Are Asian Women Bad Drivers Part 3

In the continual series on whether Asian women are bad drivers, following from posts here and here, Jessie relayed another extremely funny story today.

After work, Emmanuel, Keiran, Jessie and I have our fairly regular chats. Today we were talking about lots of things and the topic got round to driving. Jessie asked how much a tow bar costs. She has just purchased a new car and was thinking of getting a tow bar. I told her that her new tiny car was not going to be able to drag anything. Then she said that the tow bar was not for pulling things but to avoid accidents. At this point, the rest of us were totally stumped.

Jessie told us that this morning, while she was stopped at a red light, another car ran into her car. However, when she finally got out to check the damage, she saw that the tow bar on her car had saved the bumper from any damage. So hence she wanted to get a tow bar for her new car so that if anyone hits her, their car will have a massive hole in it while her's would be fine. This totally cracked us all up. Firstly, that she is thinking that she will be in an accident already, and secondly, that she wanted the tow bar as a form of protection. We all joked that the best way to avoid an accident is to not drive altogether.

We then joked about her atrocious parking, where she parks about 1 metre from the curb. Even when she parked on an empty street so that all she has to do was drive straight forward and stop, it's still pretty bad. Then Keiran said, "What about when you drive on the freeway, you have to go fast there." And Emmanuel replied "Jessie knows of a freeway but has never been on one." This turned out to be very true. The next question from Keiran was "How many roads do you drive on, 10." He said this in a very sarcastic tone but Jessie started to count the roads she drove on. It turned out to be less than 10.

Jessie's situation is not uncommon to many Asian women who have immigrated to Australian. Second generation Asian women tend to all drive ok at least. But first generation Asian women tend to be very scared drivers. As I mentioned in previous posts, there are a lot of other women who carry a license but only drive to the shops or to take their kids to school. They never bother to try other road conditions and in turn actually end up being very dangerous drivers. They don't know the road rules too well and anytime they get slightly stressed driving, they will do something wrong.

I think I will start writing some more posts about driving. It seems to be one of those topics that everyone has an opinion on and is affected by. I'm constantly amazed at how small an incident can be for people to totally lose it while driving. I'm fairly calm when I drive and just listen to my music and sing along. However, that could probably just be due to me having Optimism Bias and totally misjudging my own behaviour.