My observations driving 1st time in India having learnt to drive abroad

I now realized why so many experienced Indian drivers flunk the driving tests in Sweden and UK so many times; it’s hard to get rid of all the bad techniques that over the years get burnt into the brain.

BHPian supermax recently shared this with other enthusiasts.

Two wheels vs four:

I’m born in Karnataka, India, and have spent all of my growing years in old Bangalore, namely Jayanagar and Basavanagudi, and spent my late teen and early twenties in J.P. Nagar, and BTM Layout. From the moment I got my two wheeler licence, I’ve been an active motorist in India, extracting all possible performance out of a 65 CC two-geared Hero Puch, before swapping it for a 125 CC Yamaha Enticer, which which I blasted through the streets of Pune for five years. Now, whenever I visit India, my vehicle of choice is my father’s trusty Honda Dio that has clocked close to 1L km and still going strong. No matter how long I stay away from India and Bangalore, I can simply hop onto the Dio, and I’m back in my element, negotiating the chaotic traffic with aplomb. Four wheelers though a different matter. My family has never owned a car, and I only took a handful of driving lessons in India some 10 years ago, before moving to Sweden, without even bothering to obtain a DL.

I learned to drive from scratch in Sweden, and have been driving for close to two years now, and I’ve driven close to 10k km in that time in my own car, so I thought how hard could it be, to drive in Bangalore, particularly since I was already so adept at tackling the roads on my two wheeler. I wasn’t at all prepared for how hard it would be!

Within hours of landing in India, I jumped into my sister’s car, a Maruti Ritz with an automatic transmission. Despite trying to repeatedly remind myself that the indicator and wiper placements were inverted, I ended up deploying the wipers repeatedly, not once, whenever I wanted to turn on the blinkers. I found also that I was anything but comfortable with two wheeler traffic diving all around me! Making a turn, I instinctively ended up turning onto the right side lane before turning to the left in horror, but that was not the end of it. The unfamiliarity of the sitting position seemed to manifest in issues judging the gap to the car’s sides. I quickly decided that I needed at least an hour but perhaps more of acclimatizing before I could be safe on the road.

I called a few driving schools nearby but most of them insisted that I sign up for some package or the other, with a 10 class minimum, but I finally found a school that was more flexible. I could sign up on a pay-as-you-go plan. I decided to start with a single class, and I found that I was basically driving with too much of a safety margin in terms of gaps to the side, something that is totally not appropriate in Bangalore traffic! I learnt quickly that unless I practically hugged the median, opportunistic two wheelers would try to sneak in a wheel into the gap, forcing me to take evasive action. I noted that the experience in a four wheeler was quite radically different to the vastly superior realtime situational awareness I enjoyed while riding a two wheeler. I quickly realized that defensive driving worked very well, just as it did in Sweden, but one needed to augment it with India specific adjustments.

The things that worked:

• My eco-driving habits such as going off the gas when I spotted a red light worked wonderfully, resulting in a smooth drive.
• My mirror routines were excellent and my situational awareness was good.

The things that didn’t work:

• Whenever I saw a pedestrian, my instinct was to give him/her a wide berth. My driving school guy would shake his head and say that I needed to stay much closer to stop the pedestrian from actually walking right onto my path, with an extended hand!
• Was a bit unnerving to realize that I could get passed in both directions, and with nearly no margins whatsoever. I got better handling this after the first two lessons.
• Clutch control instructions by the instructor here were totally against everything I learned in Sweden. When turning at an intersection, we motorbrake, make the gear change before making the turn, and are ready to stop if needed, but never ride the clutch while turning. Here, the instructor insisted that I be fully clutched as I took turns.
• Even at traffic lights, the instructor would tell me to apply full clutch way before I’d want to do it. I’ve learned to scrub off speed by motorbraking, and then downshifting when the revs drop, resulting in a smooth downshift with no need for a rev match. Here, the instructions were to clutch fully and use the brakes to slow down. I found him applying the clutch and brake for me, even when I was in control and just wanted to motorbrake more before clutching in and braking.
• I had to get used to honking. I’ve used the horn probably three times on the road in the past two years of driving in Sweden. I even remember those instances! Here, I needed to use the horn pretty enthusiastically. I’ve done more honking in the past week than I’d do for the rest of my life, if I spend all of it in Sweden, I think!

The take-home:

• It’s far easier for a person who has learned to drive abroad to tweak his/her driving styles to Indian conditions than for a seasoned driver in Indian conditions to drive in an acceptable manner in the west.
• I now realized why so many experienced Indian drivers flunk the driving tests in Sweden and UK so many times; it’s hard to get rid of all the bad techniques that over the years get burnt into the brain.
• I saw many driving school cars and none that I saw used special mirrors for the instructor to use. The student in India loses the center mirror completely, so most students don’t even learn to use it correctly in the first place.
• Since I’ve learned to look far, far ahead, it was easier for me to observe and take in a lot more, even in the midst of chaotic traffic. Students here are not taught to look far enough ahead. Most drivers only look as far as a car length or two down the road.
• The total absence of lane discipline bites Indian drivers very, very hard when they drive in a country like Sweden where lane discipline and proper planning is critical to success.
• Most Indians seem to believe that driving in India makes them capable of driving anywhere in the world. The ridiculousness of that assumption and that fact that the ridiculousness is lost upon them is rather amusing. When I told my driving instructor that he’d most likely stick out like a sore thumb, being the only guy who was driving very differently from the rest of the traffic flow, he was fairly shocked. You can spot non-regular drivers on the road there, very, very easily.

• For the future:

Now that I’ve invested some time and effort in learning to drive here, I hope it’ll allow me to jump into a car in the future and be able to feel more comfortable behind the wheel. It’s unlikely that I’ll manage to get an Indian LMV license, given that I only visit India once in two years, and rarely if ever stay for longer than three weeks, so I’ll have to make my peace with having to rely on an IDP issued on my Swedish DL to be able to drive in India. On this point, it would be interesting to hear from fellow TBHPians in a similar situation if they use an IDP, or simply drive with their foreign DL which may not be in English. My Swedish DL is in Swedish, and I’m sure DLs issued by Germany, France, Netherlands etc won’t be in English either.

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