Driving right
I have never driven on the right side of the road before. Ever. Taking baby steps outside yesterday was an unusual experience — it’s as if you know it and you don’t. This may sound hilarious, but I went to office by train yesterday instead of taking our new car. I was scared yesterday. Today, I can feel my feet a little firmer on the ground.
The trick, I think, is to keep your cool, or so my colleagues tell me. Think ‘right’, watch that right curb and that right mirror often. (Reminds me of Firefox — the movie, vivid in my memory, in which, Clint Eastwood keeps reminding himself to think in Russian, in order to fire and fly that MiG-31, which can only be controlled neurally.)
We got a little adventurous today and put the GPS in control, before venturing out in the real world. We criss-crossed a few freeways and went around just to get a hang of it all. But, I still dread overtaking.
This may sound like a 6-year old kid with his peddle car (and if it does, pardon the extra dose of enthusiasm :)), but Civic’s cockpit is fantastic. The Porsche developed I-shift is one hell of an amazing technology. There’s no clutch! No button and no peddle to depress. (Anyone remembers Honda Street? — That odd looking bike with rotary gears sans clutch? I-shift is something like that; only leap-years ahead.) It’s a manual transmission but feels like an automatic.
Either you control or you let the machine control it for you. And you get fuel economy of a manual transmission along with the luxury of an automatic. Feel like going on a track? No sweat and no stopovers. Just flip the gear stick and the car hands the control back to you and also tells you in which gear you’re currently cruising. Use flippers mounted on your steering to revv that RPM counter and change at will.
Absolutely amazing!
Strangely I never experienced any apprehensions while transitioning to a drive-right and no-clutch driving. Probably riding shotgun for nearly two years before taking the wheel helped.
Apr 15, 07 at 01:47We did drive an automatic while in Malaysia. But this manual/automatic thing together with right driving, and of course the density of traffic and narrow Dutch lanes all managed to overwhelm us
a little.
Apr 15, 07 at 06:55