My family and my brother’s family are going to Ireland for a couple of weeks this summer. We’ve rented a car for the occasion. It is standard transmission.
I can imagine that it wouldn’t be too hard for me to drive a “backwards” car with an automatic transmission. But adding the standard transmission makes things a bit scary–or at least, seems scary to me at the moment. Seems like it would be just a few steps below trying to learn how to write with my left hand.
Anyone here had to learn to drive standard transmission on a car that has its steering wheel on the side opposite the one they were raised on? How hard was it? How long did it take you to get into the groove of it?
-FrL-
To be clear, I know how to drive standard on an American car.
I’ve driven standards in the British Isles (both countries, all parts of UK except N.I.) several times.
For me, it’s not a big deal. Even the very first time I drove in the UK, it took me about 5 minutes and I was fine after that.
Then again, I’m a guy who loves driving and is semi-ambidextrous (IOW, if I **really **had to write with my left hand, I’d probably manage that too), as well as spotty on left vs. right (possibly as a consequence of the above) – I ended up rationalizing the “reversed” driving process by switching them in my head, the first few times I drove in UK/IRL – so YMMV.
But – millions of people do this every year (going both ways; Brits and Japanese driving in Europe, e.g.,) with very few mishaps, so if you trust your basic driving skills you should probably be able to manage.
I went from driving a stick-shift in Australia (right-hand drive) to driving a stick-shift in the Middle East (left-hand drive) with very few problems. I only banged my hand into the driver’s side door a couple of times, usually when I was reversing. Otherwise, I had no trouble adjusting to the switch within a couple of hours. For those first 2 hours, I needed to be a little bit conscious of what I was doing, but after that, I was back to auto-pilot for gear changes.
If, however, they had switched the clutch pedal around as well, I would have been absolutely screwed!
I learned to drive in an automatic in the states. While stationed in Okinawa (US Navy) I bought a standard car, almost used cars sold were sticks. Didn’t have any problem learning the stick. And after almost causing 2 wrecks due to looking wrong way, didn’t have any problem driving on left side of road. After coming back to the states, didn’t have any problem adjusting to the gear shift being on the other side of me. My biggest problem adjusting was wanting to get in the wrong side of the car after I was back in America.
I’ve had little trouble making the switch between right-hand drive at home in India, and left-hand drive in Europe and the Middle East (with both manuals and autos). There have been a few occasions where my left hand would bang against the driver-side door, but it typically happened in the first few minutes of making the switch to right-hand drive.
What everyone else said. I’ve driven a manual transmission RHD configuration car on the left, and an LHD on both the right and left*. I don’t think I’ve driven an RHD on the right. You get used to it very quickly. And I’m a confirmed klutz.
I was terrible at it, but my wife had no trouble. For me, the traffic circles were the worst, I had this terrible fear of entering one going the wrong way.
I’ve driven left hand drive cars in the US and UK, and right hand drive cars in the UK and France, which covers all possible combinations. At first I found “wrong side of the car” harder than “wrong side of the road”. The first few times in a RHD car in the UK I would get too close to things on the left.
It was easy for me. We went to Ireland, and it was ludicrously expensive to rent an automatic over there, so we rented a standard and I drove. I had no problem with either the wrong-side-of-the-road or the wrong-side-of-the-car thing.
I should in fairness add that:
1.) I’ve driven a standard since I leatned how to drive, and my ordinary car was a stick.
2.) This wasn’t my fiorst time driving on “the wrong side”. I’d driven in Scotland before, without any problem.
I switch between the two quite regularly, as I have a transatlantic family. It feels decidedly odd the first hour or so, but then it’s a cinch.
However, a word of warning: make sure you have a reminder of which side of the road you are meant to be on!!! My dad uses a stick-on arrow on the dash; someone on Dragon’s Den in the UK was trying to market wearing a single glove to remind you.
It’s easy enough to maintain the switch when you’re concentrating, but if something distracts you, such as the need to manuever, it is also easy to fall back into ‘instinct’ mode.
Twice I have set off on the left hand side of the street in the US after a maneuver and only realised my error when a vehicle was hammering towards me head-on. The second time was after six months’ constant driving on the right - I got distracted on an empty street, and set off on the left.
But worse, friends of mine from Texas, while in Ireland, took a wrong turn, turned their hire car around, and drove for 5 miles on little wiggly Irish roads without seeing any other traffic, before rounding a bend straight into the front of an SUV at full speed, head on. They were in Galway hospital for several days, with several broken bones. The same happened to my ex’s cousins from Boston when in Connemara.
But was this the fault of driving on the “other side”? In my (limited) experience of driving in Ireland, lots of those “wiggly little roads” are only one car wide (sometimes not even that – the vegetation brushes the car on both sides). And you never can tell what’s around the next bend. This narrowness of the roads and inability to se around bends (where there could be a truck, or bicyclists, or a herd of cows on the road) prevented me from ever driving with the speed and abandon of my Irish hosts.
No, my friends were on the wrong side of the road - they admitted it. There may have only been 2 vehicle widths + 3" in that road, but if they’d have been on the correct side of the road, the accident would either not have happened, or they’d have glanced off the SUV and into the hedge, rather than smack into the front of it. Most Irish drivers manage these roads for decades without incident, as you admit, by adhering to the left at all times! Personally, I never had a crash in ten years living there.
I agree with what Jjimm seems to be saying, that it’s not switching hands per se, but rather what things look like from the other side and being on the other side of the road.
In airplanes we call that the “sight picture” - how things look from your seat. Driving on the other side, the lanes and such don’t look the same as from where you’re used to.
And as he also said, be careful when you get loaded up with tasks because your default mode may be a return to what you know.
I agree that the really dangerous situations are empty roads, and turning on to them. With other traffic to guide you it’s less likely that you will revert to your normal side of the road.
However, I don’t want my caution to put people off - it’s immensely common people to change to the other side frequently (perhaps moreso for Brits and Irish, being in between two landmasses of righties), and the vast majority of us do it just fine. I’m just urging a modicum of reminding oneself not to go to default setting.
I went to England for the first time about 2 years ago, and I drove our rental car. My daily driver here in the states is a stick, and I was adamant going in that I wanted to try out driving a manual over there, too.
I did not find it that difficult. A bit weird, in an enjoyable sort of way. I had a blast, to be honest; driving those rural roads was a lot of fun. Having my wife manning the map helped a lot - the number of wrong turns we made was reduced considerably (but not eliminated). Some specific points that come to mind:[ul][]Whacking the door with my right hand while groping for the shifter, as many have noted;[]Occasionally missing shifts due to fully mirroring the process. “2nd gear - towards you and down. Whoops, that’s Reverse!” I (a righty) often find that I can write more clearly backwards when I try writing with my left hand - perhaps its a related cognitive phenomenon;[]I didn’t realize until I got there that I often flick my turn signal on while reaching for the shifter. You can’t do that when both are operated by the same (left) hand;[]Only once (and towards the end of my stay, at that) did I absently walk up to the car and actually sit down in the left (passenger) seat before realizing what I was doing;[]I never did find myself toodling down the wrong side of the road. Being in the right-hand seat seemed to be a very effective subtle reminder;[]Turning right off of a two-lane road felt really weird. I was struck by an amazing feeling of Wrong, expecting to get T-boned by the (nonexistent) car just behind me whom I was about to turn in front of.[*][/ul]I can’t wait to go back and try it again - driving was one of the highlights of the trip for me.
My girlfriend and I were in the Cayman Islands a couple of weeks ago. That’s an “opposite side” country from what we’re used to in the US. I was recovering from surgery, so she drove.
I was in the left-side passenger seat, holding the map and navigating. She focused on keeping the car where it was supposed to be on the road. Very occasionally, I would remind her, “left turn equals near turn,” when she was starting to make a wider arc, and she would quickly correct. After a couple of days, she had it down pat.
In our experience, the job is a lot easier to manage, and the transition easier to make, if two people are doing it.
(I make no promises if you’re a nervous driver who can’t abide passenger kibbutzing. )
Having narrowly avoided a head-on 60+60mph collision with a German car a few months back, half a mile from where that driver had turned off a main road, I cannot stress how true this is, and that you shouldn’t relax behind the wheel as much as you might normally do.
