On the Left!

In 1908 Henry Ford started producing the Model T. During a drunken shop party on week one, as the first vehicle approached completion, a coin toss (to keep the assembly line rolling) arbitrarily determined that steering wheels would be placed on the right-hand side. After a while many of the shop workers started developing repetitive motion issues and to change things up, Henry had the boys shift to putting the wheel on the left, hoping to avoid medical claims by evening out muscle usage. Unfortunately there were a lot of unsold cars on the lot that had steering wheels on the right, so a plan had to be devised to get rid of them and make room for the paradigm shift of total left hand drive production for North America. Henry instructed his logistics department to drive them all to New York and put them on the first ship off the continent. Marvin, the Logistics guy, arrived at the dock just in time to find an empty ship heading to Australia. Short story is that they filled the ship with Tin Lizzies and just went on with life.

This one ship, of course, set off permanent repercussions for Australia. The country went nuts buying and putting these cars on the road. Lines were painted, intersections configured, rules written, yada, yada. Nobody suspected that they had been duped into purchasing a boatload of end-of-life vehicles and by the time they discovered the ruse, it was too late. Australians continued to have to special-order the right-hand variety of cars. In the long-run Henry was just fine with this, as he could shake up the production line and keep the soft tissue damage risk in balance.

There you have it; history conjectured. We just returned our second Australian rental car and every time I had to make a simple right-hand turn and have to wait for both sides of the road to be clear, I cursed Marvin.

One of Marvin's RH fleet at a rest break on its way to New York.

My most fun driving was on Tasmania. That was my 5-day training run, as there are only a half million people on the whole island and I hoped a lot of them would be sleeping in the first day I was behind the wheel, making for less potential vehicles on the road that I might otherwise run into. That first car had the lane departure beep feature enabled and I proved incapable of disarming it. I attribute the fact that it went off so frequently on how narrow the lanes are on Tasmania and the number of hairpin curves that are thrown in because of the amount that road crews are encouraged to drink on the job. After a while I couldn’t hear the beeping anyway, what with all the coincidental screaming.

With our last rental car returned, my official Australian driving record remains surprisingly unscathed. For those Australian drivers I may have traumatized along the way, I extend my sincerest apologies. Thank you for having properly maintained your braking systems. I will be sure to give advance warning should I happen to return someday and rent again.