Juddian:
Has anyone else noticed how skills perception awareness vehicle control and ability to make any sort of progress have taken massive backward steps,What’s happened?
A gradual sea change in society’s values. I was brought up in the sixties with the view that anything worth doing was worth doing well, people aspired to be seen as capable in the eyes of their peer group, no matter what the “thing” being undertaken was. We mostly maintained our own vehicles, and had knowledge of the systems we relied on and treated the vehicles with more care.
Now, no one gives a rats ■■■, hardly anyone understands how anything works, because some guy at the garage will sort it out.
In everyday travel we see people hammering their vehicles i) failing to properly join the main carriage from a slip road, (ii) over-reliance on braking systems - ie leaving it all to the last minute and just assuming you can stop in time, and (iii) total inability to leave any kind of gap between you and the vehicle in front, so in heavy traffic it’s all stop-start-stop-start rather than flowing continuously, albeit at a low speed. So our engines work harder and fuel consumption is higher.
I feel this is partly because most modern drivers know little if anything about how an internal combustion engine works, probably due to the decline in the ability of Joe Public to maintain their own car - forced on us by car manufacturers who have made it impossible to do much more than change your oil, without needing specialist tools.
Most people have no idea that diesel and petrol engines have different compression ratios and why that is, no idea that there was ever anything different than a direct fuel injection system, and as for camshafts, crankshafts, con-rods and gudgeon pins - they may as well be Sanskrit words as far as many people are concerned.
Fuel has never been more expensive than it has been this year, yet every day I see full-on acceleration from gas-guzzling 4x4s, usually just racing from one set of red lights to the next, seemingly with no clue that hard acceleration is just wasting fuel.