Blinded By The Lights? Let's Brake It Down

Right, buckle yourselves in, because I’ve got a right old bone to pick with a seriously annoying driving trait that’s on the rise, and I need to mobilise the TeamCT army to help stamp it out before it’s too late.

It all stems from a trend fitted to lots of new cars, and the automatic gearbox has to take a lot of the blame. If you’ve just awarded yourself ten points for guessing this is a snipe at the death of manual transmissions, hand those points right back over, sunshine. That’s not what I’m getting at.

Even some stick-shift cars have the dreaded...automatic handbrake. ‘Aha!’ you might be thinking. ‘He’s missing the fun of handbrake turns. I’ll have my points back now please.’ But actually, our survey says...

Right, so here it is. With lots of cars getting auto handbrake switches rather than an old-fashioned lever, people are getting lazy about putting the damn things on. It’s just a switch, most of which auto-release when you pull off, but it seems most people are happiest just to sit at junctions with their foot pressed on the over-damped brake pedal, holding their cars at a stop.

This has to stop. Why? Because when teamed with another recent car trinket – the LED taillight – you unlock a combination so evil, so truly terrifying, that it could end the very world as we know it. Or, cause me to burst a blood vessel in my eye and end up looking like Bond villain le Chiffre...

Sitting in a car holding LED brakelights on creates such a bright beam of red light that it sears the designer’s LED swishes into the poor guy behind you, like a hot poker shoved directly on your retina. You wouldn’t drive everywhere with your headlights on main beam, so why blind anyone who’s queuing behind you? The British are meant to be good at queuing, for fook’s sake! We can’t do football, or cricket, or politics, but we can at least wait patiently in a line.

This week, I was sat behind a new Audi A3 in traffic. The A3 is a slick, if dull-looking car. It’s actually a really decent drive, and it has the best interior in its class – even better than the new BMW 1-series and Mercedes A-class. But its driver inside was treading on the brake, ignoring the auto e-brake switch, and I was left seeing two lines of LED light in my middle distance vision for the following ten minutes. My eyes were sore when I took my contacts out later than evening. I’d suffered third-degree Audi-burn. A cure must be found.

So this is an appeal. If you’re fortunate enough to own a new car, we’ll let you have your LED running lights up front. Yup, they’re chavvy and irritating, but at least we only see them for a split second before the car flashes past. But please, in the name of caramel digestives, Mila Kunis, and all else that’s good and pure in this world, don’t hold your car on the brake pedal. For every idiot I catch doing this from now on, trying to tattoo their rear lights onto my lenses, I’m going to apply full my Puma's main beam in an Ibizan nightclub strobe effect, until they cease and desist.

This isn’t a pet hate. It’s mentalist behaviour that needs to be stopped. Or can you think of anything even more annoying on the roads? Hit up the comments if you’ve got bigger fish to fry...