Could this lead to tougher tests for older drivers

Should we mandate more ‘city speed’ protection devices?

A lot of these “old folk crashes car into something” events are a case of mistaking the gas for the brake and – especially in an EV  – acceleration can be rapid, too quick for the owner to react and often too quick for the car’s own sensor stuff to start dealing with the rapid change in pace and the scenario of what’s in front of it. Plus the driver still has their foot hard on the gas pedal. By the time everything has kicked in, the car is already bonnet deep in a shop.

And human faculties or lack thereof aside, if you’re pressing what you think to be the brake and aren’t slowing then every nerve in your body is screaming to press it harder.

This was a Thing I Was Taught back when I passed my test. You start sliding and – in the days before widespread adoption of ABS which only became mandatory in the UK in 2004, my first car was manufactured in 1977 – you should lift off the brake to allow the wheels to start turning again. Great in theory, really difficult in practice when you’re trying to recover from a **** up.

These days we could probably equip all new cars with technology to prevent them from mounting kerbs altogether and it would much improve our urban realm, as well as making doddery drivers somewhat safer.

This was a Thing I Was Taught back when I passed my test. You start sliding and – in the days before widespread adoption of ABS which only became mandatory in the UK in 2004, my first car was manufactured in 1977 – you should lift off the brake to allow the wheels to start turning again. Great in theory, really difficult in practice when you’re trying to recover from a **** up.

Same with the theory that putting your best tyres on the back keeps the cars natural tendency to understeer, which is safer.

Great in theory, but try telling you monkey brain to straighten the wheel when the car is understeering straight on into a crash barrier. Oversteer might be more likely to end up in a full on spin, but at least your instinct and the right thing to do in order to correct it are aligned.

By the time everything has kicked in, the car is already bonnet deep in a shop.

Come and try it in a Volvo. Honestly sweeping into the car parking space at work to quick with a hedge in front led the system to all but put me through the windscreen as the car stopped on screeching tyres.

The day it spotted a child on bike swerving in front of me, I hadn’t even seen the kid and the car behind could barely stop in time…

It’s a really, really good system.

A lot of these “old folk crashes car into something” events are a case of mistaking the gas for the brake

do these safety features have an override? Like lane keep assist, you can still leave the lane but the steering is much heavier. So something in front, you have override the autobrake by putting your foot on the floor. Seems stupid at first thought but as technology is fallible, would always want a manual override of sorts.

more importantly, the mistaking the pedals issue – if you think you are pushing the brake and you are still heading towards something, you push down harder on what you think is the brake. only a problem in auto transmission vehicles (and EVs) so for a long time, it was only americans who had incompetent people plowing into shop fronts. Now autos are common here in the civilised world in standard vehicles not just expensive luxury ones, its becoming much more of a problem.

The UK is in a bind – so car-dependent that people don’t think of the car as something that has to be kept maintained and driven competently, it’s become ‘the only way I can get around’. This has become really embedded in how people think and means that there are significant blind eyes turned by practically everyone to poor practice (that tyre? I’ll get around to changing it, but right now I need to get to work / ‘oh gosh I can’t see a parking space, I’ll only be ten minutes so I’ll just leave it on the pavement, I’m sure that guy in a wheelchair won’t mind popping out onto the road to get round it etc).

The lack of alternatives makes it really hard for people to give up driving (even for a few days). My mum in Germany (81) has an e-bike that she potters around on so she has access to the post office, shops etc and the train station for longer trips. There aren’t many places in the UK that are as safe for cyclists as where she lives – which is a semi-rural town in the Thüringer Wald. Nor do small UK towns have the kind of public transport that mean I don’t have to worry about her needing a car.

I know it’s a bit nerdy but I am really excited about the Buses Bill, it could make a massive difference to access to public transport. Obviously it’s turning a tanker size endeavour but we really need to have alternatives to driving so that everyone has options.

Re the Volvo auto brake feature

Even if the car was equipped with this feature, the heavy acceleration of the driver could have caused the system to be overridden and deactivated; the Volvo auto-braking (mitigation and avoidance) technology is highly advanced and in cases which the car detects that the driver intends to perform the action deliberately, it will deactivate itself.

From googling, depending on the age of the system it only prevents collisions up to 19 or 30mph as well, although by braking it will mitigate/ reduce severity of accidents if not overridden as above.

I know we’re discussing older drivers here but there’s a very wide issue with general competence and lack of compliance with the HC and law.

I commute along the M27 four days a week.  Currently it’s subject to a massive resurfacing project where there are a normal width lane and 2* 2m width restricted lanes (so cars and modest sized vans). There is clear signage saying HGVs use inside lane.  

Every day I see:

• Large numbers of HGVs in the width restricted middle lane – but of course they get stuck every time they catch up to anything wide on the inside so end up with 200m of useless dead space in front of them and holding up a queue behind
• Car and van drivers in the normal width inside lane who can’t manage to steer their modest family car to stay off the lane markings / out of the narrow lanes
• People barging across the solid white lined hatchings to join the main carriageway at junctions
• People leaving ridiculous gaps between them and the queue in front and not moving in unison with the traffic.
• Stupid tailgating and bullying behaviour like refusing to allow enough space for vehicles to exit slip roads at the proper point
• People ignoring the variable speed limit (sprinting between camera sets)
• Facetime/video calls using a phone in a windscreen / air vent cradle + hand held phone use is still rife.

Round town there seems to be an epidemic of leaving more than a car length to the vehicle in front when stopped at traffic lights, unnecessarily extending the length of queues and also of blocking junctions and pedestrian crossings.

These problems are not being caused by “older drivers” as a group they’re caused by people of normal working age having a massive shortage of competence and consideration.

These drivers are much more numerous, they’re on the road more of the time and I honestly don’t know how you turn the tide. If they can’t drive properly now as fit and healthy people what on earth will they be like in 20-30 years.

Now autos are common here in the civilised world in standard vehicles not just expensive luxury ones, its becoming much more of a problem.

As an auto driver now I struggle with how incompetent one has to be to mistake the wide firm brake pedal for the narrow soft-feeling accelerator pedal. Like “the sun was in my eyes” it’s another poor excuse for an inability to drive to the expected standard. Maybe if the laws had both of these as excluded excuses (use either and lose your driving privileges forever).

Same with the theory that putting your best tyres on the back keeps the cars natural tendency to understeer, which is safer.

Great in theory, but try telling you monkey brain to straighten the wheel when the car is understeering straight on into a crash barrier. Oversteer might be more likely to end up in a full on spin, but at least your instinct and the right thing to do in order to correct it are aligned.

This is a bit “would you rather have a punch in the nose or a kick in the bollocks.” The solution, as ever, is more robust driver training. I don’t recall ever being taught how to handle a skid, if I was then it was little more than the paragraph above. I taught myself one night on a deserted ASDA carpark in the snow.

See also, RWD vs FWD.

People leaving ridiculous gaps between them and the queue in front and not moving in unison with the traffic.

To be fair here, if you do this and move at a constant pace rather than stop-start-stop-start it can actually clear a traffic jam and get traffic flowing again.

Round town there seems to be an epidemic of leaving more than a car length to the vehicle in front when stopped at traffic lights, unnecessarily extending the length of queues and also of blocking junctions and pedestrian crossings.

You’ll be thankful of that the day you stop and the driver behind doesn’t. If you can’t see the rear wheels of the car in front, you’ve stopped too close. Obviously though yes, blocking stuff off is either incomptence or being a dick.

Maybe if the laws had both of these as excluded excuses (use either and lose your driving privileges forever).

it’s the job of the state prosecutor, with all the resources of the police and CPS/COPFS at their disposal* to prove the case beyond reasonable doubt.  If an accused person manages to convince a judge or jury that there is reasonable doubt that the standard of driving was below that of a careful and competent driver, it’s probably wrong to get upset at the “excuses” the defence used: the crown have plenty of opportunity to dispel those claims.

* they may be massively under resourced, and subject to all sorts of pressures but be under no doubt, that compared to the ordinary man on the street their resources are vastly different.

@poly The comment would save precious resources from disproving specious excuses. Don’t continue driving if one’s visibility is poor is covered in HWC (be prepared to slow down or stop is in the version I remember).

This:

I know we’re discussing older drivers here but there’s a very wide issue with general competence and lack of compliance with the HC and law.

And this:

so car-dependent that people don’t think of the car as something that has to be kept maintained and driven competently, it’s become ‘the only way I can get around’.

Absolutely. And that’s why every single driver should be regularly retested. The general standard would rise. The reliance on cars would change. Paid for by the retest fee.

It’d be a simple thing to issue new licences for a certain amount of time. Then those drivers are in a system where they know they must be retested.

Then roll it out for the remainder. Could start with oldies first. ?

People leaving ridiculous gaps between them and the queue in front and not moving in unison with the traffic.

To be fair here, if you do this and move at a constant pace rather than stop-start-stop-start it can actually clear a traffic jam and get traffic flowing again.

What cougar says.  Its much better to roll along at a slow steady speed than accelerate and stop all the time.    Closing up to within half an inch of someone acheives absolutely nothing

Unless there are statistically significant incidents of injuries/deaths then they won’t do anything.

Should we mandate more ‘city speed’ protection devices?

Already are in many places

From googling, depending on the age of the system it only prevents collisions up to 19 or 30mph as well, although by braking it will mitigate/ reduce severity of accidents if not overridden as above

From memory it’s all about trading off max braking control/stability/traction control and sensor range/accuracy. Minimising the number of false positives and screeching to a halt in the middle of the road because of a car in the other lane on a curve. There are 4 or 5 versions of it out there in the wild now, and several market/model specific sub specs.

The requirement to be able to override is a legal thing. Probably written by the terminally carbrained :wink:. There is also some draft legislation around false pedal detection, but don’t know the status on that. The brake override will be overridden if you can detect that the driver didn’t really want to press the accelerator pedal. It all starts to get a bit meta then. So i don’t get involved.

Again,

There isn’t the resource. You could charge £1000 for a retest and it still wouldn’t be viable because there aren’t that many test centres, buildings to turn into test centres, instructors or examiners. There’s barely enough for the current load. Such a scheme would require massive investment ahead of implementation.

It’s both far easier and cheaper to fling up a few more speed cameras and go “that’ll be a hundred quid thanking you kindly” to everyone passing one at 31mph. Hell, we don’t have the resource to process that even, having the Gatso limit at 31 rather than 35 would cripple the automated fixed penalty system.

I know we’re discussing older drivers here but there’s a very wide issue with general competence and lack of compliance with the HC and law.

Very much this – local news last night running a story about “problems” with traffic calming measures on the road through the centre of Castle Donington. Because drivers keep driving over signage/bollards/kerb chicanes in a longstanding 30mph area.

So the call is to remove the traffic calming. Not remove the licenses from the bellends who can’t drive safely. **** madness.

So the call is to remove the traffic calming. Not remove the licenses from the bellends who can’t drive safely. **** madness.

Ha! They put chicanes in a few places on my old commute to work, just to restrict it to 1 1/4 lanes, make everyone slow down entering villages.

Each chicane got a big sign (chevrons), a streetlight and black and white painted kerbstones all back filled with tarmac or concrete/gravel. But they are only kerbstone height. So it was quite common to pass through in the early hours on the way to work to find a broken sign, streetlight and bits of someones car spread along the road.

So now, the worst offending of the chicanes are made out of massive curved protection kerbs (35/40 cm high) with a large concrete pillar in the middle (50-60 cm dia and 1m tall) to hold the signage and lights. I still (very occasionally) see bits of car, but the chicanes and signs are there to stay…

There isn’t the resource. You could charge £1000 for a retest and it still wouldn’t be viable because there aren’t that many test centres, buildings to turn into test centres, instructors or examiners. There’s barely enough for the current load. Such a scheme would require massive investment ahead of implementation.

As if ‘they’ were listening to STW the BBC has an article on recruitment for driving examiners. Can’t link to it as it’s currently unavailable at the office!