Other What Makes Your Life, Meh?

I remember when I finally got my landy "roadworthy" and took it for a spin, kinda terrifying. Especially as I realised the selector gate was weak and you needed a safecracker's touch to find first gear

 

So… In a test, you are allowed to use driver aids like automatic handbrakes, parking sensors, etc, provided that they can be used safely and without causing a distraction. The important part is that they are assistance aids only, you still have to make all the correct observations and safely deal with any situation you encounter. When I did my test I made a point of mentioning to the examiner at the start that she wouldn’t see me putting the handbrake on manually - it’s automatic and that functionality can’t be easily turned off. But I also said that she would see me checking the dashboard for the handbrake light so that I can make sure it’s on.

Automatic parking would almost certainly land you with a fail. The examiner is asking you to demonstrate that you can park the car properly and safely, not that you can push some buttons on the dashboard/touchscreen. But reversing cameras, 360 cameras, sensors, etc, are all fine as long as you’re also checking your mirrors and blind spots.

 

I too, passed before all the shiny modern stuff was in cars (1992) - Nissan Sunny, I think.
Even though I could just glance at correctly adjusted mirrors, I made sure to misadjust them slightly before my test, so the examiner would notice me moving my head to view them.

 

And we wonder why the overall standard of driving has taken a nose dive

 

My driving test was in '81 in NZ, when they had transport cops (later merged with the real cops), examiners were these cops and notoriously strict & grumpy (they thought it was beneath them).

I borrowed a car from the driving school I used for a few lessons (most were in my dad's old 1972 Datsun 1500 pickup truck), turns out the driving school car had a faulty clutch, would crunch gears even when standing still putting it into first, I saw the examiner putting his own foot on the dual control clutch pedal a few times to figure out what was going on.

I started shifting without using the clutch (I had been driving my dad's truck since I was 13 as well as motorbikes on farms), as soon as the examiner saw what I was doing and that it was smooth, he wrote a big "P" on his clipboard and said "we're done here, just drive around for 10 minutes".

I was 15 years & 2 weeks old.

 

Of course, there is the added difficulty in driving a modern car that you have to simultaneously browse Facebook and WhatsApp your friends while dodging e-scooters.

 

Kids today, eh? They dun’t know they’re born, I tell ye…

I had a lot more here, but I can’t be arsed - I’m supposed to be working right now…

So… condensed version…

Modern driving aids aren’t making people be absolute muppets on the road. A lack of enforcement of infractions like distraction, driving without due care and attention, speeding, phone use, jumping red lights, etc, will have an effect however.

A lot of the muppets I see being muppets, and generally the ones who seem like they’re out to kill me when I’m on the bike, aren’t young drivers. More often than not they’re middle-aged… er… “bankers”… thinking the German badge on their car means they’re on the Nürburgring instead of sharing a public ****ing road with other people.

You could make people learn in barebones tin cans on wheels with the worst and most clumsy controls imaginable, and it still won’t magically turn them into better drivers.

People are absolutely idiots on the road because… well… people are absolute idiots sometimes and there’s barely anyone around to punish them for being absolute idiots.

 

Wasn’t that a Jeremy Clarkson suggestion originally…?

 

I agree on the lack of enforcement, however I would suggest that more than half of the infractions that need enforcing against are due to said modern driving aids and modern vehicles in general.
I'm not rallying against mod cons, but they make the driver so cocooned away from the real world that's happening around them at 70mph they fail to appreciate the effort that's required in driving is more than they're giving.

 

That's a similar age to our (only) car, which doesn't have have hill hold assist or whatever it's called Absolutely no mod cons whatsoever.

 

Driving is hard, you forget how hard, I’ve been teaching my daughter to drive and it’s given me a new found appreciation of all the things you do automatically through experience, so many things being monitored and controlled by you as you are driving along, it doesn’t take much to be missed for things to go wrong.

Modern safety stuff is very good and can help to mitigate the odd small lapse but the driver still has to be in control.

I do see you point about feeling cocooned I just bought a little Up, everything feels like it is going much faster in this car than anything else I own, in fact its set my daughter back a bit as she doesn’t feel as safe in it at speed (by speed I mean 30mph ) than she did in my Punto as it feels like its going 2x the speed

 

It's interesting to be reminded that driving is hard.
I've been driving my Dad's 1932 Morris Minor, and it's like being a 17 year old again...

I've driven cars with no synchromesh and a couple with reversed pedals, but never one with both!

Double declutching is getting more familiar, not so much with rev matching on the down changes.

Having the centre accelerator pedal adds a while new level of things to think about at the same time

Yep, the brake is on the right and the accelerator pedal is where the brake usually is.

Luckily it'll do 35, maybe 40 mph tops, so nothing's happening that fast.

 

And I agree with that bit , but I don't think that's being driven (pun intended) by the increasing amount of driver aids.

Learning to drive with an automatic handbrake or hill start assist didn't make me a worse driver overall (at least not in my view anyway* ). I've driven off more than once with the handbrake still on, but I soon adapted and now it's more or less second nature. Same thing with hill starts; I stalled a couple of times on steep hills and even rolled back, but I soon adapted to how much throttle this car needs on a steep hill. For that matter, I did also try holding the car on an incline hill using solely the clutch, and while I was unsuccessful at first I'm getting a lot more used to it now.

As much as this is anecdotal evidence from a sample size of n=1, I do think I'm in a more unusual position than most people on the road. I didn't pass the car test until 25 years after I was eligible to drive, and by the time I did so I'd already spent seven and a half years on the road with a full motorbike license.

I know you know this, but on a bike you have some textiles and thermoplastics (or carbon fibre, if you bought a flash expensive lid) to separate you from your surroundings, whereas in a car you've got all this steel and stuff around you. Having gone from the former to the latter... yeah, you know what, I get it: I 100% see why people get so comfortable, so 'switched off' and oblivious to the world around them. I catch myself slipping into it regularly. You're so much more... disconnected from everything and everyone else, you really are in a cosy little bubble where it's just you, your passengers, and whatever you're listening to. Even the atrocious visibility from a car still blows my mind... Gives me a whole new perspective on 'sorry mate I didn't see you', because a lot of the time they really can't see you! Even the things that are supposed to help visibility can block an entire vehicle from view - on more than one occasion I've had my view of a vehicle joining from a slip lane completely blocked by the rear-view mirror and had to take action at the last minute. If I turn my head to the right in the car all I see is door pillar; if I turn my head to the right on the bike I can see pretty much everything around me.

My car isn't new or "fancy" in any way at all; it's an 11 year-old Astra, the rear bumper's been held on with gaffer tape for years, it has a weedy 1.4L engine that can't accelerate for toffee, my knees don't fit under the steering wheel, and the only "driver aids" it has are a speed limiter and cruise control. Damn thing doesn't even have a bloody mileage calculator or bluetooth input on the stereo.

But it's not that lack of mod-cons that I think makes me a "good" driver*, it's the fact that I'm used to being on a motorbike where lapses of concentration can have fatal consequences.

*Disclaimer: These claims may be disputed by my other half when I accelerate right through every single gear in order to build up speed because the alternative is never getting the damn thing past ~50mph, a speed at which she's quite happy to dawdle along 70mph roads while getting overtaken by a bloody HGV every few minutes

 

Maybe I'm getting to be that old cantankerous a-hole that shouts at kids enjoying themselves, but I really really dislike all the electronic additions to cars.

My daily driver, which gets driven once a week, is 12 years old and has cruise control, but we get a new car every three years as a company car for the wife, currently a 2024 Skoda estate, hill hold, auto handbrake, radar cruise, stop / start, lane departure warning etc etc, it's loaded to the gunwhales, to the point I refuse to drive it.

I fear for the 2nd hand buyers later down the road when all of the trickery starts to go belly up

 

I feel much the same, eg, what’s wrong with a simple, reliable, manual handbrake? Also, many of the auto functions just seem pointless, if you can’t decide for yourself when to use headlights or wipers, or can’t manage to stay in lane without help, you are not fit to drive.

 

I'm all for some driver aids, massively against others.

Adaptive Cruise - can see further than you in thick fog and rain. So will slow the car before you even know a hazard is there.
Blind spot detection - far too many people on the road don't check blind spots.
Electric handbrakes. VW group cars are brilliant, others less so.
Reversing cameras - more visibility is always going to be better.
I wish more cars had matrix headlights, so I wasn't constantly blinded by people forgetting they had main beams on.

Auto Park and lane assist need erasing from history though.
I can easily get into spaces Auto Park can't.
Lane Assist messes up so often it's outright dangerous. I don't need to be steered into another lane because it thought the crack in the tarmac veering to the side was the actual lane marking. Or be steered back into the pedestrian that decided the road was clear that I've just swerved to avoid.

 

I actually quite like the modern features on my other car, it has radar braking but it really does wait until the last minute, never had it go off in this car but my old one did it a couple of times when it shouldn't have. Multibeam projector lights are like voodoo, you can see everything and the person in front of you doesn't get dazzled, it's as if it projects a block of darkness over their car. Nine speed auto box with brake hold, never makes a bad decision, more efficient than your manual. Reversing camera with good field of view and excellent night vision, never gets dazzled, doesn't struggle in the wet. Electronic stability system that can brake individual wheels, let's see you do that, Nigel Mansel. If I do plough into a tree it'll alert the emergency services while I take a little countercoup nap.

On the other hand, no lane assist (I'd be furious), the parking sensors don't differentiate within the last 100mm so I often ignore them as I do know better. Self parking can get into as tight a spot as I can but not as quickly, puts annoying dry turns on the wheels. You can't get full engine performance without pressing a button to request it first, but that's so rarely an issue, just a minor inconvenience once in a blue moon.