this post was submitted on 24 Nov 2025
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I firmly believe that the vast majority of tailgaters, and in fact drivers just don't know what correct following distance at speed looks like. It's not so much anger as incompetence.
Especially in the US where almost noone leaves a good gap.
I was in a car a few years ago with my cousin and her husband who was driving; they were both around 60 years old at the time. He was insanely close to the car in front while we were doing over 50 mph and my cousin was screaming at him to back off. He got irate and said "but I'm maintaining a one-car-length distance!" It's hard to believe that a person could drive for 45 fucking years and never have learned what a safe following distance is, but there you go.
Part of the dilemma (at least on multi-lane highways) is that if you leave a proper gap someone will cut in front of you and then you won't have a proper gap any more.
Ah yes, a one car-length gap, the suitable gap to leave when stationary!
Correct, people are simply too dumb. They think the distance is fine, and it would be in the sense that "when I see the other car break, I too can break". But then you need to break harder, because you started breaking later. And the car behind you then has to break even harder. Etc. Maybe you even avoid the crash, but the car(s) behind you do not. People severely overestimate their abilities and underestimate breaking distance.
They also don't think about the situation when the vehicle in front spots something happening late (that they themselves can't see because the closer you are, the less you can see around the sides of the vehicle in front) then swerves out of the way at the last moment, revealing it to following traffic with no time to react at all.
It's my impression that there's a lot of attempted bullying going on.
They want you to feel endangered and move out of their way as fast as possible.
That said, this might mainly be in situations were people speeding in the left lane get stuck behind a car which is just overtaking whilst staying below the speed limit.
That does happen but they then usually blast past you as soon as there's an opportunity, rather than just hanging out back there.
I'm thinking more 2 lane roads, when somebody is on the left lane overtaking somebody on the right lane, so there is no room for the car coming from behind at high speed to pass and they're stuck behind the car overtaking.
In that situation, whilst I was overtaking at just below the speed limit, more than once I've had people coming from behind at high speed and getting far too close for comfort until I finished overtaking and got out of their way.
My feeling was that the whole thing was to scare me into exceeding the speed limit to overtake faster and also join back into the traffic in the right lane faster than safer (i.e. with less distance to the car was overtaking) so that the car that came from behind speeding could go back to speeding as soon as possible.
In the past I would actually do just that, nowadays I don't care and just do my thing with the speed and care I feel is appropriate.
Yeah that's more likely. I do think though that plenty of those people are also not being aggressive and are just impatient or incompetent.
Yeah, I also think most are just a mix of impatience and incompetence.
Look at a light post you are passing and count to 3 after it passes the car in front. That's how far back you should be.
Onetwothree! See, it’s fine!
If you leave two seconds of following distance, someone will cut it in half. Some asshole in a lifted pickup will pass you on the right and flip you off, no doubt screaming something about left lane campers. I can't literally drive through the car in front of me. I want to go fast too but there's a left lane camper there. 🤷