Your bad driving encounters

RampantMark said:
Still so much to unpack in this thread.

Has anyone ever seen Ashley Neal on YouTube? It could easily be said of Ashley that he is "cocksure" of himself. Clearly, however, he is not an idiot driver by any measure of the word.
This is why I take exception and offence to anyone conflating the attitude of "cocksure" with the automatic label of "idiot".

Yeah, sure, there are some cocksure idiots on the road and in my view this is a minority of the number of cocksure drivers out there. The trouble is that *YOU* just don't see the cocksure competents because their driving is not marking them out. They're inconspicuous. You *do* see the idiots, because they are conspicuous, and therefore the attitude of labelling the cocksure with the additional label of idiot is prevalent amongst those of limited analysis and reasoning. (And by extension those very people are virtue signalling that they believe themselves to be "better drivers" and in so doing become the hypocrite because what they are doing is, in fact, displaying their own cocksure attitude for all to see...)

Just to be clear, I don't see anything wrong, per se, with being a bit cocksure. I am myself. How does one justify that to oneself? Well, going back to the original discussion about hesitancy and nervous drivers... I am normally able to read the vast majority of other drivers around me, and know what they are going to do based on the body language of their driving. I'm pretty cocksure that I have skill enough to do this after many years of nurturing the ability. I can often tell what other drivers are going to do apparently before they know it themselves. For instance on a quiet 3 lane motorway with a vehicle ahead and a lorry well in front of that. I can tell that the car in front will need to pull out, often seemingly before they do themselves, so position myself in lane 3 well in advance and only when they are too close to the lorry do they start to cross the line and then might even indicate as an afterthought. You can see this happening well in advance if you are concentrating or if you are a competent driver. However, those many other drivers who approach the same situation as me and position themselves in lane 2 only to be conflicting with the driver needing to pull out into the side of them to pass the lorry that was clearly visible half a mile or more in advance... causing both drivers to get all angsty about right of way and who is in front or I was there before you idiocy... Oh, and neither are speeding - or cocksure - but both are idiots for sure, for not reading thje road and other road users...

With that in mind, I am happy to report that yes I'm a bit cocksure and can normally predict the vast majority of other drivers actions - even the cocksure idiots actions (possibly a hidden pseudonym for "boy racer"?) - because they are predictable.

Enter the nervous driver - this is where it gets sticky. I'm not talking about the recently passed a test hesitancy or young driver still learning the basics - you can tell those too - I'm talking the hesitant don't really know what they're doing types. Of all ages. This is where it gets sticky because those drivers are bloody unpredictable.

Personally, I'd very much rather be surrounded by the cocksure idiot and other cocksure competent drivers because despite the fact that I might not like their driving - at least they are largely predictable and therefore I can be safe around them. Not so with the nervous driver - it breeds a lack of overall safety. I just wish they'd learn better, because in the vast, vast majority of cases they could learn better if they had a mind to.
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Wth is this post? Do you even understand the word cocksure?
 
CaptainRAVE said:

It’s as if I don’t exist. The entitled cow didn’t even have the decency to apologise, not sure she even realised or cared she was in the wrong. She also managed to drive over the roundabout. Driving standards don’t exist anymore.
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That does my head in at minis, I've even been at a few where the person on my right is waiting for me, which is quite scary as I'm sure it's a basic rule, using roundabouts unless they removed that from the test too :D .
 
Stu999 said:
Where is this, roundabout-ville? :p
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...People in their suv tanks don't necessarily have the turning circle to drive round a mini-roundabout - poor design,
equally some are at the mercy of their stop-start mechanism and they move off irrespective of available gap once it has finally restarted.

wondered where the speed was on this dashcam (or mpg?) and whether the presumably 30mph had been adherred to.
if you were in any kind of collision and presented that dashcam coverage you'd be self-incriminating without the speed.

e:

gEd said:
cocksure, adj. & adv.
Excessively or arrogantly self-confident or self-assured; brashly or smugly overconfident.
too confident, in a way that is slightly unpleasant or rude
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do you have anything on the demographic and geographical use of this word - not sure it's still in the google top 10K words.
e2: chatgpt
 
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I agree about mini roundabouts. It's so common now for people not to give way to the right and not even realise/acknowledge they are in the wrong. It's as though they don't think normal roundabout rules apply on them.

As for difficulty navigating a large SUV in small areas, if you can't do it then buy a smaller car. Also stop/start takes a second to activate so if that second makes a big difference then you're not in control of the car anyway. I turn it off because it annoys me but even when I leave it on it doesn't change the way I drive.

Driving standards are shocking now.
 
Hades said:
I agree about mini roundabouts. It's so common now for people not to give way to the right and not even realise/acknowledge they are in the wrong. It's as though they don't think normal roundabout rules apply on them.
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I get the opposite on mini roundabout, people who have right of way to my right stop to give me priority. Everyone sits there a moment until someone goes for it.
 
gEd said:
Are you?

cocksure, adj. & adv.
Excessively or arrogantly self-confident or self-assured; brashly or smugly overconfident.
too confident, in a way that is slightly unpleasant or rude

I would consider myself as a relatively experienced and competent driver and I am confident in my abilities to handle a wide variety of road situations safely.
I practice defensive driving and (when required) I assert my space on the road ("elbows out") and position my car to discourage being cut up or undertaken to reduce risk.
I would however hate to think anyone thought I was cocksure....
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Yes, I acknowledge that I *can* be a little bit - it'd be hypocritical of me to claim otherwise while at the same time schooling everyone else on driving capabilities in a thread about driving standards. And there are levels of cocksuredness for sure...

I wonder whether you realise how what you've typed above comes across? I also wonder whether you realise that the *vast majority* of drivers consider themselves better than the average standard.

The point of the post was to illustrate an evidence that being cocksure does not also equal being an idiot.

Meanwhile - another driver is probably saying out loud "look at that cocksure driver getting his elbows out to prevent others from passing freely"; or words to that effect.
 
tom_e said:
For now... :D
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people don't anticipate the delay due to stop start - well I can see that would be difficult if you have been used to instantaneous throttle response, & now, there's half a second to - make it so;

not sure if the mild hybrids are now fixing that (but the future reliability/cost of these look like a nightmare even if tax/emissions bill is reduced - I like my NA)
 
jpaul said:
...

wondered where the speed was on this dashcam (or mpg?) and whether the presumably 30mph had been adherred to.
if you were in any kind of collision and presented that dashcam coverage you'd be self-incriminating without the speed.
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I can confirm that the speed had been adhered to, actually I was probably closer to 20mph or less at this point. It hardly looks like 60 does it and it’s clearly my right of way.

I just assume people won’t give way or stop at red lights these days, it’s safer.
 
Had an amazing one tonight. Some of you might know the town Blyth, if you do then you'll know there's a mini roundabout in front of kwikfit that used to be flat. Used to be...

Bloke sped up and went to cut across the middle of it as I was going round it. The crunch from his suspension, wheel and tyre failing was beautiful.
 
RampantMark said:
I wonder whether you realise how what you've typed above comes across? I also wonder whether you realise that the *vast majority* of drivers consider themselves better than the average standard.
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I don't know. I said I was "experienced" (having driven for 37 years and driven over 700K) and "competent". I made no claims to being "better than average", mindful that most men consider themselves to be "better than average" both on the road and in bed.........
 
Dis86 said:
Had an amazing one tonight. Some of you might know the town Blyth, if you do then you'll know there's a mini roundabout in front of kwikfit that used to be flat. Used to be...

Bloke sped up and went to cut across the middle of it as I was going round it. The crunch from his suspension, wheel and tyre failing was beautiful.
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Blyth, isn't that where people made in the Royal Navy are from? ;)
 
A little different subject but even after all these years I still find driving unknown side-roads in the dark somewhat intense, well outside my comfort zone, and always think afterwards I could have done that better, tonight for instance the main road I was on was closed due to an accident. Fortunately nothing worse tonight than being aware there was a speed limit change but being preoccupied with trying to figure out if I needed to take a turning didn't read it and had to rely on the fact the vehicle I was in fortunately tracks the current limit on the dash.

Typically in these situations the satnav always decides to be useless and try and take you back to where you diverted, there is suddenly no good place to stop and figure out a route... even one quick glance at a paper map is enough for me to get my head in the game :s

EDIT: It is more the unexpected instances - if I set out to drive unknown roads in the dark but have a rough idea of the route already planned that is another thing.
 
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All this talk of roundabouts. Seems like going over them has become so common that people are taken by surprise when you actually use them properly. I was approaching a mini-roundabout with exits at ~10 o'clock (left) and ~1 o'clock (right). I'm taking the right exit so indicating right, another car is approaching from the left. They started off by giving way, but when I started heading left to go around the roundabout instead of straight over, they started to pull out and I had to slam on the brakes :cry:
 
RampantMark said:
Still so much to unpack in this thread.

Has anyone ever seen Ashley Neal on YouTube? It could easily be said of Ashley that he is "cocksure" of himself. Clearly, however, he is not an idiot driver by any measure of the word.
This is why I take exception and offence to anyone conflating the attitude of "cocksure" with the automatic label of "idiot".

Yeah, sure, there are some cocksure idiots on the road and in my view this is a minority of the number of cocksure drivers out there. The trouble is that *YOU* just don't see the cocksure competents because their driving is not marking them out. They're inconspicuous. You *do* see the idiots, because they are conspicuous, and therefore the attitude of labelling the cocksure with the additional label of idiot is prevalent amongst those of limited analysis and reasoning. (And by extension those very people are virtue signalling that they believe themselves to be "better drivers" and in so doing become the hypocrite because what they are doing is, in fact, displaying their own cocksure attitude for all to see...)

Just to be clear, I don't see anything wrong, per se, with being a bit cocksure. I am myself. How does one justify that to oneself? Well, going back to the original discussion about hesitancy and nervous drivers... I am normally able to read the vast majority of other drivers around me, and know what they are going to do based on the body language of their driving. I'm pretty cocksure that I have skill enough to do this after many years of nurturing the ability. I can often tell what other drivers are going to do apparently before they know it themselves. For instance on a quiet 3 lane motorway with a vehicle ahead and a lorry well in front of that. I can tell that the car in front will need to pull out, often seemingly before they do themselves, so position myself in lane 3 well in advance and only when they are too close to the lorry do they start to cross the line and then might even indicate as an afterthought. You can see this happening well in advance if you are concentrating or if you are a competent driver. However, those many other drivers who approach the same situation as me and position themselves in lane 2 only to be conflicting with the driver needing to pull out into the side of them to pass the lorry that was clearly visible half a mile or more in advance... causing both drivers to get all angsty about right of way and who is in front or I was there before you idiocy... Oh, and neither are speeding - or cocksure - but both are idiots for sure, for not reading thje road and other road users...

With that in mind, I am happy to report that yes I'm a bit cocksure and can normally predict the vast majority of other drivers actions - even the cocksure idiots actions (possibly a hidden pseudonym for "boy racer"?) - because they are predictable.

Enter the nervous driver - this is where it gets sticky. I'm not talking about the recently passed a test hesitancy or young driver still learning the basics - you can tell those too - I'm talking the hesitant don't really know what they're doing types. Of all ages. This is where it gets sticky because those drivers are bloody unpredictable.

Personally, I'd very much rather be surrounded by the cocksure idiot and other cocksure competent drivers because despite the fact that I might not like their driving - at least they are largely predictable and therefore I can be safe around them. Not so with the nervous driver - it breeds a lack of overall safety. I just wish they'd learn better, because in the vast, vast majority of cases they could learn better if they had a mind to.
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You appear to be confusing confidence with being cocksure.

In my mind the way you have described yourself is as a confident and competent driver.

A cocksure driver is one that THINKS they are competent and as such is OVER confident and tends towards idiot manoeuvres such as overtaking multiple vehicles in one move on the approach to a blind bend.

The above happened last week on the A39, white Audi overtook a total of 7 cars around a blind bend. He then had to swerve to avoid the car coming in the opposite direction nearly taking the front off the car in front of me (my Dad) and only just slowing down in time to avoid hitting the back on the tractor/trailer that was causing the hold up (had not been safe to pass tractor up to this point with blind bends and oncoming traffic)
 
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