Control in Driving - Doing it the Easy Way

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When people speak of control in driving quite often they miss the point. Everyday drivers seem to associate the important aspects of control with being able to perform a handbrake turn in the tightest of spaces or weaving in and out of narrow gaps at high speed.

Personally I blame Clarkson and his cohorts, along with Hollywood and the PlayStation. Their sort of driving is spectacular and it cannot be denied that there is certainly a large degree of control involved, but in order to demonstrate that type of control with any degree of safety, the first thing that must be controlled is the environment.

The only safe places to display these boy racer tendencies are the Top Gear test track, a Hollywood film set or in a virtual world via your own living room. You see the problem is that if you do this kind of thing in the real world, one mistake could severely affect the lives of other people, and regardless of how unlikely it is that you will make a mistake, you just do not have the right to take that risk with another person's life.

So what type of control is relevant in real driving? Well of course you do have to have a certain degree of control over the vehicle, but vehicle control is truly irrelevant when compared to the concept of exerting your control over the situation.

This is a massive issue and once it is understood in the right way driving becomes much more of a stress free task, confidence will start to build and the whole thing becomes much easier and more enjoyable.

So let's look at the level of control each driver can have over a situation. Is it possible that one driver can control the intentions and actions of any other driver? Well no that would be impossible, we are not looking to dictate what anybody else on the road does.

So what does that leave us with? It seems that we must concern ourselves purely with our own actions; we must drive in a way that gives us control over how our vehicle interacts with other road users.

Basically this means that if the plan we have for the route ahead is reliant on another road user doing anything that is not standard practice then we need to change our plan. Even if the thing that we are relying on is standard practice but it requires another road user to take action, we should approach the area at a speed that gives us control over the situation.

The full understanding of these points may take some more research and a degree of consideration, but with the right attitude and a little bit of help, driving should become a far more enjoyable experience in no time at all.

Review Feature Office 2010