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IN THE NEWS
Page 23
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Stuart Thomas gives us his regular round-up of the way the newspapers have covered the wild and whacky world of transport this week.
Well done to the Daily Mirror for devoting a whole page recently to the dangers of blind spots in foreign truck cabs.
Not so well done for using an image from Steven Spielberg's seminal 1971 work, Duel, about an unseen malevolent driver of a menacing black Peterbilt 351 tanker, to illustrate this poorly publicised problem.
Still, when you're relying on Jeremy Clarkson 's diminutive chum Richard Hammond, to highlight how drivers of lefthand-drive trucks (or right-hookers on those pesky foreign roads) sometimes struggle to see overtaking cars in a tabloid, sober-yet-striking imagery is given the same treatment as Hammond's parents experienced in their MX5.
As my folks overtook, they entered a huge blind spot in front of the cab," Hammond LEARN TO reported. "The STAY OUT OF THE LORRY' German driver BLIND SPOT, had absolutely no idea they were tue co them spinning off in there until he saw front of him." there until he saw front of him."
In fairness to this visitor to our overcrowded roads, this is a major problem anywhere big trucks share road space with small cars, not just in the UK, and using your column to tell Mirror readers to overtake trucks quickly and safely is certainly useful advice. But why the backroom boys at the Mirror decided to make a connection between a cat-and-mouse game involving a monstrous truck, a moustachioed Dennis Weaver and an all-too-real perennial problem on the world's motorways, is anybody's guess.
Almost all newspapers last week reported on drivers being led astray by sat-nay systems, resulting in them being stuck in rivers, on the edges of cliffs and in fields.
No one, however, seems to have asked why motorists ignored their evidently unsophisticated and evolutionary redundant eyesight, instead relying on a technological faith matched only by Hammond's blind-sighted love for the jeans. jacket and jingoism of Jeremy Clarkson, to guide them through challenging terrain.