For a week I’ve had a sense of foreboding when alongside Mercedes-Benzes. Part of this comes from over 100,000 miles on a motorcycle in L.A. traffic, when I noticed M-B drivers were predominantly the ones who were mot courteous to motorcyclists. (Yes, I made mental notes of the types of cars that had courteous drivers and the ones that didn’t.) But up here in the Great Green Pacific Northwest it’s often too wet and/or too cold to enjoy motorcycling, and lane-splitting isn’t allowed here anyway so it’s less convenient. So while my riding experience contributed to this sense of foreboding, it was not the primary factor. The primary factor is that the M-Bs I’ve been alongside seemed to get too close to cars in front of them, and often seemed to come up on people too fast.
Driving home from Seattle on Wednesday, I passed a collision. A Mercedes-Benz had rear-ended a van at a speed sufficient to completely destroy its front end.
Even though my SO and I both spent a long time in Germany, we have noticed that here in the US, people who buy new Mercedes’ seem to think their warranty comes with street/road ownership; everybody else is just driving on their private property and should get the hell out of their way.
Then again, I have a theory that because Volvo is considered the safest car - one that you will be able to walk away from in case of a crash - the people who buy them are the worst drivers on earth and know it; thus they buy the safest car that might save their ass when they cause the accident they know is coming eventually.
Zooming down a freeway, I can guarantee the car that will pull in front of you at 24 MPH, causing you to slam on your brakes, will be a Volvo.
Then you will look in the rear view mirror and see that Mercedes coming from behind at 124 MPH…
Well, Johnny, I haven’t ridden a bike in many years (since I left L.A. in 1950), but in all the years I have been driving, I am absolutely sure that the worst assholes on the road are BMW drivers. YMMV.
I find Cadillac drivers the worst. Not necessarily because of their taste in cars, but because so many of the drivers are so old, and half blind, and drive at 40 on the highways and 15 on the streets. Ok, they probably won’t rear end someone because of excessive speed, but they will pull out of a driveway right in front of cross traffic because they don’t see it.