I’m driven mad by tailgaters

It’s the flash that shocks you first. It’s night and you’re driving in the outside lane of the motorway at a speed that isn’t exactly the national limit, but isn’t so wildly in excess that it would raise eyebrows. Suddenly your car floods with the light of a thousand suns. The flash in the rear-view mirror alone is enough to dazzle. It’s not a speed camera – you know from bitter experience that it’s too fast, too furious for that. Has Putin detonated a tactical nuke over the last junction? That would actually feel less threatening. The flash comes again, and as your eyes readjust the mirror shows a pair of headlights roughly ten feet behind your neck. Alarm shades into cold fury: you’re being tailgated. 

Who are these people and why do they do this? If there’s space to overtake, why don’t they just overtake? And if you’re already shading over 80mph, and unless the tailgater is rushing Ebola vaccine to a Hot Zone somewhere in the M40 corridor, what can they possibly hope to gain that’s worth the risk of killing us both? The M40 seems particularly bad, by the way – sweeping and surfing through the Chilterns, it’s a late-night racetrack for a certain kind of driver. They barrel past on the inside and streak off into infinity (or at any rate, Stokenchurch) like the Millennium Falcon making the jump into hyperspace. 

Still, if it’s late and the road is empty and wide, rather them than the tailgater with their lethal, disorienting headlight flash (a million times brighter, or so it feels, since the introduction of LED headlights). ‘You’re barmy or plastered, I’ll pass you, you bastard / I will overtake you. I will!’ wrote John Betjeman, imagining the ‘pitiful life’ of a tailgater in ‘Meditation on the A30’. Clearly these louts were a recognised menace as far back as 1966. Equally clearly, the person currently trying to blind you in the fast lane is not the sort of person who reads Betjeman. 

I’ve researched various strategies in response. Sudden braking is even more dangerous, going faster will just encourage them. Rear-facing missile launchers might answer; unhappily, you’re not 007. I found a bumper sticker – ‘The closer you get the slower I drive’ – but something about the scansion felt a little off. Eventually you choke down the humiliation, pull over, and watch the little chequered roundel on their boot recede into the distance along with the galactic sense of entitlement it apparently confers. ‘I will overtake you, I will!’ OK, Beemer. 

Most popular

Michael Henderson

Simon Schama is a bore

Tom Slater

The dumbing down of Oxbridge

Ross Clark

Skiing is ghastly

Because it is usually a BMW, isn’t it? Or failing that an Audi, or one of those steroid-pumped SUVs that look like someone put wheels on a giant training shoe. One tries to be fair; the numerous surveys that have identified BMW drivers as Britain’s rudest create a risk of confirmation bias. So I counted the marques on a recent run down the M1 from Rugby to Brent Cross. Five tailgaters; three of them were BMWs. Sorry, lads (and it is usually lads, too, I’m afraid). Without wanting to stereotype (but heck, let’s do it anyway), perhaps there’s something innately Prussian about that aggressive will to penetrate someone else’s lebensraum, and the assumption of invulnerability that comes with it.

One thing’s for certain: it’s profoundly un-British. Imagine walking up to a bar and elbowing other customers out of the way. Or pushing into a queue – worse than that, standing next to other queuers screaming that they must give up their place to you. It’s the behaviour of a maniac; bullying, plain and simple, and no red-blooded Briton wants to give way to a bully. Unfortunately it does seem that the only safe and legal course of action with these poundshop Clarksons is to let them have their way and overtake. And as you slip back to a safe distance, and they close in on their next victim, think of Betjers and resolve, next time, to follow his example and take the train instead.