2008 Pontiac G8 GT: How Long is Your Commute?

That is a helluva annoying feature IMHO who stops every two hours when taking a long distance trips? I know i dont.

How stupid.

Ya you should totally put the car in neutral while driving 80 mph on the highway, then quickly turn the ignition off and back on! ...the car potentially refusing to restart without the gear in Park...
Dangerous I know.
Some police car pulls up behind you.
The car made me do it, officer. There are no picnic tables under a tree around here.

What a stupid big brother feature. Who makes this car; Toyota?

Rest reminder... Oooh nice tree and bench, how relaxing! Thanks G8, im ready for another two hours thanks to your little display!

On the DIC go to Customize Options -> Trip Computer -> Rest Reminder to disable the "feature."

That is very... what is the word I'm looking for... polite... Australian... certainly its considerate.

Or do they expect the car to overheat after 2 hours?

I think its due to Australia having extremely long, straight roads and a high rate of driver deaths due to falling asleep. I think I read somewhere that they have the longest straight road in the world.

From personal experience I know that Audi and BMW both have warnings at the 2 hour mark to maybe pull over and stretch your legs. I have a 48 mile one way commute and in the winter time when it's snowing I have seen this warning more times than I would have liked.

Surprised Dan has never seen this before, must not drive longer than 2 hours.

My 2008 Subaru Legacy GT chimes whenever you have driven for two hours (it has a trip-timer that auto-starts everytime you start the car). It then chimes for every hour after that.

It did this for hours 2, 3, and 4 for a recent trip. So I imagine it was just saying "holy cow this is a long trip. Don't you have to pee yet?"

On a side note, the LGT made it from Holderness, New Hampshire to West Chester, PA on a single tank of gas. I STILL haven't figured out how it did that....

Joe

"...you will be able to enable or disable the
rest reminder feature."

As long as any 'feature' I find
annoying can be disabled, I am fine...
- Ray
2009 G8 GT driver...

Apparently this "feature" was set to disabled on my wife's G8 when we picked it up from the dealer. We have made several trips where we went 4+ hours between stops and have never been reminded to stop and rest. Quite an interesting feature though.

What a waste of programming. I drive more then 2 hours on a regular basis, so this feature would be irritating. Thankfully the MINI does not have one. I wouldn't even have said that 2 hours is a long (or dangerously long) drive. Maybe after 4 hours?

Why is there a rest reminder? To remind you that you need rest? Or that you're still driving? That's pretty stupid.

I'm just sorry they used a table instead of an outhouse!

Personally, I think it's a smart thing as long as it's not intrusive. Resting every 2 hours is good to prevent highway hypnosis, for one thing, and if nothing else the break in monotony is a nice touch.

Joe

As an Australian, I know first-hand that this is a cultural quirk from my country. Like someone mentioned, Australia has long, boring stretches of road and there are many deaths from drivers falling asleep behind the wheel. Several Australian cars have this feature and many Aussie highways have break reminder signs and "PowerNap" areas, which are similar to the rest areas in America.

That's annoying for sure. I do NOT need rest after only 2 hours of driving, and I do not like a car telling me I need rest. My limit is 13 hours of driving. I know this, because I did 14 hours straight once, and that last hour wasn't good at all.

How inappropriate and annoying. I usually stop every three hours on long trips. Having to reset this thing 3-4 times would eventually get on my nerves.

Bladder-wise, I can almost always out-last a tank of gas. Two hours, an interval I regularly exceed with no trouble, sounds like something derived from union workplace regulations to ensure coffee breaks.

And Australia isn't the only place with long, tedious drives. Perhaps it's their combination of long, boring drives and relatively slow speed limits (with rigorous unmarked speed camera enforcement and no radar detectors, so everyone complies) that makes people groggy behind the wheel in Oz. I never thought I'd see a country with more unreasonable speed limits on desolate roads than here in the USA -- until I spent a week driving down under, that is.

Lawyers will always default to a shorter, fixed threshhold on a system such as this. But the only way to make this feature really useful is to employ active driver monitoring to detect actual drowsiness. Such systems exist, but they cost major bank and corporate lawyers are afraid of them.

You should be able to turn it off. I did ages ago.

If it`s not in the DIC(I don't know why it wouldn't be), next time you go to start the car, hold down the enter button, the left scroll wheel, and turn on the car to enter engineering mode, you should be able from there.

I wonder how many people die every year because they think they drive forever.

2 hours is a bit short (3 would be better) but it's not a bad idea.

My rest reminder is my girlfriend. I shouldn't say anymore because she reads this!

Hmm, maybe the car was tired? It's an interesting gesture. Maybe you should take it for what it's worth.

That is just stupid. A car that won't let you drive it for more than two hours at a time. It's like a valet key or anitheft device for the owner.

Another Australian uniqueness are "road trains": tractors with 10 or more trailers behind them. They're mainly on the interior (desert) highways.

Anyway, 2 hours seems a little short, especially for California drivers, many of which do long commutes or sit in traffic for hours. Still, a lot of car seats make 2 or more hours of continuous sitting an ordeal.

10 trailers?

The most I've heard of is 3. Love to see one with 10.

I understand the Australian aspect of the rest reminder, but isn't 2 hours a little short? I have 2 incredibly long drives ahead of me this year:
1. Great Falls, MT to Lompoc, CA (1,400 miles)
2. Lompoc, CA to Austin, TX (1,500 miles)

I can drive the first one in a day (with a quick nap in Vegas) but I have to stop in El Paso for the second one (ironically, it takes longer to drive the TX leg than driving across New Mexico, Arizona, and through CA traffic halfway up the coast). While I appreciate rest stops, just spending a little extra time at the gas stations is enough for me.

I don't see what the big deal is. It's just a strange feature left from the vehicle's country of origin. Turn it off if you don't like it. It's like complaining about the radio station, people.