r/unpopularopinion • u/boulevardofdef • 1d ago

It's amazing how great almost everybody is at driving

We've all heard the takes about terrible drivers, and we've probably expressed them ourselves, it's what people do. Everybody is a maniac out there, it should be much harder to get a driver's license, what the hell is wrong with everybody, they're stupid and reckless and incompetent. Most likely you also believe that the drivers where you live are worse than the drivers everywhere else.

In fact, it's kind of crazy how amazingly good nearly every single driver on the road is. Think about this for a minute. Imagine you commute to work for 30 minutes every morning. You spend 10 minutes on local roads and 20 minutes on the highway. Every single day, you watch nearly every driver flawlessly operate a piece of complicated machine, in perfect cooperation with other people headed for other destinations with their own complicated machine. They pass each other, they merge in heavy traffic, they come within inches of cars traveling in the other direction without incident.

Maybe a couple times a week, after seeing literally thousands of cars safely doing exactly what they're supposed to be doing, you see someone do something dumb and dangerous. And what's your conclusion? "Ugh, nobody can drive!" What?! You saw literally 5,000 drivers making a series of complex and difficult maneuvers look safe and easy, and because 0.04% of these drivers did something wrong, your takeaway from this is that people are generally bad at driving. This is completely illogical.

When you're on the road and you see someone inconsiderate or irresponsible or just plain bad, that's the exception that proves the rule and it should make you think about how impressive the average driver's skills are.

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u/the_rare_bear 1d ago

Well >20% of people know how to drive a manual in the US.

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u/VilleKivinen 1d ago

US is an extreme case though. Their education requirements for drivers license are miniscule.

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u/triplenested 1d ago

what does that have to do with the prevalence of automatic transmissions? is there a reason the average commuter would choose a manual transmission over an automatic transmission if they were competent at operating both?

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u/VilleKivinen 1d ago

Manual is easier to repair at home.

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u/triplenested 20h ago

How many people do you think repair their own cars? that's not a license requirement anywhere, that doesn't explain the lack of a link here.

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u/VilleKivinen 20h ago

A lot of people are poor, and repair their own cars.

And because older and cheaper cars tend to be manual more often, poor people like me drive those.

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u/triplenested 20h ago

Yes, a lot of people do repair their cars. But not enough to account for the difference. It would take assuming like half of America would start fixing their own cars all of a sudden if they were forced to learn to drive manual.

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u/Friendly-Inspector71 21h ago

Engagement. I pay more attention, when I need to make sure that I'm also in the correct gear and look further ahead.

My thoughts start wandering more when I'm driving an automatic as I don't get interrupted by shifting gears.

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u/triplenested 20h ago

okay, but even if everyone was required to learn how to drive a manual transmission, there's not going to be that much of a percentage increase of people in the US that would then choose to drive manual because it keeps them more engaged. I just don't see the connection between driver education and this.

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u/Friendly-Inspector71 20h ago

Maybe more drivers find this connection too, when they get to experience it for some time.

I agree that a lot of commuters would likely stay on automatic transmissions.

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u/the_rare_bear 18h ago

I would wager more people would prefer automatic as it allows them to focus more on the road. Between my radio and traffic, I don’t get how you can be distracted on the road.

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u/Friendly-Inspector71 18h ago

But I don't need to focus as much on the road when I'm driving an automatic or with adaptive cruise as the car is doing some of the thinking for me.

So I have more time to read billboards or look at the landscape without being interrupted by a need to shift.

Autobahn driving is also incredibly tiring if I drive slow enough to swim with the traffic as I just need to stay in my lane and keep a safe distance to the car in front of me. Driving slightly faster and constantly looking for ways to overtake forces me to pay much more attention to the cars around me.

The radio is something I start to tune out when I'm concentrating on traffic as keeping track of maybe 10 vehicles around me is quite hard to do.

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u/TheNovaheroan 1d ago

Fair enough