At least 15% of the interior electrics had been replaced with house cable when I bought this, which is very low for a French car.
As I pointed out in an earlier post, I used to live in France; Normandie to be exact, for almost 5 years. During that time I owned a few different cars, and drove thousands of kilometers across the country regularly, culminating in a massive road trip covering Spain, Italy and most of France with my then girlfriend during the months of May & June. The scale of that trip wasn’t the same as this one for many reasons, not least of which the fact that my car in those days was French, and we took a longer time to complete it.
Except for a short overnight trip to Lille with some friends in my Saab last year, I’d never actually driven an English car in France before. It’s a very odd experience. As a cardinal rule, the French secretly don’t really like the English that much. All English people are lumped into the group of ‘Les Anglais’, and shown similar levels of respect on the road – not something that I’m used to as a holder of a driving license with “République Francaise Permis de Conduire” in big letters on the front. In fact, during the time I lived in France I treated Les Anglais the same way any other French driver did – with sheer contempt – so this is most likely some sort of karmic effect finally coming around to bite me.
This does not belong in a car.
Driving here is stressful in an English car; tailgating and general asshole-ish behaviour is the norm. I should point out here, that it’s only tailgating in France if you’d struggle to fit a piece of paper between the cars.
A few hundred km into the journey on this side of the channel got me back into my old groove of driving like a French person, which decreased the stress induced by driving here dramatically, and I’m sure caused a few confused looks on the faces of French drivers as they were about to vocalize their distaste.
A few pointers should you ever be in France and are getting tired of all the French drivers treating you like something slightly lower on the food-chain than pond-scum; written from the French perspective:
- From a town sign to the cross on a town sign, the speed limit is 50km/h unless another speed is posted after the town sign. The accepted minimum speed to drive in a 50 is 55. 60 is preferrable, but, the points are yours to lose if there is a Gendarme radar trap.
- You should stop at pedestrian crossings, but stopping at every single pedestrian crossing there is within 10km will result in death-glares, tailgating and sometimes profuse quantities of annoying horn sounds.
- Riding the white line between lanes will piss off all of the motorcyclists. Keep an eye on your mirrors and move over when they are approaching. You’ll receive a grateful foot-kick thank-you and feel better about yourself. Why a foot-kick I hear you asking? It’s quite simple, Europe drives on the right and overtakes on the left, the throttle on a motorbike is on the right, so, to be able to say thank-you without removing a hand from the go-handle, it’s much simpler to kick out a foot in gratitude.
- Braking for every corner is unacceptable, and will result in tailgating and death-glares; learn the basics of how to judge the tightness of a bend, and practice good car control. Lightly riding the brake pedal ‘just in case’ is exceptionally annoying for drivers who might be following you, and will result in tailgating and death-glares.
- On autoroutes, when overtaking, it is best keep an eye on your mirrors; the speed limit may very well be 130, but this loosely translates to between 140 and 150 depending on how much traffic is around. For optimum results, when you’re 6″ past the car you’re overtaking pull sharply across the front of it into the right-most lane. If the driver of the car you have overtaken was French, the response will be unflinching. Doing this with foreign cars may vary the results and could conceivably cause spectacular swerving followed by loud noises, and sometimes accompanied by explosions and fire. Obviously, if you’re fully immersing yourself in the French Driving Style, you’ll have refocused your gaze on the next vehicle you intend to run down, and will not notice the carnage erupting behind you.
- When travelling fast on the autoroute and overtaking many vehicles, you will sometimes meet a slower car in front that has not moved back into the right hand lane. The best approach to take here is to speed up to 160km/h, and begin a fast and aggressive closure on the vehicle in question. Should the car still show no sign of pulling back into the right hand lane, it is acceptable to put your left indicator on to reinforce the fact that you will be overtaking, and that they should get out of your way. If this results in no action, continue at your speed and course until you are no more than 5 meters away from the car in front before applying liberal braking until your distance has closed to 15cm (with a view to possibly boarding their vehicle via the boot to politely ask that they get out-of-the-way), then simply alternate between straddling the white line between the two lanes and giving the driver death glares while flashing your high beams.
- Sometimes, a string of cars will be in the left lane, overtaking nothing, and maintaining a slow speed. This can usually be attributed to a caravan or truck overtaking something far in the distance. Gather your courage, and aggressively switch to the right lane while developing a death grip on the steering wheel and making an annoyed snorting sound, perhaps accompanied by a number of expletives directed towards whichever nationality you presume the vehicle in the distance to be. Check that you can see no sign of the Gendarmerie on the road, then quickly undertake as many cars as you can before arriving at the obstruction. Once there, casually barge back into the left hand lane between the other vehicles.
The most important things to note:
- Brake checking someone who is tailgating you will result in an accident at high-speed, and you will be killed.
Hopefully you were able to detect most of the sarcasm in the above passages, but make no mistake, these are all valid manoeuvres that you will experience while travelling on french roads.
On a truly serious note, the best piece of advice I can give is this:
- Stop signs in France do actually mean “stop”. Stopping is defined as “being stationary for a minimum of 3 seconds”. Gendarmes are most happy to pull you over for failing to adhere to this little known rule, and will shower you with demands for cash prizes – payable immediately since you are foreign.
