Back when people took pride in their driving skills

Although I usually travel backwards in time in this blog, today I want to go into the future, and look back. I want to try to explain what it was like "back in the day" when people took pride in their driving skills. Here we go...

Since cars have been self-driving for many years now, some of you young folks have asked me to talk about what things were like back when the average person was expected to drive cars. I'm in my seventies now, and I might be my eighties (I'm not sure) so you have to bear with me, and rest assured that even people younger than me remember this.

There was a time when driving skills, and the knowledge of what to do in traffic was very important to the average person, especially us men. I myself remember that getting my driver's license was a big moment in my life, and I got my first car soon after that.

It really is hard to explain how much the average man cared about his ability to drive. You really couldn't even hint at a criticism of it, or you would risk a punch in the nose. Of course, most people were just terrible at it, but in spite of lots of collisions (I personally put several cars in the junkyards of Phoenix), driving was a point of pride, which increased with age as other skills faded away (such as doing backflips, or using apps on a cell phone, etc.). 

Unlike today, a license to drive was not very limited. There were professional drivers back then, just like there are now, but they had to get a special license - an ordinary drivers license was given to just about anyone requiring mostly only the ability to read some letters on a chart on a wall. And there really was no skill test needed as the years went by, which made for some very impaired elderly drivers, especially in the Phoenix area. But they really didn't have a choice, there were no self-driving cars back then. It was just taken for granted that people behind the wheel couldn't be criticized, no matter what happened, from fender benders to fatal accidents. It was seen as humorous, and people just laughed it off.

And driving really required a lot of skill, and concentration. You couldn't even take a quick look at your phone to text someone or you would probably have an accident. You certainly couldn't watch a movie in your car the way that you can do nowadays!

And people did more than just take pride in their driving skills, it was a subject of conversation that most people enjoyed. There were discussions about how things were better years ago, before the invention of things like automatic transmissions, or power steering, or whatever.

So, yes it's true that talking about driving was a touchy subject, and people took a lot of pride in their driving, no matter how terrible it was. Nobody said anything unless they wanted to start an argument, and I just kept quiet, hoping that self-driving cars would quickly go from the testing phase to common, the way that computers, and cell phones did.

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