If you've crafted the training situations, you've obviously given the subject more thought than I have.<br><br>I remembered an incident that illustrates the quality I'm talking about, though;<br><br>Sometime in my early 20s I was hitchhiking and was picked up by a guy driving a ‘60s VW Beetle (the real one- and not so very old then). He had had his accelerator cable break on him.<br><br>On the old VWs, of course, the engine was in the rear, and that meant that the accelerator cable went all the way from the gas pedal, through the tunnel in the floor, under the seats and the behind-seat luggage area, through the rear firewall to connect with the carburetor. The cable connected to the bottom of the throttle arm and pulled it forward, but the top was longer and swung back.<br><br>Now, most of us probably would have cursed the luck and called a tow truck- replacing that cable was not trivial, even if you had the part. Maybe Richard Dean Anderson would have repaired it on the fly, with improvised materials, better than new … :-)<br><br>This guy was a surveyor on a construction site, and what he had on hand was his synthetic chalk line. He tied one end to the throttle linkage, threaded it through the (rear) louvers in the hood, around the outside of the car on the driver’s side, and in through the vent window. He was driving by pulling on the cord with his left hand to accelerate, and releasing it to slow down. He had come some distance, and when he picked me up we looked at the cord- there was a little fraying going on where it passed through the louvers in the hood, but it was holding up pretty well. By the time he picked me up he was getting the hang of it, and talking about deferring permanent repairs until his next paycheck.<br><br>I have no idea if he ever thought of “survival” at all, we certainly didn’t talk about it, and I never saw him again- but I bet he’d do Ok. He was the sort that, in earlier generations, whittled about half the things they needed on the farm with a jackknife.<br>