Side-effects: What aggressive driving does to your vehicle…

I decided to officially start this blog with a post regarding a subject I’m quite familiar with – vehicle mechanical health. I’ve spent long hours under the hood of my cars and while I might not be a seasoned pro, I can at least decode the rattles, squeaks and hums an engine makes to know when to change the oil, plugs, filters, etc.

Now a lot of people may argue that there’s no difference between the kind of aggressive driving you would do during fits of road rage and the kind of driving you’d do on a race track. And if your car is up to the task (e.g. if it’s a well-engineered sports car), rough driving will not adversely affect its health or longevity. This is not true. Even if you drive something as well built as a top-tier German luxury sedan, the nature of belligerent driving practices will take its toll and wear out mechanical components faster than relatively frequent track use.

When you’re on a track, a scenic country road or high-speed freeway, where any red-blooded gear-head would be tempted to drive enthusiastically, you’re likely to use a certain degree of finesse in all your inputs – better times won’t result from sudden jerks on the steering wheel or mashing of pedals. Any good driver knows that the smoother you are with your inputs, the better your car will follow its “racing line”. During fits of rage, however, you’re more likely to do the exact opposite: you’ll brake abruptly, weave between lanes with erratic tugs at the steering wheel, accelerate suddenly, etc.

So, what’s all this doing to your car? Well, simply put, in “rage-mode” you’re subjecting the components of your engine, transmission, brakes, suspension and tires to physical forces delivered in lumps rather than with the deliberate consistency of “wannabe-racer-mode”. Let’s take a look at each component at a time and compare enraged driving to civilized, but fast driving:

Engine: 

There is a level of commonality in how your engine is used during spirited driving and how you’d drive if suffering a fit of rage. For example, in both scenarios you’re likely to be putting more strain on your engine compared to when driving slowly – this strain comes in the form of letting your engine run in higher “revs” or revolutions per minute than usual. This is not intrinsically damaging to your engine, provided that your engine is designed to handle sustained hard-revving, and that you keep your motor well-maintained. The main down-side to the kind of hard-revving you’d do during rage-driving is that it’s neither sustained nor smooth in its delivery. Unless you have an EV, PHV or FCV, chances are your internal combustion engine will have the same results.

Sudden kicks to the throttle are likely to damage your throttle-linkage (a cable that connects your gas pedal to the throttle body/bodies in the engine); newer cars are likely to have electronic or “drive-by-wire” throttles, taking the cable out of the equation, but the throttle body itself has a thin metal plate which rotates to let air into the combustion chamber which can become damaged as a result of erratic acceleration habits.

Raising and dropping revs suddenly can also result in stress on your valves and cylinder heads which are a robust yet delicate assembly of small metal components moving at very high speeds. This in turn can increase the wear and tear on the belts/chains connecting the various pulleys connecting different rotary components in your engine bay, such as the power steering pump, air-conditioning compressor, etc.

The most extensive damage to your engine during road-rage is likely to come in the form of heat. What some drivers fail to realize is that the main difference between driving fast on a track or open road and driving fast through city or high-way traffic is, well, traffic. On public roads you’re often coming to a halt, meaning that there’s less air passing over the hot components of your engine. Even if your engine is water-cooled (and it is most likely to be unless you’re driving an older Porsche, Fiat, Volkswagen, etc.), water is only cooling the engine block and part of the cylinder heads – the rest of the stuff in your engine needs air to cool down. The worst part is that there’s usually no way of monitoring these temperatures since the gauges only report the water temperature in your radiator.

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Transmission:

This is the most common victim of aggressive driving, especially in cars equipped with manual transmissions (stick-shifts to you Americans). Simply put, if you’re enraged, you’re inclined to making quick starts off the line and screeching your tires to show contempt – this means you’re revving harder than ideal and letting the clutch go abruptly. End result? You’re burning and/or warping your clutch, release bearing and flywheel. In automatics, there’s no clutch to speak of (thus, to burn), but conventional torque converter automatics, in my opinion, are hardly up to the job of tackling the occasional highway sprint, let alone survive frequent road-rage. Automatic gearboxes are likely to just die as a result of continued abuse. Tougher “sporty” automatics such as those from Mercedes-Benz, BMW, Audi, Porsche, Jaguar, Lexus etc. are likely to survive a lot more punishment, but suffer from poor driving habits all the same.

Other parts of the transmission likely to suffer from bad driving behavior are the differential(s) which can overheat, constant-velocity joints which can crack or shear, and the gear linkage, which can get disconnected from the gearbox as a result of sudden jerks to the shifter in a manual car.

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Brakes:

Hard braking is another thing which draws parallels between sporty driving and enraged driving with the same set of differences as hard acceleration. While during track days or your weekend cruise you’re likely to brake hard but do it smoothly, chances are you’re not as polite with your braking etiquette when you’re raging. So, what’s this doing to your brakes? First, it’s wearing out your brake pads. Now I’ll have to be honest here. You’re likely to do tons more damage to your brake pads on the track than you are anywhere else, but that’s because you’re usually using your brakes to shed a lot more speed than on the road. Compared to a calm and collected method of driving however, rage-driving will still do a several fold more damage to the brake pads.

Other components likely to get damaged (which probably would survive well under track stresses) are the brake rotors, which can warp from repeated and erratic hard braking, the master cylinder and brake booster which can overheat, and you’re more likely to boil the brake fluid which can, in turn, damage other brake components.

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Suspension and Steering:

This is an easy one, drive angry and you’re likely to drop your car more often into potholes and run headfirst into speed humps with little regard to the stuff holding your car up off the tarmac. I’ve seen a few ragers, however, who have an usual habit of destroying every part of their car in fits of rage, except the suspension – they’ll kill the engine, brakes, transmission etc. but they’ll slow down for speed humps… Weird. So, what part of your suspension are you hurting if you’re an aggressive driver? Well, that depends. Depends on what kind of car you have, how hard you go over bumps when you’re mad, how often you notice potholes, and so on. The parts you can hurt include the springs and dampers (shock absorbers) which will suffer more wear and tear the harder you run into bumps and dips, the sway (or anti-roll) bars which can get snagged on or scraped by tall bumps such as paving slabs, and the suspension bushings which will wear out over time anyway, but wear out faster the quicker you drive over rough surfaces.

The steering system in your car, whether unassisted, hydraulically assisted, or electro-mechanically assisted is a difficult component to damage no matter how miserably you drive when you’re angry. Parts which will likely fail as a result of sudden jerks to the wheel include the control arms which can come aloft in poorly built cars, and the power steering pump in hydraulic PAS systems which can overheat and lose power steering fluid.

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Wheels and tires:

While you’re not going to do much damage to your wheels other than scraping them against the curb, your tires are going to need replacing very quickly if you’re a rager. This is partly due to the damage you may have already done to your suspension which in turn may have resulted in incorrect wheel-alignment, and partly due to the bad acceleration, braking and steering habits which burns more rubber off your tires than calm civilized driving would. Again, as with brake pads, track use, drifting, burnouts and other spirited driving is many times more likely to destroy tires, look at it this way: you’re ruining tires, but at least with that you’re getting fun in return. With rage, you’re losing tires while feeling miserable at the end of the day.

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So that covers all the mechanical components which suffer as a result of deplorable driving habits, but what about the body of the car itself? While most rage-prone drivers won’t deliberately run into another vehicle, impaired judgement during moments of rage can result in fender benders, scratches and scrapes and unsightly dings on the body of your vehicle. While some people may not care about the physical appearance of their car, it does affect the subconscious mind of the driver – particularly the part of the driver’s psychology which processes their attitude toward driving behavior. A later post on the psychology of road rage will cover this issue more in detail.

At the end of the day, the true cost of the damage done to your vehicle is… er… the cost! Whether you choose to repair and maintain your vehicle across the time of your ownership or decide to sell or scrap it when its outlived its use. Physical damage done to your vehicle will inevitably lower its residual value, and again depending on what you drive and where you live, maintenance and repairs will take a sizable bite out of your wallet.

What’s your say on this post? Do you agree/disagree? Has road rage caused damage to your vehicle? Leave a comment, a reply or a story of your own to share with others, and with that, do drive safe.