Are Asian Women Bad Drivers?

My work friend, Hien, had taken some photos of another work friend, Jessie, and how she had parked her car. As you can see from the photos below, it isn’t the best parking in the world. Some unsuspecting person such as Tin is demonstrating below can walk right into the car and hurt themself. :-)

This has prompted me to write this post about Asian women drivers. To begin with, lets talk about Jessie. She admits that she is a bad driver and knows that when we joke about it we don’t mean anything mean towards her. I’ve only been in Jessie’s car once, and let me tell you, there were some tense moments. A group of us always go out to lunch on Friday and Jessie usually doesn’t want to drive, she has driven only once before according to my memory. However that one time I wasn’t in her car, but another work friend, Jeffrey, had joked the whole time at lunch about how bad she was. I didn’t really believe him as I thought he was just joking.

Anyway Jessie is a very tense driver. She sits bolt upright in the car and all her attention is fixed on the road. She has to know where she is going so can change to that lane well in advance. As she says herself, she only drives from her house to work and back, that’s it. This is not dissimilar to my aunties, who only drive to the shops to do their grocery shopping and to each other’s houses. This is probably a good thing for the rest of us seeing as they bought their licenses. More on that later.

I don't think I'm stereotyping when I say a majority of older Asian female drivers are pretty bad drivers. I should know, I live in Springvale where most of Victoria’s older Asian female drivers come each week to buy their Chinese groceries and I see first hand how they drive. I have seen so many accidents and near accidents in Springvale due to these ladies not knowing the road rules. The problem is that most of them have poor English so to be able to get a license, they have to pay for it. I know of two aunties who bought their licenses. You give the “instructor” about $2000 and he gives you the answers in the written test. Then he arranges it so that you are given the driving test by someone they know or even themself and will pass you regardless of how you really drive. This means there are lot of people driving on the streets that don’t know the rules fully. They continue to drive that way thinking it is correct, causing lots of accidents because other people expect them to do something else. I was at a round about and expected the lady on my left to give way to me so I continued on only for her to also keep going. Luckily I braked really hard just in time to avoid an accident. She then drove away happily not even knowing that she nearly caused an accident.

So you might be asking, why aren’t men from similar backgrounds just as bad. Well they probably are at the beginning. Older men though still seem to have better reaction times than older women so can sometimes avoid accidents due to reacting to it faster. Also, since the male is usually the main driver in a household (in Asian families anyway), they quickly learn from their mistakes in many varied driving situations. After a couple of crashes or close calls they will learn to try and understand the road rules better. Since the females only drive in limited situations, they may be lucky and not have any accidents or major accidents. And since they think that they will only continue to drive in limited situations, usually they don’t bother trying to learn the rules even after an accident.

What are you opinions on this topic, are stereotypes of Asian women as bad drivers correct or just another urban myth? Feel free to leave comments.

Edit: As a follow up to this story, about 8 months after I wrote this post, my friend and I got into a real accident involving an Asian woman driver who had no clue how to drive at all. You can read the post here.