I’ll start. Stopping distance.

My commute is 95 miles one way to work, so I see a lot of the highway, in the rural part of the US. This means traveling at 70+ mph (112km/h) for almost the entirety of the drive. The amount of other drivers on the road who follow behind someone else with less than a car’s length in front of them because they want to go 20+ over the speed limit is ridiculous. The only time you ever follow someone that close is if you have complete and absolute trust in them, and also understand that it may not even be enough.

For a daily drive, you likely need 2-3 car lengths between you at minimum depending on your speed to accurately avoid hitting the brakes. This doesn’t even take into account the lack of understanding of engine braking…

What concepts do you all think of when it comes to driving that you feel are not well understood by the public at large?

  • @Salad_FriesEnglish
    14•1 year ago

    due to cognitive bias, roughly 80% of drivers think that they are “above average” in their driving ability.

    AKA, you’re probably overestimating your driving ability and are not as good of a driver as you think you are…

    • darcyEnglish
      6•1 year ago

      sucks for everyone else but im different

      • @warbondEnglish
        4•1 year ago

        You and me both. Come on, we don’t need these bad drivers bringing us down!

    • @TeckFireOPEnglish
      2•1 year ago

      Yeah, that absolutely holds water. I can’t tell you the number of people I’ve seen making stupid decisions on the road and barely recovering from the mistake. It’s a bad combination of misjudgment and lack of skill. I’ve been run off the road by someone merging into where I was because they didn’t want to brake, I’ve been cut off by someone who almost lost all traction after merging so quickly, I’ve been “challenged” by someone revving their engine wanting to beat me in a race (while there were many, many cars around) and much more.

      I think people in general need better driving classes, stricter requirements to begin driving, and police should be more worried about behaviors like these on the roads compared to just speeding.

      Honestly, one of the biggest reasons I want to build a car for auto crossing is because I want to become a better driver. It will be fun, sure, but if I can train myself to know how to react to extreme situations, then my thought is that in an emergency, I should be able to make the right reactions.

    • @CrispsEnglish
      2•1 year ago

      It’s because it’s true. Think about how many drivers you see on the road on a journey. Sure you’ll see some inattentive ones and some dangerous ones, but really it is a very small percentage that cause almost all the issues.

      On an imaginary bell curve it is a huge spike of terrible drivers, then a normal bell making the vast majority above average because of the skew.