Parking brake pedal position - left and right hand drive differences

Left and right hand automobiles are never complete mirror images. Pedal positions are standard on both.

Tom

 

What he said. The handbrake is by your left foot in a RHD car.

 

It's not a complete mirror image as qbee42 says.

To confuse things further you will find that on many RHD cars the wiper controls are on the left side and the headlight controls are on the right side of the steering wheel on many Japanese manufacturers cars. But often those sold in Europe will now have them on the sides familiar to LHD users (headlights on the left and wipers on the right).

Also Japanese manufactured RHD cars will often have the radio controls reveresed too so the volume is on the right side and the tuning on the left. Most other RHD cars are standard to the LHD cars.

You will also find the automatic transmission 'gates' are reversed on most RHD cars but some use the LHD gates, but the botton is reversed to be operated with the thumb on your left hand.

Check out the RHD Prius transmission lever and compare it to a LHD Prius, but then refer to the RHD Auris Hybrid and you'll see they've cheated and used a LHD lever.

Clear as mud?

 

Clear, um... I'll be sure to hire you when I'm in the UK. Best marketing ever.

 

As an American driver visiting England, none of these subtleties really matter when you turn the wrong way into a roundabout.



Tom

 

Yes, this drove me crazy when we rented a Toyota Corolla in New Zealand a few years ago. I was able to adapt to driving on the wrong (left) side of the road, but kept turning on the wipers when I wanted to signal a turn.

 

It's not just visitors who get caught out - I remember driving a Honda Civic years ago which had the controls reversed and wanted to wash my windscreen but ended up flashing my headlights many times thinking the washer was broken. Suddenly the car in front slammed on his brakes and a big bloke got out wanting to know what my problem was!!!

 

Also remember when you're driving in RHD countries --
Left is right
Right is wrong!

 

Which side of the road do they drive on? describes the turn signal lever situation pretty well.

That said, I've only driven a RHD vehicle once and it was on a very short closed track in Japan at the Toyota Mega Web in a JDM Toyota.

 

^^ Yeah the last time we were in the UK, we rented a manual shift sedan, forget the brand of it. I think the shift layout was reversed? But the clutch was on the left still. I'm reasonably certain that headlights were on the right toggle, and the turn signals were on the left.

After a while you get used to it, but shifting with the left hand is weird.

Also roundabouts are crazy confusing, especially the multi-lane ones. We don't have a lot of roundabouts here.

 

More confusing than having to yield on a green arrow to someone coming from the left who's turning right on a red light? (something like that was in a thread about an accident).

Roundabouts are dead easy in comparison - give way to the right.

 

The car turning left in an unprotected left turn (solid green) has to yield to the following:

Pedestrians, even morons who enter when the walk signal is red, and jaywalkers
Cyclists
Oncoming Thru Traffic
Cars turning right on green

Cars turning right on red have to yield to:

Cross traffic
Pedestrians & aforementioned morons
Cyclists,
Cars turning left on protected greens

Does right on red not exist elsewhere? (or left on red if left is right and right is wrong)

 

Not here, red means don't go, end of. It seems kinda stupid, since accidents could easily (and by the sounds of it, do) happen. It sounds like you need to watch traffic in three directions at once - that's not possible.

What is jaywalking, anyway?

 

And the vehicle bigger than you or going too fast!

 

OMG that's the truth! Thank God I was on a motorcycle and could ditch the bike in lieu of a head-on

 

Aye, well, there's a Wisemans dairy in the next village, so i do regularly have to give way to a few tons of milk...

 

Shhhh... that's the kind of simple straight forward logic that might get someone fired here in America. You'll never make it in upper management around here.

In America, red means stop unless red means you can go. And green means go unless it means don't go just yet. It's easy, see? How could anyone not figure that out? As Charlie Sheen would say, our logic is winning, duh.

Jaywalkers are people who cross the road or intersection when they aren't allowed to. You might even see them walk very slowly and obliviously, until they see a car coming at them, in which case they run. They can get a jaywalking ticket.

I also forgot, when making a right on red, you have to yield to cars in the cross road making a U-turn. It's clear as day (or mud).