Driving in Australia
Country Driving Tips: How To Drive Near Horses
Over the summer, a lot of us head out into the wide open spaces for a holiday. Country driving is a lot different from city driving, with the empty roads and higher speeds being just one of the things. Or should that be “mostly empty roads”? There are other drivers out there on the roads who are driving just as fast as you are, and there are other hazards that you just don’t get in town, and most of these hazards have four feet.
Horses are one such rural hazard and they are legitimate road users, so if you see a horse and rider on the tarmac ahead of you, you can’t get indignant and wonder why they aren’t off the road. As is the case for bicycles, you have to share the road with horses.
However, horses aren’t bicycles and it’s not just a case of overtaking them when you get close and making sure that you give them enough space to fall over safely. Bikes do not have brains; horses do. And a horse’s brain isn’t a human’s brain, so a horse on the road might not react the way a human would. You don’t want a horse coming through your windscreen. It won’t just be the horse and the rider that gets badly injured or killed: as a horse is very heavy (half a tonne for something the size of the average racehorse or stock horse), it could kill or injure you and the front passenger as well.
To drive safely near horses, it’s important to understand how a horse thinks. A horse is a herbivore whose main form of defence is to run like heck. This is often very dangerous for a rider, because of the risk of falling at high speed, as well as the risk of the horse colliding with something because it’s so focused on the scary thing behind it. Things that prey on horses in the wild make growly roaring noises and often take horses by surprise. It takes a fair bit of training to help a horse realise that that roaring thing isn’t actually a jaguar or a lion that can eat them – it’s just a V8 Jaguar or a Holden with a lion on the front. Most horses that are ridden out on the road have had this training, but drivers still have to do their bit, because the basic instincts are still there in that horsy brain.
The first thing you can do is to ease off the accelerator. This isn’t just so you can slow down enough to react in time if the horse suddenly swerves or something unpredictable happens. This stops your engine making that roaring noise that sounds like a predator. Don’t reapply the accelerator until you’re well past the horse.
Secondly, and most importantly, DON’T HONK YOUR HORN! This will hurry the horse up, all right, but in a way that could potentially kill. You want to avoid spooking the horses at all costs.
Horses can be startled by all sorts of things and they have different temperaments. If a horse is giving the rider trouble, it’s best if you can slow down to a crawl as you go past or even stop. The hand signal for “I am having trouble controlling my horse – please slow down” that can and should be given by the rider is the right arm held out (like the right-turning signal from a cyclist) and waved up and down. Of course, if the horse is being particularly difficult, the rider may need both hands on the reins. Use your eyes: if the horse is walking slowly with its head down and its ears pricked forwards or tilted to the side, it’s relaxed. If it has its head high and its ears back, it is agitated.
Share the road with horses – drive past slowly and considerately, and enjoy it as part of the sights to be seen in the countryside.
Nostalgia Time
Modern cars have come a long, long way from what they used to be. When I first was given the steering wheel (which was down our rather long driveway when I was about ten years old and we had a Mitsubishi Sigma Galant station wagon), thing like airbags, GPS and pyrotechnic seatbelts weren’t even dreamed of. And there certainly is no substitute for modern safety features – people can walk away from a serious crash with just a few bumps and scratches (and a rather bad case of the jitters, admittedly), whereas the same crash in an older car would have involved serious injury and possibly fatality. Dual-zone climate control means that there’s no more fights about “I’m too hot” and “I’m too cold”, and pollen filters make car trips more bearable for those who suffer from hay fever.
But there’s something to be said about older cars, and most drivers over a certain age (and a few under that age) get a bit wistful when they see an older car, and more than a few of us still own older vehicles. But just what is it about older vehicles that we like?
• Nostalgia: if you have a lot of happy memories associated with a certain make or model, you are likely to want to own one.
• Simplicity: Some drivers who have been on the road a long time find the multitude of gadgets and electronic bells and whistles in modern cars to be a bit overwhelming – or even unnecessary. Another aspect of simplicity that appeals to some car enthusiasts, especially those who like to do a bit of tinkering in the garage, is that older cars that don’t have everything done by electronics and electrics can have some repairs and tweaks done by a keen amateur – anyone with a good set of tools can replace a wind-up window, but you have to really know what you’re doing if you try to fix an automatic window.
• Fun: This is one that appeals to passengers rather than drivers, but older vehicles (especially utes and four wheel drives) tended to have ghastly suspension but bouncy springs. The seats weren’t very adjustable and they certainly didn’t have any lumbar support other than a pillow, but they were like a trampoline when you went over a speed hump.
• Charm: The original Mini Cooper was drawn by hand. Later, cars tended to be designed by computers, taking aerodynamics into account. Most modern vehicles do have aesthetics applied to them by a real human, but very few capture the bug-eyed cuteness of the VW Beetle, the Mini or the Fiat 500, which is why new versions of these have been release that combine the best of the old with the best of the new.
Drivers can have other reasons for owning an older vehicle. Some people are holding onto one because they believe that it will become a classic one day: after all, the Model T Ford was once as common as muck, but is now a rare and coveted vehicle. Others stay with an older vehicle because they don’t give a damn about fashion and status, and can’t be bothered upgrading. To each their own!
A Varley Good Idea
A lot of people switch off when they read about electric cars. They’re all over in the USA, aren’t they? Or they’re just concept cars that turn up to make a manufacturer look good at a big motor show. We just can’t get straight electric cars over here in Australia at the moment, and those who are interested in sustainable motoring and alternative fuels have to make do with hybrid cars (and probably feel very grateful for their Toyota Prius and Honda Civic hybrids.
Well, that’s about to change. Varley is getting in on the act. Varley may be quite an old Australian company that was originally founded in 1886 and has been involved in all sorts of engineering projects (including marine, defence force, rail and more) for quite some time. However, now Varley is producing Australia’s first-ever all-electric supercar, the evR450.
The Varley evR450 first made a rather tentative appearance at the Electric Vehicle Conference held in Brisbane in mid-October 2011 and the makers have been surprised at how much interest has been shown in this vehicle. Maybe they shouldn’t have been so surprised – electric cars and hybrid cars are very sexy in automotive design (and this isn’t the only place that electric-powered transport is a hot topic: aviation is another area where the engineers are breaking new ground to get a battery-powered plane off the ground).
The Varley evR450 does quite well in the supercar stakes, as it can do the nought-to-100 sprint in a very, very respectable 3.8 seconds, which can beat the figures of some other Aussie-built supercars such as the HSV and FPV. Its top speed is a nippy 200 km/h, and it can do anything between 150 and 300 km to the battery pack, depending on the type of battery pack under the bonnet.
However, while the Varley evR450 is the first real passenger-style car to be launched on the Australian market, this isn’t the first electric vehicle that Varley have manufactured. Varley already make a number of small electric runabouts that you may well have seen in action. If you’ve seen some of those dinky tugs on wheels at airports pulling the baggage carts and the like, the chances are that it’s a Varley and it’s probably electric. Varley also make those little buses that take people on tours around parks and botanical gardens. Have a look on the back of one of those vehicles next time you see one to see if the Varley logo’s on the back. And have a listen and a sniff, too: can you smell fuel burning? And is the motor quiet?
The Varley evR450 will officially hit the roads in Queensland in January 2012, which isn’t far off. At the moment, they’re not sure how many units are going to produce for sale, and they’re going to wait and see what the demand’s like (which means that it won’t be listed in Private Fleet’s car reviews for the moment, and this post is the best you’re going to get for now). The Varley evR450 is aimed at the luxury car end of the market, and will cost about $200,000.
Keep Left…Unless Overtaking
On a recent trip to the UK, I couldn’t help but notice how major roads (including motorways) fared better with increased traffic volumes than here in Australia. It wasn’t perfect by any means but it definitely seemed that in moderate to high traffic volumes, the traffic moved more smoothly and quicker than over here.
I’m pretty sure the reason is at least partly to do with the following:
In the UK, all drivers keep to the left lane where possible.
In Australia, this road rule is just ignored.
What this effectively does is turn a 3-lane freeway into a two-lane freeway. It also encourages driver’s to undertake which is not ideal for a free-flowing traffic. In an ideal world, the left hand lane should be the busiest with the middle lane less freqented and the outside lane rarely used (yes even in high traffic situations!). However in Australia, the left hand lane seems to be reserved for trucks, caravans and old bangers. The average driver seems to use the middle lane as the default, leaving the ‘slow lane’ for the speed-challenged drivers.
It’s not clear why this is done when there are signs on every freeway stating ‘Keep Left Unless Overtaking”.
Perhaps it’s a perceived safety issue. A clear lane on either side gives the driver a little more distance between the car and potential threats such as trees or the median strip. I’d argue however that being aware of cars on both the left and right sides is much more dangerous than just worrying about the one side if you were indeed keeping left.
I think the most likely reason is because so many people do it, you might be disadvantaged if you do tow the line and do keep left unless overtaking. For example, if you come up to a slow truck, the busy middle lane might trap you in the left hand lane behind the truck unable to overtake. So best to keep in the middle, that way you keep options open on either side? this means you’re forced to break a law which negatively affects traffic simply because so many other people do it. It’s s problem that’s created by the problem itself.
The solution lies in education and regulation. We need:
1) Fines for people who hog the middle lane (have you ever met anybody who’s copped one of these fines? It’s a hard one to enforce admittedly but surely we can do better)
2) Education that the middle lane is not the default and the left hand lane is not the ‘slow lane’
Think about how much money we’d save if, rather than spending billions on new roads and widening of freeways, we just learnt to make the most of our existing network by encouraging more ‘efficient’ driving. Not to mention the increased safety.
What do you think? Is this a real issue? Would it make a difference or am I just a typical driver getting my own personal ‘pet hate’ off my chest?
Level 2, 9 Help Street