Hyundai Ioniq
Hyundai has made a near-perfect car for everyday driving
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It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a driver in possession of a good car, must be in want of driving lessons.
While parodying Jane Austen is occasionally amusing, the fact that hardly anyone on the public highways is capable of driving with any degree of skill is far less amusing. Yet wherever we look within the OECD, this is what we find. When we look elsewhere, the situation is far worse. Most people simply have no real notion of how to drive. They scrape through a rudimentary test designed to enable most people to scrape through, and then they deteriorate thereafter.
Hardly any country offers advanced driver training (the UK’s Institute of Advanced Motorists being a much-needed exception to this rule) and hardly anyone imagines they even need advanced driver training. This is akin to a group of clumsy white belts in a karate class imagining themselves to be skilled to sandan level. Everyone thinks they are a better than average driver, while having no concept of pitch and yaw, polar moment, how to set up a car for a corner, where to position the vehicle in the road depending on what’s ahead, how to deal with an explosive decompression of a front tire, how to handle a skid, nor even having any basic situational awareness. Most people simply lurch and jerk from point A to point B in a self-contented mental fog where most of their attention is focused on texting or voice calling or some other non-driving task.
Not surprisingly, there are a great many accidents on the roads, and only the many safety features found in modern cars keep the death toll relatively modest. But without our safety belts and air bags and anti-lock brakes and stability control and crumple zones and lane departure warning systems and automatic braking systems and passenger cages, the toll would be far higher.
And people would still imagine themselves to be better than average drivers.
While some automobile manufacturers continue to use marketing techniques to appeal to a subset of self-proclaimed “better than average drivers” who actually just happen to have a better than average ability to spend a lot of money on a car, most companies quite sensibly focus on the great mass of people who most of all…
