Irish Side Note - Cars

It's not unusual enough for us as Americans to drive on the right side of the road while in Ireland. That in itself takes some getting used to (even for passengers!), but a few notes I took also indicated some differences between what is expected in America and what is expected in Ireland when it comes to cars.

First off, we saw very few old cars. Most everything we saw was no more than 5-8 years old with little exception. The bigger the city (Dublin) the more apt we were to seeing a little more dings and damages, but by in large, the Irish just keep newer vehicles than us. I asked one of our taxi drivers about the observation and he confirmed it to be true and the standard. I was also overwhelmed with how many of the cars were not just in good shape, but were big names - Jaguar, BMW, Mercedes were fairly common. We also saw our share of Fords, Honda, Suzuki, Toyota, Mazda and Hyundai. I don't recall seeing Chevy or Dodge.

They also have different brands that we do not. I shot some pics of various logos. Some we were able to figure out - some we never did.

Most of the cars driven, aside from work trucks are small compact or minis. Part of this is probably mileage based, but also road based. With no exaggeration at all, we traveled on two way roads in Waterford that were as small as one of our one way roads, with no shoulder and with stone walls or hedges on either side. This was fairly commonplace in the towns and back roads.

The bigger interstates were more alike ours, however.

We saw very little of a police presence on the highways and roads and the speed limit exceeded what any of us felt comfortable driving on windy, hilly and minimal vision of what's around the curve roads. We didn't even generally attempt to get TO the speed limit - especially in the big 9 passenger van we were driving.

And while I'm on that subject, another anomaly was the first time we stopped and the van died. I'm not sure if it's an electric start/stop or what, but anytime we were at a complete stop, the

van engine would shut down and resume once gas was pushed. We were also getting 35 miles a gallon in a 9 passenger van. The environmental movement among the Irish (and presumably the UK) apparently makes for much better gas mileage.

Now parking was quite a different thing, especially in smaller towns. Some of these roads and walls have been around hundreds of years, so there isn't room to 'expand' them. It was not unusual at all to see cars parked on either side of the road (facing whatever direction they damned well wanted to) and for half of the car to be parked on the curb while the rest was in the street, and again...some of these were NICE cars.