On Motoring with a Right Hand Drive Car in Spain

The Steering wheel is on the Right-Hand side.
How big a problem is that in Europe?

This is a subject that we tend to take for granted, but in reality it can be a life or death experience with no error for mistakes.

I own both forms of cars, and sometimes I change from one to the other in the same day. To complicate matters, the Jag, with the steering wheel on the right side, is an automatic. When I drive the Jag, apart from the fact that it is my classic car, which means I drive it as though it were made of eggshells, I am always on high alert.

Frankly, none of us who drive along National roads, or any road with two-way traffic, should overtake the vehicle in front for silly reasons, such as he is moving too slow. The big crashes almost always occur along such stretches as it places two opposing vehicles in the same lane. A head-on collision will most likely produce death. Why that doesn't seem to cross the minds of people who do such things, I really don't know.

When the steering wheel is on the right-hand side, to overtake is considered a suicidal move. I normally hold back and accept the speed of the vehicle in front of me, the exception being if it is a tractor. In such cases I can only make the move if we are making a right hand turn that exposes the whole of the road ahead to reveal that there is nothing coming my way.

This is an example of what can go wrong if the driver decides to poke himself out into the oncoming lane without knowing for sure that nothing is coming his way: One such driver was stuck in a lane of traffic that had stopped. He had his wife sitting in the front passenger seat, and behind her was a visitor from England. Suddenly, the driver pulled out and was hit by a bus carrying school children.  The man's wife and visitor were both killed instantly. His car was slammed and turned around, and the bus was pulled to the left and drove one of the cars in the lane through the barrier and down an embankment, whereupon the bus fell on the car.

The driver of the car was killed, and his pregant girlfriend was seriously injured. On board the bus, one student, who was sitting in the back seat, was propelled the length of the bus and out through the windscreen. She had to be taken by air ambulance to hospital. Several of the other children were also injured, which in turn set off panic by a mass of parents and family members. 

What would be the appropriate form of punishment for such a person? (It's not good enough to assume that what he did must haunt him everyday!)

There are a number of other things that range between being dangerous and a nuisance. Dangerous is misjudging where you have the car placed, especially when you are accustomed to personally being near to oncoming  traffic. Secondly, toll booths are a real pain, and added to that is the fact that the car is an automatic, and if I forget and try to change gears I would move the lever from "drive" to "neutral", if it would move while I'm in motion, and from there to REVERSE. I don't know whether there is a safety control mechanism, but I am not going to experiement.

Other than these sorts of things, motoring with a car with the steering wheel on the right is a perfectly normal thing to do. However, it does make you the odd man out, but, when the car is a Jag, people can understand why I might not have wanted to leave it behind in England.

Between you and me, I actually purchased it here in Spain, but that's our secret!

Copyright (c) 2012   Eugene Carmichael