I don’t think so.
Go on living your dull conformist life, sheeple.
Now, back to serious : not sure what handedness has to do with driving - no matter which your dominant hand is it will be doing important stuff, be it holding the wheel or shifting. But since neither are high precision tasks, does it really matter ? I can’t write well with my right hand, but I can still hold a pen with it.
I did this a bit when I moved from the US to UK. You’re trying to place your body in the same relative position in the lane. You’re used to sitting near the left edge of the lane in the US. When you switch to a RHD car you’ll drift left to attain the same position.
I drove in Canada a few weeks ago after having not driven in that configuration for about 8 years. I was proud of myself for never driving on the wrong side of the road or trying to get in the wrong side of the car.
That’s an interesting question, for some time I had a Japanese car and its wiper and other controls were swapped as compared to the US/European models I was driving at work. Much hilarity ensued.
Not really relevant to handidness but a sad story regarding driving cars you aren’t used to. A few years back an American tourist was killed here when he pulled out in front of oncoming traffic, his wife stated that he accelerated but the car didn’t go anywhere. What happened was he wasn’t used to manual cars and had selected too high a gear to pull out with. Unfortunately there are some mistakes you only get to make once. :\
I’ve driven thousands of miles in multiple configurations over the years (LHD and RHD cars, auto and manual on both LHD and RHD countries and vice-versa)
After the first 15 minutes of strangeness it really isn’t a problem. It steels you for other changes as well so that when you subsequently drive LHD on RHD roads (or vice-versa) for the first time it comes as less of a shock.
I’m right handed and I don’t really recall any set-up being particularly more confusing or difficult than the others.
Manual gear changing is 90% of my driving and changing hands could potentially be the worst but in practice…not so much. When driving I have a little mental picture, almost subconscious, in my head of the gear layout. Regardless of which hand I’m using it is a simple process of knowing that it is currently “there” and then moving it to “there”. the hand (whichever one) simply follows the thought, it doesn’t try to do the mirror image.
I never had any problem driving in England, only in crossing the street as many have commented. Now that I have been spending several weeks in Barbados every winter, I’ve even gotten used to that.
But I have to tell a story good enough to have made it into one of Cecil’s books. A Norwegian I once knew was a student in Oslo at a time that Sweden still had left side driving. His home town (called Kirkenes, pronounced Sheerkenes) was on the other side of Sweden (actually near the Soviet border). When he drive home the road snaked into and out of Sweden and the borders were unmarked. The road was not much more than one lane wide, although cars could inch past one another with care. So it happened more than once that he would be driving down the middle of the road and see approaching headlights. Which way should he swerve?
Sorry, but to the best of my knowledge there is no road along the Swedish-Norwegian border that fits that description, unless he chose to drive some extremely strange and remote route.