There was recently (pre-COVID-19) a road-safety ad on some cinemas in Australia (and possibly TV) for motorcyclists. We have video of a motorcyclist on a winding road, which I guess is the other side of Healesville, and there is a voiceover of his thoughts. He sees a branch on the road to avoid, he sees a curve coming up, he consciously thinks through changing gears, including clutch manipulation, he sees a van ahead which he overtakes. The point is that there is this continuous internal dialogue based on what he observes while he’s riding.
What I find intriguing is that this ad is obviously targeted at motorcyclists, yet I fail to see why it doesn’t equally apply to car drivers. I learned to drive (decades ago) from riding motorcycles, not only on winding roads but in city and suburban traffic. I used to do a daily commute along one of the busiest arterial roads from East Sydney to Western Sydney and back, which I’d still claim to be the most dangerous stretch of driving I ever did in my life.
I had at least one close call and one accident when a panel van turned left into a side road from the middle lane while I was in the left lane (vehicles travel on the left side, a la Britain, in Australia). I not only went over the top of my bike but the van started to drag the bike over me while I was trapped in the gutter, and then he stopped. I was very young and unhurt and he was older and managed to convince me that it was my fault. My biggest concern was not whether I had sustained injuries (I hadn’t) but that the bike was unrideable.
Watching the ad on the screen, which is clearly aimed at a younger version of myself, I thought that’s how I drive all the time, and I learned that from riding bikes, even though I haven’t ridden a bike in more than 3 decades. It occurred to me that most people probably don’t – they put their cars on cruise-control, now ‘adaptive’, and think about something else entirely, possibly having a conversation with someone who is not even in the vehicle.
In Australia, speed limits get lower and lower every year, so that drivers don’t have to think about what they’re doing. The biggest cause of accidents now, I understand, are distractions to the driver. We are transitioning (for want of a better word) to fully autonomous vehicles. In the interim, it seems that since we don’t have automaton cars, we need automaton drivers. Humans actually don’t make good robots. The road-safety ad aimed at motorcyclists is the exact opposite of this thinking.
I’m anomalous in that I still drive a manual and actually enjoy it. I’ve found others of my generation, including women, who feel that driving a manual forces them to think about what they’re doing in a way that an auto doesn’t. In a manual, you are constantly anticipating what gear you need, whether it be for traffic or for a corner, to slow down or to speed up (just like the rider in the ad). It becomes an integral part of driving. I have a 6 speed which is the same as I had on my first 2 motorbikes, and I use the gears in exactly the same way. We are taught to get into top gear as quickly as possible and stay there. But, riding a bike, you soon learn that this is nonsense. In my car, you ideally need to be doing 100km/hr (60 mph) to change into top gear.
We have cars that do their best to take the driving out of driving, and I’m not convinced that makes us safer, though most people seem to think it does.
Addendum: I acknowledge I’m a fossil like the car I drive. I do drive autos, and it doesn’t change the way I drive, but I don’t think I’ve ever enjoyed the experience. I accept that, in the future, cars probably won’t be enjoyable to drive at all, because they will have no 'feeling'. The Tesla represents the future of motoring, whether autonomous or not.
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