Top 10 Most Infuriating Driver Habits

This needs no explanation really. You’re putting the safety of pedestrians, cyclists, other motorists and yourself at risk. Stop it. Let others know what your intentions are and where you’re going with plenty of time. 

Typically a Honda Jazz or late 90’s Nissan Micra. Going significantly below the speed limit is dangerous and infuriating for a number of reasons. Merging onto a motorway in a low-powered car is difficult enough, but when there’s someone going 20mph under the limit in the lane you’re merging into it can make things really awkward. We know it’s called a speed ‘limit’ but try and stay as close to it as the conditions safely allow, for everyone else’s sake.

There are few things scarier than when a motorist coming the other way round a blind bend is clearly going over the limit. All it takes is a slight loss of traction and it’s a head-on collision, but that driver doesn’t see it like that as he/she tries to shave off precious seconds on their journey home from work.

New rules mean that you’re going to be heavily disciplined for using your phone while behind the wheel, but that doesn’t appear to have stopped most people. All you have to do is walk down the path alongside a queue of traffic at a red light, you’ll be blown away by just how many people are checking their social feeds while in control of a vehicle.

There’s a number of reasons the Germans have motorways without speed limits, where drivers routinely test the performance of their cars and still maintain relatively good safety figures. It’s called ‘lane discipline’, you were never taught it in your driving lessons, because you didn’t even go on a motorway, (although this is soon to change) but it’s a big cause of crashes, traffic, congestion and road rage. Stop hogging the lanes!

When travelling at speed it’s always good to use the 2-second rule when measuring the distance you should be behind the car in front. When they get level with a street lamp, a bridge, or whatever, it should take you 2 seconds before you get level with that same piece of road furniture. When it’s raining, double this to 4 seconds. If there is slow moving traffic in front of you the last thing you should do is get right up close. It could be a less confident driver who could panic and tap the brakes when they acknowledge you breathing down their bootlid, and guess who would cover the costs of a rear-end collision? The person who was sitting a metre behind the car in front.

This isn’t bad driving per se, it’s just being rude. Stop being rude. 

*You don't necessarily have to be as grateful and courteous as the lady in the photo.

Honestly, if you do this you’re just waiting to cause an accident. Driving around with full beams on at night time is waiting to cause an accident for someone else. On the flip-side of this, driving around at night time with just your daytime running lights on isn’t going to help the poor motorist behind you!

In a world where supermarkets are trying to fit as many parking spaces in as possible, while manufacturers are building bigger and bigger cars, this was bound to happen. An ‘SUV-only’ section at the back of the car park could help relieve the stresses here, but for the meantime, you can expect to see countless more car owners trying to protect their paintwork by covering two spaces, or maybe they’re just terrible at parking.

We’d all like to think that every time anyone ever makes a lane change they’re checking every mirror twice, indicating well in advance and moving over only when it is safe to do so. Sadly, we live in the real world, where some motorists scarcely check all their mirrors once. Often motorists will only check the mirrors that typically need checking, so if you’re undertaking someone and cutting them up, don’t think they’ve seen you because they probably haven’t and it’s you who is breaking the law. Ok, they might be hogging the lane, but that excuse won’t float in court, you’ve just got to sit behind them (at a safe distance) and cause a big tail back before the person in front realises they need to move over. Sounds stupid, because it is, but the law is the law.