Commercial Car Rage or Commercial Carnage?
Many thanks for your comments, Aykay.
Forum readers might be interested to know that official figures just received by MotorBar show:
* Nine people die every day on UK roads.
* Commercial vehicles (such as trucks, vans, coaches and buses) account for 1 in 5 or 20% of all road deaths.
* What is extremely worrying from the above figures is that commercial vehicles account for only 1.7% of all vehicles on our roads.
These figures take no account of how many of these commercial vehicles could be foreign or the percentage of lorries, vans, coaches, etc. Our personal experience over many years of travelling around the country testing cars is that we have not noticed an excess of commercial vehicles being driven badly. Quite the opposite, in fact. Most examples of bad driving likely to cause an accident have involved cars.
Having said that, many years ago a (drunk?) lorry driver tried to run us off the road and a couple of years ago a coach tried to force us into roadwork bollards after the driver misjudged the conditions. Once through the congestion he overtook dangerously and again tried to force an incident. Two isolated cases that could have resulted in a serious accident. MotorBar supports commercial vehicles going about their business safely and is pleased to see the 'Well Driven' campaign. 