there’d be no need to convert the drive.
If the postal service could make a sport out of such an arrangement, I bet it would generate some much-needed revenue.
Slalom-post-racing? Sounds fun AND dangerous!
So it’s for people who are too lazy to get out of the car?
Stop, shut off car, Look for traffic (sometimes with no view around a corner or over a hill), get out, walk around your car (potentially with an armfull of mail), place mail in box or boxes, check traffic, walk back to car, get in, restart car, repeat for 500 to 600 boxes (some are grouped). How do you think you’d do? Not to mention -
1. you’ll never even get close to the 2 second per box quota.
2. you’ll work most of your day for free because they only pay for the hours the route is rated for.
3. spend more on fuel than your puny fuel and maintenance stipend.
4. replace your starter every couple of months.
5. drive without a door because it fell off (if some inattentive driver didn’t run into it and rip it off).
6. get yelled at by your supervisor because you are holding up the dispatch truck (takes the outgoing mail).
7. get fired for failing to perform the minimum requirements of the job.
this is nothing unusual for rural post offices. they buy vehicles from auctions and convert them to postal carriers…cheaper than buying a new postal truck every year because of the bad roads
What scares me most is what happens if the passenger side air bag deploys ???
Excuse me sir, do you drive on the right or on the wrong lane of the way?
transformer half way from car to mech
To add to the discussion about countries driving on the left, and their being former british colonies, I think Sweden used to drive on the left and they decided to change (in the ’70s I believe), which was probably a good thing to do back then, and might not be possible nowdays with all the infrastructure (crossroads and their traffic lights, white lines, signs, etc.) being more numerous and complicated to change… However, I’ve heard that it was the norm to ride (horses) on the left so that you could protect yourself with your right hand (and sword) if the traffic opposite turned out to be thieves. Napoleon for some reason decided that people (carriages, etc.) would drive on the right and as he was a great conqueror, enforced it in most Europe except, as always, for the Brits who always resisted him…
Chain & pulley rig to switch on lights, windscreen wipers etc removed for clarity, as were the prisms and mirrors needed to read the instruments.
This is of course hideously dangerous and the person responsible should be shot for not using an approved duplex chain-and-cog setup to relocate the steering wheel rather than the bits off an old hi-fi.
It may have been easier to move to Australia. Ours cars are made with the steering wheel on the right already.
Officer: Do you know what speed you were doing back there?
Driver: Nope
Driver: Honey tell the officer what speed I was doing
Perhaps that’s the reason I don’t bring English cars to the US (and vice versa).
never get into an accident. passenger airbag would certainly kill you.
Wait, what about the tu….
Never mind; who uses them anyways?
I would just like to point out that most people used to drive on the left, even you americans. So the caption about evolution is technically wrong.
Let me guess – a British person bought an American car and had it altered to avoid learning how to drive from the other side of the car!
Ahha there we go, http://www.postalthings.com/right_hand_drive_kits.htm
isnt it mr. Beans Car?
Waste of a perfectly good ’97-’01 Jeep Cherokee. It wouldn’t pass inspection in NY, the release button for the parking brake is broken off. He should’ve just come up to the local college here. The automotive program has a RHD ’96 that never made it to Athens, Greece! It was really weird driving it from the wrong side.
I’m a mechanic and have been for years and I hate to say this, but I do believe this car would pass the MVI. I would certainly call the Ministry and ask, but so long as all the bells and whistles work, I do not believe the placement of the steering wheel matters.
There are some oddities though. For example, a car missing it’s engine will not pass. What could be safer you wonder? The mising engine means if you have power steering it can’t work, therefore it doesn’t pass.
Safety inspections are the biggest pain going. Not because of the inspection, but because of the new or old owners being total prats.
This is the car designed for blind driver’s. You see, the passenger in the left can make sure they’re travelling at a ‘safe’ speed.
Adaptation Complete. (said Borg Queen and entered Great Brittany)
I’m just ganna say this one thing…. I hope took out/deactivated the passenger side air bags….
You bring it here Customs TAKES ur drivetrain, take there and they ADD a steering wheel….WTF America! I feel used.
Steve was angry about Burger King. There was as this one and only fast food for a hundred miles around his village and they missed to build the drive-in counterclockwise around the building. There was no way he was parking and then walk into the restaurant. But how should he… Oh snap he thought. And made this. Colleagues say it totally kicks ass
Great idea if you want to get into the glove compartment with ease.
However, reading the speedometer and gauges and reaching the turn signal lever will be a challenge.
This is pretty cool – they do these conversion in South America to make mountain driving easier, particularly on the Unduavi-Yolosa Highway in Bolivia also known as the “Road of Death”. They switch the driver seat to the right side for 2 reasons: 1 – if 2 vehicles collide on the narrow, mountainous dirt road, there is a better chance of survival, 2 – it is cheaper to do the conversion then to import right side drive vehicles.
Here is link with more info about the road: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yungas_Road
I have seen some dangerously stupid things done, but to think that a government department would let employees use something like this is beyond belief
The sad thing is that American emissions aren’t anything special, there is no reason why a RHD car couldn’t be imported to do the job. Looking at http://www.postalthings.com/right_hand_drive_kits.htm, apart from the Chrysler minivan and the Scion (whatever that is)- every other car on their list is made in RHD versions and as they use exactly the same motors, body panels etc as the US versions there is no reason why they couldn’t be imported
Although why they can’t do like we have and just use the Honda `postie’ bikes or something similar- much better than a car anyway. Our posties are legally allowed to ride along the footpath to put the mail in the letterboxes
That kludged up system wouldn’t be allowed to even be parked on the street here, let alone be driven
Eventually, it will be difficult to drive with all those missing fingers.
http://postalpete.com/
Here’s a solution!
Uh, why not just import a right hand drive vehicle?
This seems pointless to me, it’s not something you would easily convert back and forth in a half hour as needed.
The rubbish trucks here are just built with dual controls.