Sean Lander is a videographer at CarExpert. He’s also very, very frustrated.
Join me, if you will, for a moment of imagination. You’re driving down a country road, and the signposted speed limit is 100km/h.
Your cruise control and speedometer are reading 100km/h and all is well. You’re taking in the sights, enjoying our wide brown land when suddenly, you come up behind some plonker doing 90km/h.
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“That’s fine” you think to yourself. “An overtaking opportunity will appear shortly”, and you settle in for a few minutes of laboured driving. Suddenly, the plonker begins pulling away from you.
“Great, they realised they were going slowly” you think, and you cruise back to 100km/h.
Your cruise control takes over again and life is good. But the offending car keeps pulling away. You frown, but turn attention back to your podcast (the new CarExpert podcast? – Ed.).
Before you know it, the plonker is back to their old habits and you’re back down to 90km/h.
This goes on, repeating like some weird glitch in the Matrix, until finally you come across a broken line and leave them behind.
This is without question the most frustrating thing that can happen when you’re covering a big distance. Forget people not indicating or tailgating, this takes the cake.
It’s even more frustrating on a multi-lane highway.
While it’s infuriating having to constantly adjust your speed, this practice does highlight a big problem. Inattention.
There’s no doubt this occurs all over the world, but here in Victoria it seems more prevalent than anywhere else in Australia.
Victorians and vehicle speed have an interesting relationship. I grew up in New South Wales, which had – by comparison – a more relaxed stance on speeding. Victorians live under an iron thumb of anti-speeding tyranny.
Just a breath over the speed limit will net you a point on your licence and a few hundred dollars in fines.
Before you say it, in a school zone any speed is dangerous, so sticking to 40km/h is a must. But when you’re doing 100km/h on a highway and you coast down a hill, getting booked for 104km/h is a bit insane.
Because of this, Victorians spend most of their lives under the speed limit. However, complacency seems to be taking hold.
Travelling everywhere more slowly than necessary, drivers are spending more time looking at their phones, adjusting their Spotify playlist or, as I witnessed the other day, eating their cereal behind the wheel.
Mirrors are neglected, as are road signs and other vehicles. Drivers often think they have a divine right to be in the fast lane at a speed they deem adequate. If that’s less than the signposted limit, too bad for the car behind.
Then for no logical reason, they hit the NOS button and rocket away. Whether they realise they were holding up traffic or just had a burst of energy, this is a regular sight.
I’m not suggesting there be jail time for the offence, but it should come with some consequence. The issue isn’t even about annoying everyone stuck behind the plonker, the issue is far broader.
Cars are two-tonne bullets, yet people don’t respect that fact.
Speeding shouldn’t be the number one priority of enforcement agencies. Driver attentiveness should be.
At the very least, if everyone used their cruise control and maintained a constant speed, we could lower the carbon footprint of cars. And that’s good for everyone.