Most people, men especially, consider themselves to be excellent drivers. If truth be told, however, most people aren’t even good drivers, as witnessed by the appalling number of car crashes that occur every year on the roads and streets of the world.
I’m not even referring to crashes that occur through outright stupidity or recklessness, and I’m certainly not going to open the festering can of worms known as “Wimmen Drivers”; not in this post, anyway.
I consider myself to be a competent driver in that I’ve only ever had a couple of serious accidents in well over four decades of driving — not serious in that people were injured, but serious enough that cars were either written off or close to being so. And yes, some were technically the fault of the other driver, but once again, I can also assume at least a little culpability in that perhaps I wasn’t paying enough attention to the traffic.
What bothers me — and I’ve noticed it a lot recently — is that as I’m getting older, my driving skill is declining. Some of it is physical: my neck and body are stiffer, making it more difficult, for example, to turn to look behind me; and my reflexes certainly aren’t what they used to be either, which means I can’t drive on auto-pilot anymore and have to concentrate really hard on what’s going on around me.
The latter certainly came to mind when I read about this little tragedy:
A man and woman were killed after an Audi ploughed into them as they were visiting a popular seaside resort at the end of the summer holidays.
The pair, in their 60s, were walking in Anglesey when the car swerved to avoid a horse and carriage before ploughing into them. The driver, a man in his 80s, also died at the scene.
(I don’t know what the car’s make has to do with the story, but it is the awful Daily Mail, after all, so maybe a little gratuitous class hatred was needed to make the story a little more spicy.)
From an eyewitness:
One local said: ‘The Audi swerved to go around a horse and carriage, mounted the pavement and hit pedestrians who were walking past a house – they didn’t stand a chance.’
It seems pretty clear that the Olde Phartte was going too fast — this didn’t happen on a freeway but on a narrow city street, after all — and that he either didn’t leave enough room to brake, or else he lost control during the swerve and smashed into the luckless pedestrians before hitting the wall. (And in a modern car (like the Audi), you have to be going really fast to be killed by crashing into a wall.)
Or else his octogenarian reflexes were like mud, and he left it all too late.
I know that Olde Pharttes get a bad rap for the heinous sin of Driving Too Slowly, but I’ve noticed myself slowing down a lot when I drive these days, because I’m fully aware that my reflexes are those of an older man, and not some young whippersnapper in his forties.
There’s a reason why modern F1 drivers don’t carry on racing into their fifties. Even once-world champs like Fernando Alonso (43) and Lewis Hamilton (39) are quite aware that their days of F1 racing are very much numbered. (I know: the peerless Juan Manuel Fangio raced almost into his fifties, but the F1 cars of his day ran at less than half the speed of today’s.)
Anyway, I am (perhaps surprisingly) in favor of stricter driving tests for Olde Pharttes like myself. When my current license expires, I will have to retake the practical and theoretical tests as though I were a newbie driver, and I will do so willingly. Because I would hate to be like that 80-year-old in the above tragedy, killed (and killer) because I was, quite simply, driving beyond my capabilities.
As Dirty Harry (himself quite an Olde Phartte) said once: “A man has to know his limitations.” And I’m certainly aware of mine, when it comes to driving anyway.
It’s called maturity, and it’s well past time that I started showing some.
