If the same manual was used for the same model of car in the UK and in a right side driving anglophone country like the USA some instructions must have been wrong in either country.
I claimed that if that is the case you would have to “translate” the manual from the UK into US-English by swapping the words “left” and “right”, “passenger side” and “driver’s side”, which would probably result in additonal problems if done blindly, and Melbourne added some more complication.
I thought in places like the UK they avoided the terms passanger side and driver’s side. They say nearside (near the curb, er kerb) and offside (near the center of the road.).
I do not know about that, but the Highway Code definitely has instructions like “keep to the left”.
And, FWIW, I pulled a random service manual and it absolutely does mention the passenger side as opposed to the driver’s side, as well as things like " NOTE: When checking oil level, ensure that the oil can symbol on dipstick is correct way up when viewed from left hand side of vehicle"
PS and, more pertinently, information like “The windscreen wiper motor (2) is located in the
plenum chamber on the driver’s side…” Since the manual refers to both left-hand drive and right-hand drive and gives separate instructions where appropriate, I would interpret that the wiper motor is located in a different place depending on the variant.
In the real world, any car owner’s manual will contain schematics showing the instrument cluster and the location of controls like the gearshift, parking brake, and hood and trunk releases. These schematics would need to be redone when describing cars with right-hand drive. Changing any text that references “driver side” vs “passenger side” is trivial in comparison.
Referencing “the left hand side of the vehicle” is another way to avoid ambiguity. As @LSLGuy correctly pointed out, “left side” and “right side” is perfectly clear when referencing the vehicle as a whole, where it’s always with respect to the vehicle’s normal direction of motion.
My earlier point was that there’s left-right ambiguity when viewing individual parts of the car, hence the preference for “driver side” and “passenger side”. If you read “the jack is stored in a compartment on the left side of the trunk” there’s no problem because it conforms with the overall vehicle coordinates. But when you read “to add coolant, open the hood, and open the coolant reservoir on the left side of the engine compartment” one may be befuddled and end up adding coolant to the power steering hydraulic reservoir on the opposite side.
Also, car manuals for the UK need to be translated from normal English to British, where cars don’t have hoods and trunks, they have bonnets and boots, like an elegant lady wading through mud!
An expansion tank, mounted on the RH side of the engine compartment, provides a fluid reservoir for the coolant system.
However, luckily, there is an illustration underneath. (I assume the RH side of the engine compartment is on your left if you are standing in front)
ETA and, to be clear, they cannot say “driver’s side” because there is no separate manual depending on whether the driver sits on the left or the right
Back to geography: I wasn’t thinking of people getting their physical directions confused on the ground because their new city doesn’t have the lake in the right direction. I think that occupies a different, spatial, part of the brain while navigating.
I was thinking about the verbal part of the brain, when speaking or writing, substituting “east” for “west” on a map and vice versa, usually with no direct reference to local landmarks.
When it came to the directions that early Polynesians migrated across the Pacific (was it from Asia or South America?), Dopers reversed east and west conceptually. My hunch is that their mental model of directions is anchored on the Atlantic point of view, where South America is capital-W West and Asia is capital-E East, so that when they try to think of crossing the Pacific, where the Americas are lowercase-e east and Asia is lowercase-w west, they forget to adjust and get the directions reversed.
Reading the “Safehold” series by David Weber, and I ran across an east/west error (based on the world map included at the beginning of each book). I’m far enough into the current book that I can’t remember if the error was in it or the previous book, but I’m pretty sure it was on a lefthand (even-numbered) page.
This is just to note that the reversal is still occurring in that FQ Polynesian thread, since I started this one. It’s impressive how the mental map setting is so strong that it defies the conscious intent of the writer.
Somewhere I read that brains often have some “circuit” for managing some concept, and then apply the same circuit for other concepts; there’s some other circuit for managing the separation between the first concept and each of the other concepts. This is way older than the human species. At some point long long ago, creatures became big enough to need to understand the directionality of gravity. That is, trilobites or worms or whatever they were needed to keep track of up and down. Our species uses our up/down circuit, by analogy, to track good/evil, rich/poor, warm/cold, tall/short, and north/south, in addition to many others. As an interesting aside, sometimes you get a failure of the concept separation circuit, resulting in bizarre confusions between concepts.
Well, north and south get this treatment, whereas east and west do not.
Somewhere else I read a challenge: imagine communicating with an extraterrestrial civilization by radio, and building mutual understandings. How would you communicate the related definitions of left/right, up/down, dextral/sinistral, clockwise/counterclockwise, et cetera?
I do know how to start, but the explanation starts with a beam of long-lived neutral kaon particles, and if your eyes are starting to glaze over there, it’ll only get worse.
NOTE: When checking oil level, ensure that the oil can symbol on dipstick is correct way up when viewed from left hand side of vehicle"