Lane discipline : worse than ever in England.

It's over 7 years since I left England, and I've discovered on my current business trip that most things have deteriorated. One thing which is immediately noticeable is lane discipline. It was never brilliant when I lived here, but unbelievably it's become worse since I left. On the commute from my lodging to my office, I come across literally miles of cars driving along a dual carriageway in the outside lane without a care in the world, whilst the inside lane is completely clear. Without exception, they all get very irritated when I overtake them on the inside.

I found the same was true of a couple of the major motorways this morning too - hundreds of drivers just sitting in the outside two lanes whilst the inside two lanes were completely clear.

Frankly I consider it to be safer to overtake these goons on the inside than to go to the outside lane and have to flash them to get them out of the way. The problem is that if the police see me doing this, no doubt they'd hassle me for undertaking instead of the hundreds of cars with no lane discipline. We're all breaking the law though - shouldn't they be trying to solve the cause of the issue?

The Audi A4 - and another thing.

I've got another Audi A4 on rental this week, so I'm having a chance to re-evaluate my previous comments. All hold true but I've found something else that's irritating me now. The indicator has two modes of operation. If you nudge the indicator stalk, it blinks the indicators three times then turns off. If you engage it fully, the indicators turn on then self-cancel when turning. It's the three-blinks thing that is irritating. I nudged the indicator stalk when moving my hand off the wheel yesterday on the motorway, and the indicator came on. Not realising it was going to do the three-blinks thing, I quickly shoved it the other way thinking I'd turned the indicators on. So then I ended up indicating to the right - shit - nudge it the other way - starts indicating to the left again. There's no way to actually manually cancel the three-blinks mode once it's running other than fully engaging the indicators one way or another, then returning the stalk to it's neutral position.
Bad, Bad Audi. That's terrible design. Nanny indicators. Whatever next?

The person behind me must have wondered what the hell was going on. In the end I actually had to change lanes simply to make it look like I wasn't a complete idiot.