The age-old debate of who’s the safest on the road – drivers or bikers – has raged on long enough! It’s time to put the issue to bed, don’t you think?
Well, we thought so anyway. The 80th anniversary of the driving test got us thinking, and we decided to put both drivers and bikers through their paces and have them retake the theory test – to see how both sides of the argument rated on road knowledge.
Although car drivers like to pour scorn upon bikers for supposedly “reckless” behaviour on the roads – which is possibly just jealousy over how we get around more efficiently and look better doing it – it turns out that bikers actually have a much stronger knowledge of road rules than drivers too. Result!
We based the test on the official DVSA quiz, and the bikers who got involved did better than car drivers about three-quarters of the time in all areas of road safety, from properly identifying road signs to overtaking safely.
The most shocking thing is that nearly one in five drivers actually failed the test! Bikers did much better – only one in twenty failed. So a resounding “good job” to all of you two-wheelers, and thanks for keeping our roads safe!
Of course, a lot of motorcyclists are also car drivers too – if they can’t avoid it – and it just goes to show that seeing the road from both sides is really beneficial to driving safely. Bikers need their wits about them all of the time, and motorbikes can be risky if you’re not fully aware of everything around you – and the rules of the road – at all times.
This is especially true given that plenty of the car drivers got questions about how to deal with motorbikes wrong – even simple situations involving motorcyclists stumped drivers, which is something that clearly needs to be addressed. It seems that any driver who thinks bikers are unsafe has got it backwards – bikers are fine, it’s drivers who don’t know how to react to them that are the problem!
At Carole Nash, we celebrate the road safety practised by bikers by offering Bikers Only Car Insurance – if you hold a valid motorcycle licence and driving licence, we’ll not just match but beat your car insurance renewal quote, because we know that bikers make safer road users.
** The survey has now closed **
