My kid’s just finished the classroom part of driver education and it prompted a discussion of crazy things we’ve seen other drivers do.
The craziest thing I saw, many years ago now, was I came up behind a guy driving a Ford Ranger pickup and could see through his rear window that he was doing tricep extensions with a dumbbell in his right hand. I was more surprised as I passed to see he was shaving with an electric razor in his left hand. I don’t really know how he was steering.
Kiddo said they were told personal grooming was the fourth leading cause of accidents.
I saw someone who mantained the legal speed limit and safe following distance.
In Attack of the Clones, Kenobi probably broke a handful of driving laws.
This has gotta be made up!!!
I hate when I leave an actual stopping distance between me and the person in front of me and someone else just decides to dart in and then tailgate the person in front of them.
I saw someone who used their turn signals.
Everyone knows that you save on car battery lifespan and look 134% cooler without turn signals
Besides the orange light doesn’t fit the paintwork and whole aesthetic and you turn too fast and too often anyway
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I remember commenting about people going over the speed limit here on Lemmy, and getting so many downvotes from people who could never explain to me why they thought they deserved to go over the speed limit. Emergencies, with your emergency lights on? By all means! Going over the speed limit because you got up or left late for work? No bueno.
To be fair, most speed limits aren’t very accurate to the design of the street. If you wanted, you could speed up for straightaways and slow down for turns. Obviously though, they aren’t going to put a speed limit sign every 5 feet, so it won’t match the street design everywhere.
Case in point the freeways where I live are limited to 65MPH but you cross the border into either neighboring state and magically 70-75MPH is the safe limit. It makes no sense apart from generating revenue from speeding tickets. Most commuters do 75-80MPH depending on traffic.
The low speed limit also has the side effect of causing those slow, oblivious drivers to immediately crank the wheel over into the left lane the second they merge on the highway and then set their cruise control to 62MPH while they get passed by every car around them causing massive congestion behind them and lots of lane changes.
While I understand both of your points and views, the fact of the matter is that the speed limit is set to whatever it is, whether it be 65 or 70. You are aware of this, and daily commuters are also aware of this. In my eyes, that means it is not a surprise, or shouldn’t be, to anyone except travelers. This also means that you should be prepared for that commute at that speed limit. Unless it is an emergency, just follow the speed limit. It’s as simple as that.
This is specially egregious since most speed limits are too high
why they thought they deserved to go over the speed limit.
So I don’t obstruct traffic? To improve safety by driving consistently with other vehicles. Yeah, sometimes I speed but most of the time I’m over the speed limit is to go with the flow of traffic.
My bigger annoyance is construction/school zones. I’m not compromising there but it is frustrating to get honked at, or have other drivers try to pass
Ooh, thought of another. I once saw a gentlemen driving down the mountain who must not have known that riding his brakes all the way down would cause them to overheat and fail. He was free rolling and honking his horn, weaving in and out to avoid hitting people. Sheer panic on his face.
Fortunately, he had the wherewithal to steer up one of the emergency offramps. I caught up to him a couple mins after he passed me. He was standing, leaning against his car, and just breathing. He was not a white guy, but somehow he still looked so pale. Glad no one got hurt with that one, that could have easily led to one or more deaths if things had happened just a little differently.
That seems more like a crazy situation caused by an honest mistake rather than a person doing something crazy, but I upvoted anyway.
Wait I never knew that you could overheat and fail if you rode it down the mountain. Holy shit
Yep, you want to do engine braking. That’s when you downshift and the engine slows the car. Even with an automatic transmission, you can downshift to 2nd so long as you’re under 50mph or so. You want to be slower than 20 before shifting down to 1st gear.
If you ever have a chance to drive up Pikes Peak in Colorado, 1) it’s gorgeous and 2) they have a stop halfway down where park rangers will check your brake temps with an IR thermometer. If you’re too hot, they make you sit there in your car for a while for the brakes to cool off and they give you tips on engine braking. Lots of flatlanders driving in the mountains for the first time and learning lessons the hard way.
Wow that’s crazy. You have taught me a valuable and potentially a life saving lesson today. I really appreciate your knowledge here.
So I have an automatic so how do I keep it under 50 or 20 without using the breaks?
My dodge will engine brake if I use the cruise control. Down near the bottom (or far side) of your shifter you should have a low gear that isn’t first. You can shift into it under 50 and let off the gas, your car should slow down. Test it’s rpm range on some flat ground first by accelerating to around 50… On the mountain is not where you want to first try it.
At minimum, shift out of overdrive into regular drive.
I have a versa so I’ll have to take a look at that later
You can use your brakes to slow down to where you can then engine brake, you just don’t want to use them for miles all the way down a mountain.
Once you’re under ~50 and you shift down to second, your engine does the work. It will keep the car slower. Maybe you need to tap on the normal brakes here and there, that’s fine, but you shouldn’t have to keep them pressed the entire time.
I also had no idea, even thought it’s completely logical. I just never would have considered that.
they have a stop halfway down where park rangers will check your brake temps with an IR thermometer
My wife’s family did that once and the ranger was apperently shocked at how cold the breaks were from very effective downshifting
If I were a ranger at those stops, I would totally turn it into a game based on make and model, which state they’re from, and judging the driver.
“Soccer minivan from Illinois? They will have no clue how to drive in mountains, their brakes will be hot”
“Ice cold, dude, I’m up by three, next Coke is on you”
Yeah when (normal) brakes get hot after a certain point that loose significant breaking force up to the point where they just fail completely. You usually should notice it before failure through when the pedal starts feeling soft and squishy.
Late '70s, on a winding paved backroad heading into town, a smaller car coming in the opposite direction lost traction (a light, misty rain had just gone through) and rolled twice in a field before landing upright.
My buddy and I quickly pulled over and ran towards the car to make sure everything was alright.
They drove off before we got to them…
Ok…I want THAT car!!! Forget airbags, and modern safety standards. This dude rolls his car TWICE and just drives off.
…until you get in a collision and the car crumples up and squeezes you out like red toothpaste.
Cars like that don’t crumple up, you just bounce around inside till you die
Oh they sure do. They really like shoving the steering column through your spine.
Ya, iirc, it was something like a Datsun or Toyota compact car, which were a lot smaller and fragile than today’s compacts.
This is one of those events that you chalk up to pure luck.
Crazy luck, 70s imports in the US were very fragile. buddy lost a wheel and most of his suspension hitting a curb in a cvcc.
Just last week, a car had missed their turn on the motorway, so decided to REVERSE up the hard shoulder.
Reminds me of a saying I heard: “Good drivers sometimes miss their turn. Bad drivers never miss their turn.”
I can’t agree more. I always say if you miss a turn or get in the wrong lane then “own your mistake and go around”
Too many times I see someone got in the wrong lane so they turn on their signal and wait or just plow over to the lane they wanted and cut others off. Nobody understands the solid white line. If it’s sold white you can’t cross it!
If it’s sold white you can’t cross it!
On Sunday there was a crash blocking an Autobahn. 50 cars turned around and drove back to the nearest exit, on the emergency lane kept free for the ambulance.
I see this shit far too often. It makes me wonder if they’re aware their gps can get them rerouted without having to risk their or anyone else’s necks.
I’ve seen elderly folks do that a few times. Not on the shoulder, but still in their lane, backing up into oncoming traffic. (Yes, I did spend some time living in Florida.)
While stopped at a red light, a taxi casually got onto the right sidewalk and drove on it to get to the front of the line.
I’d give an A for dedication to customers I guess.
Next we’ll be learning taxis are amphibious.
Driving super drunk. Like, super drunk. I saw the guy getting pulled over and the officer helping him out of the car. The guy literally just folded down to the ground and passed out. I have no idea how he was moving the steering wheel and stepping on gas and brake because he seemed to have no control over his limbs.
Reminds me of a story from college when some friends were high out of their minds on various things. They got pulled over for speeding by a cop who appeared to be running beside their car. Turns out they were only going a few MPH and the cop stopped them for driving way too slow. They got arrested for DWI, obviously. No idea if it was true or not, but still a funny story.
When I lived in Thailand, I lived next to an apartment building where quite a few bargirls and trans women who worked im the red light area lived.
Regularly you could watch them come home in the early morning hours, driving up with their motorbikes without any issues but then having major diffficulty walking the few meters to the door. Sometimes they didn’t even manage to get off the bike properly and just fell off it. But you would have never guessed from their driving.
Here in Japan, I saw a dude pulled over by a cop. Of course, I didn’t see him driving, but the dude was absolutely legless. Like had problems standing. That was the one and only time I ever seen Japanese cops actually doing their job.
I’ve seen a lot of bad things. But one that has always stuck with me was a guy studying.
I’m not talking about glancing down at a book. He had a textbook propped up on his steering wheel and was using a highlighter to mark in the book.
During morning rush hour (a near-standstill occasionally broken by brief periods of 10mph movement), I once saw a woman eating a bowl of soup/oatmeal/whatever while steering with her elbows.
It seemed to be a regional norm to eat breakfast in the car because a 20 mile commute generally took 1.5-3 hours and often moved slower than a walking pace, but that was the only time I’d ever seen someone eating food that required a dish and utensil.
Sounds like the kind of commute where an ebike would be life changing in time savings
This was my experience going down the GW Parkway. People frequently had the morning Post unfolded all the way reading it, and others applying eyeliner and mascara.
I was with my uncle (ca 1990) when he confidently took an offramp and got onto the I5 freeway going the wrong direction in an RV.
Bad enough with the wrong way, but in an RV is so much worse!
I was on the beltway one night in a construction zone. They had jersey walls (concrete barriers) instead of cones and barrels to shift traffic. The SUV in front of me had not been weaving or worrying me at all when it drifted into the jersey wall in the left and just ground along it doing about 70. I expected them to jerk the wheel the other way, but they didn’t. After a few seconds, they drifted back to the center of the lane. Just as I was thinking good on them for not panicking, they slammed back into the jersey wall and rode it until it ended. Their car was scraped all to hell. They had to have fallen asleep (passed out drunk). The grinding noise of car on concrete and flying sparks were too obvious to not be noticed by a conscious driver. I backed way off and fortunately was nearing my exit.
Drove past a guy on the highway, driving 100kph, wondered why he first drove so slow, then sped up, then slowed again… He was reading a book while driving 🤦♂️ One other guy, driving 80kph hardly could keep the truck on his own lane, so I drove past him. He was filling in some paper forms, while he had a cup of, assumably, coffee in the other hand, and tried to keep the truck going straight with that. Jeez these people…
and people wonder why I’m 40, but never had a drivers liscense.
I was on a highway doing around 60 when the car in front of me suddenly spun around in a 360 and stopped. Luckily they were some distance in front and there was no other traffic. When I passed, it was a teenage boy in the passenger and his grandmother driving. She was yelling at him and reaching down between them trying to do something. I think he had pulled the e-brake just to see what would happen.
Dude let the intrusive thoughts win.
Woman with a pink suction cup dildo attached to the inside of her window, vigorously sucking it while going throughly an intersection.
Did uh…did you catch that liscense plate???
Cincinnati, tis a strange place.
Seen too much shit.
People driving and: texting, watching movies, reading with books or newspapers pinned to the steering wheels, working on a laptop with those steering wheel laptop holders, applying makeup, shaving. Sometimes more than one of these things at a time.
The cellphone video/text/surfing is a multiple times a day occurrence. People drive with their phones in their hands and use them all the damn time.
Seen two people deceased, one hit while attempting to cross a busy road well away from a crossing area, another thrown from the car after rolling it because they’d clipped a car while they were speeding and weaving through traffic.
People backing up in breakdown lanes on freeways to make an exit. People crossing multiple lanes rapidly, cutting off other cars, to avoid missing an exit. People OUI weaving in a lane. People nearly coming to a full stop in traffic to avoid missing an exit or turn.
Yeah, think that’s most of it. I’m sure I’ve forgotten some. I’m sure I’ll see more tomorrow.
working on a laptop with those steering wheel laptop holders
Remember when they were an onion-style joke to begin with?
My dad. He drove the wrong way on a highway, fell asleep at the wheel, and unknowingly ran from the cops.
To this day, my dad doesn’t believe me that he’s ran from the cops twice.
Since none of you know my dad, imagine if Mr Rodgers were cranky, racist, and stubborn.
What was the other time he ran from the cops?
