West Yorkshire Police

It must be a near certainty that if you stop suddenly and hard in lane 3 you will be rear ended. Even driving in the small hours you are unlikely to be alone on any motorway. Trying to maintain a safe stopping distance is tiresome as if you manage to create the gap then someone will dive into it leaving it to you to do it again. It won’t be a problem for much longer as autonomous vehicles will look after the frustration for you.

Mike

My father insisted that I pressed the release when applying the handbrake.

Apparently, in the early days of his transport business, he bought a very used Crossley lorry. He said that as you loaded sacks onto the bed, you could hear the handbrake releasing click by click with each sack! Hence his fear of worn ratchets.

Old habits die hard, so the handbrake hardly ever clicks on; just the same with double declutching.

Our daughter brought her car back from the Hague, to East Anglia, with a broken clutch cable, because she had been taught these techniques.

According to the TV programmes, a lot of Police cars are severely damaged, either by being rammed by criminals, or after being authorised for "Tactical contact". The American Police are trained on where to hit a car so that it spins off the road!

Howard

Some Fords (and probably others) need to be applied with the button out every now and then for the automatic adjusters to work.

My Citroen has a very odd feel, one click only and if you press the button you have to release it well before you let go of the handle or it drops off.

Neil

Howard a lot of the police car bumps are down to just plain getting carried away. There are only a limited number of Tpac (tactical pursuit and containment) officers so not many stops are carried out.

Regular beat car drivers often get the red mist coming down when driving and make silly mistakes. Bit too much adrenalin or as we used to term it; the drivers ambition exceeded their ability.

I used to do a slide show style presentation to new cops with bent police cars to demonstrate how things can go wrong. One pic had two marked cars turning into the same junction and colliding , one showed a crashed bandit vehicle that had slid off the road on black ice with the following police car right alongside it as the ice applied marked cars as well. But my favourite was a beat car that never even got out of the nick yard, seen embedded in the station wall, blue lights still illuminated.

I still always press the handbrake button in now, it grates on me to hear the angry ratchet of a brake applied otherwise.

Whichever way you slice it driving standards are being eroded, mainly because of a lack of active policing on the roads. All the automatic stuff is ok for documentary offences and speeding but there have to be cops stopping cars for routine checks, otherwise folk get complacent real quick.

Ex driving instructor and IAM Motorcycle Observer here.

AFAIK (from my Observer days so 30 years ago) only the traffic cops do the Advanced training not beat/panda/area car guys. I remember a Police Driving Instructor telling me that when the non advanced drivers were allowed to drive traffic cars (but with no pursuit or legal concessions) the number of crashes went up tenfold.

I too taught, and still do press the button when applying the handbrake, despite that my first driving school car (a Nova) ended up with a dodgy handbrake by the time I retired it.

Whether people jump into a safe gap or not when you leave one there is no excuse for driving too close. Remember the 'two second rule' only applies in good dry conditions, in rain you should at least double it and in snow stopping distances can easily be 10 times the Highway Code numbers (TBF many modern cars, even not so sophisticated ones, can stop in significantly less but better too much room than too little).

Many years ago I was in lane three at around 70 when the traffic slowed rather quickly.

I hit the brakes hard but also checked my mirrors, as trained, so as I came close to stopping I moved right towards the central area with my Dad, in the passenger seat shouting "what are you doing?"

Having stopped we watched the car behind me, nose down, head directly into the boot of the car in front of me.

Close call

Nothing beats looking where you are going!

The first time that I drove M25 westbound, cars catching up with me were tail ending the ones in front!

Fortunately, the traffic cleared and I was able to move away before they came sideways and got me involved.

Maybe modern cars are so easy to drive that you no longer need to think what you are doing?

Howard