BMW driver walks free from court after deliberately running over cyclist

[pete75]

I wonder how old the BMW involved was. EVerything written about the driver suggest fairly low income and there are lots of banger priced BMW cars for sale.

My limited experience of people watching suggests it's not the value, merely the perceived value.
For some the badge is all that's needed.

And of course the press only ever give the make of car and no other details.

[reohn2]

Can't understand what the make of car the driver was in has to do with this.

It's much easier to feel a sense of entitlement in a 'posh' car than it is in a ten year old Fiesta.

Why not collect the numbers? There's some interesting data analysis to be done here.
Suppose it turns out that 'posh' cars are really involved in more incidents like these than they should be, what then?

Be nice to think that entitlement had nothing to do with the vehicle owners perception of the vehicle they were driving but if it were true then it would be at odds with every study that looked at social status and how we perceive it, what drives it etc.
We're ape derived social animals, our view of ourselves in the social hierarchy, the groups we belong to, how we view the out groups etc is massively important to us and affects everything we do and think.

Of course we're pretty good at self deception too. You'd be hard pushed to find anyone who admits to such stuff but then such behaviour is often under our own radar.

I wonder how old the BMW involved was. EVerything written about the driver suggest fairly low income and there are lots of banger priced BMW cars for sale.

And for some people carry the same sort of entitled driving attitude.

Anecdote alert:-
IME,I'll almost guarantee that if I'm being tailgated on 30 and 40mph limited roads it'll be a young woman driving a smallish car.
On a motorway at 70/75mph,it's most likely to be a thirty or forty something driving a BMW or Audi.
More often than not on the bike close passes are usually BMW,Audi or Mercs.
There's a certain cocksure arrogance that seems to come with the German prestige car,and old black 3series BMW's tend to be driven by nutters.
That's my experience.

[Barks]

Fastpedaller wrote:

His act was attempted murder, and the sentencing should reflect that and prevent as much as possible a repeat of the same.

I agree entirely but as we have seen from other incidents there appears to be legal cultural aversion to calling out such blatant acts of aggression when using a car as a weapon for what they are and try to get easy convictions for poor standards of driving. While I do sympathise greatly with any individuals who have behavioural challenges in their lives it just cannot be right to use such reasons to excuse the inexcusable - as others have pointed out, if behavioural issues mean that an individual is prone to uncontrollable urges then I am sorry they MUST NOT be permitted to drive in the first place.

That said, the cynic in me is that such ‘behavioural issues’ and the mans ‘remorse’ seem to me emanating from the ‘coaching’ he is given from his defence lawyer rather than any genuine feelings.

I have written to my MP (Dominic Grieve) on a number of occasions on this topic but it has not reasulted in any meaningful activity within political circles. I wonder what would be the attitude if an MP were on the bike and, rather than end up with injuries and bike damage, met their demise? In the absence of that, just how do we get our politics as to take these inconsistencies seriously?

[pete75]

It's much easier to feel a sense of entitlement in a 'posh' car than it is in a ten year old Fiesta.

Why not collect the numbers? There's some interesting data analysis to be done here.
Suppose it turns out that 'posh' cars are really involved in more incidents like these than they should be, what then?

Be nice to think that entitlement had nothing to do with the vehicle owners perception of the vehicle they were driving but if it were true then it would be at odds with every study that looked at social status and how we perceive it, what drives it etc.
We're ape derived social animals, our view of ourselves in the social hierarchy, the groups we belong to, how we view the out groups etc is massively important to us and affects everything we do and think.

Of course we're pretty good at self deception too. You'd be hard pushed to find anyone who admits to such stuff but then such behaviour is often under our own radar.

I wonder how old the BMW involved was. EVerything written about the driver suggest fairly low income and there are lots of banger priced BMW cars for sale.

And for some people carry the same sort of entitled driving attitude.

Anecdote alert:-
IME,I'll almost guarantee that if I'm being tailgated on 30 and 40mph limited roads it'll be a young woman driving a smallish car.
On a motorway at 70/75mph,it's most likely to be a thirty or forty something driving a BMW or Audi.
More often than not on the bike close passes are usually BMW,Audi or Mercs.
There's a certain cocksure arrogance that seems to come with the German prestige car,and old black 3series BMW's tend to be driven by nutters.
That's my experience.

Why German - do you not think the same sort of people wouldn't do that in a Jaguar or Range Rover albeit they're Indian cars?
BTW I think the bloke in this case was a nutter going by his defence lawyer's description of his mental problems - I wonder if his car was black?

[reohn2]

I was posting from my experience,that's not to say I haven't had problems with other makes of car driven by morons,just that predominantly they tend to be German prestige marques.
To be clear,my post doesn't say all German prestige car drivers are morons.

[fastpedaller]

An anecdote.... Many years ago I working with a nice guy who sold his old Ford Fiesta and bought a BMW. "Oh dear" said I, "you'll turn into one of those awful BMW drivers" 'Oh, I've not noticed they're bad' he said. Next thing a couple of minutes later another colleague turned up and repeated almost exactly my words! Interestingly he didn't keep the BMW very long at all.

[thelawnet]

Why German - do you not think the same sort of people wouldn't do that in a Jaguar or Range Rover albeit they're Indian cars?
BTW I think the bloke in this case was a nutter going by his defence lawyer's description of his mental problems - I wonder if his car was black?

Cars have an image, people choose the car that matches their personal image. Some exceptions, but generally true.

[Cyril Haearn]

Why German - do you not think the same sort of people wouldn't do that in a Jaguar or Range Rover albeit they're Indian cars?
BTW I think the bloke in this case was a nutter going by his defence lawyer's description of his mental problems - I wonder if his car was black?

Cars have an image, people choose the car that matches their personal image. Some exceptions, but generally true.

Many exceptions, most buy on price

[kwackers]

Many exceptions, most buy on price

It's not the "most" that are the problem though is it?

It's a handful, ime probably 5-10% who when presented with the chance to be an a-hole grabs it with both hands.

I personally find that where the driver goes out of their way to be aggressive it more likely than not involves a high status car.
Obviously that doesn't mean that all such drivers are aggressive, nor does it mean low status car drivers aren't but my experience suggests some bias.

I'd seriously be interested in seeing some number crunching, but afaik we don't even collect such data for fatalities let alone simple aggression so I suspect we'll always ponder and thus there'll always be subjective bias in our assumptions...

[Bonefishblues]

It's much easier to feel a sense of entitlement in a 'posh' car than it is in a ten year old Fiesta.

Why not collect the numbers? There's some interesting data analysis to be done here.
Suppose it turns out that 'posh' cars are really involved in more incidents like these than they should be, what then?

Be nice to think that entitlement had nothing to do with the vehicle owners perception of the vehicle they were driving but if it were true then it would be at odds with every study that looked at social status and how we perceive it, what drives it etc.
We're ape derived social animals, our view of ourselves in the social hierarchy, the groups we belong to, how we view the out groups etc is massively important to us and affects everything we do and think.

Of course we're pretty good at self deception too. You'd be hard pushed to find anyone who admits to such stuff but then such behaviour is often under our own radar.

I wonder how old the BMW involved was. EVerything written about the driver suggest fairly low income and there are lots of banger priced BMW cars for sale.

And for some people carry the same sort of entitled driving attitude.

Anecdote alert:-
IME,I'll almost guarantee that if I'm being tailgated on 30 and 40mph limited roads it'll be a young woman driving a smallish car.
On a motorway at 70/75mph,it's most likely to be a thirty or forty something driving a BMW or Audi.
More often than not on the bike close passes are usually BMW,Audi or Mercs.
There's a certain cocksure arrogance that seems to come with the German prestige car,and old black 3series BMW's tend to be driven by nutters.
That's my experience.

TBF there's an awful lot of them on the road:
https://www.motoringresearch.com/car-ne ... cars-2018/

[thirdcrank]

Why the f is this remotely considered a driving offence rather than at theserious end of assault. You'd get a stiffer sentence for even carrying a knife never mind stabbingg someo r

This is it for me. Also, there must be many road rage crashes which through lack of evidence about motive are dealt with as bad driving. When a driver returns and targets somebody then IMO that's got to be treated as personal violence. I've linked to two cases over the years where outraged drivers have assaulted parking officials using their car as a weapon and been treated lightly. Using a weapon is an aggravation factor in any assault and its hard to imagine a worse weapon than a vehicle, short of a firearm.

I think this is much more sophisticated an issue than powerful car = driver with a tendency to violence.

[bigjim]

He'll be lucky to get insurance in the future looking at his record. But then again he might not bother, just drive anyway.

[Cunobelin]

I wonder how old the BMW involved was. Everything written about the driver suggest fairly low income and there are lots of banger priced BMW cars for sale.

My post was about losing the car being a financial hit was an interpretation of scale, rather than the value of the BMW as a marque. An older second hand BMW may not be expensive, but as a proportion of a lower income is still significant to that individual

[Cunobelin]

I wonder how old the BMW involved was. EVerything written about the driver suggest fairly low income and there are lots of banger priced BMW cars for sale.

And for some people carry the same sort of entitled driving attitude.

Anecdote alert:-
IME,I'll almost guarantee that if I'm being tailgated on 30 and 40mph limited roads it'll be a young woman driving a smallish car.
On a motorway at 70/75mph,it's most likely to be a thirty or forty something driving a BMW or Audi.
More often than not on the bike close passes are usually BMW,Audi or Mercs.
There's a certain cocksure arrogance that seems to come with the German prestige car,and old black 3series BMW's tend to be driven by nutters.
That's my experience.

Why German - do you not think the same sort of people wouldn't do that in a Jaguar or Range Rover albeit they're Indian cars?
BTW I think the bloke in this case was a nutter going by his defence lawyer's description of his mental problems - I wonder if his car was black?

Interesting as an aside. One insurance company asked its customers which cars they associated with bad driving:

A quarter (25%) of drivers who took part in our survey told us BMW was the car brand they most associate with being poorly driven, coming in way ahead of Audi (8%) in second place.

Vauxhall (3%), Ford (2%), Toyota (2%), Mercedes (2%), Fiat (1%) and Volkswagen (1%) all received mentions, with both Jaguar and Mazda not polling at all in our survey of over 1400 InsuretheGap.com customers.

Another article using self reporting also reported overall, but broke down the behaviours, and actually raises the point about Jaguars:

Jaguar drivers are the worst in Britain after admitting to several bad habits included, speeding, talking on their phones whilst driving speeding and not wearing seat belts.

Of the Jaguar drivers questioned, 85 per cent of them admitted to speeding, 71 per cent said they regularly failed to indicate and 50 per cent confessed to jumping traffic lights.

Using phone while driving
Skoda - 92 per cent

Renault - 89 per cent

Hyundai - 87 per cent

Nissan - 87 per cent

Volvo - 87 per cent

Eating while driving
Mitsubishi - 62 per cent

BMW - 60 per cent

Mini - 60 per cent

Jaguar - 57 per cent

SEAT - 56 per cent

Littering from car window
BMW - 33 per cent

Jaguar - 29 per cent

Audi - 17 per cent

Dacia - 17 per cent

Fiat - 14 per cent

Not wearing seatbelt
Jaguar - 29 per cent

Dacia - 25 per cent

BMW - 22 per cent

Fiat - 16 per cent

Audi - 16 per cent

Smoking or vaping while driving
BMW - 40 per cent

Jaguar - 29 per cent

Fiat - 28 per cent

Audi - 25 per cent

Land Rover - 21 per cent

Speeding
Mitsubishi - 92 per cent

Jaguar - 86 per cent

Mini - 72 per cent

BMW - 68 per cent

Honda - 66 per cent

[Bonefishblues]

Am I reading that correctly? It's saying that 40% of BMW drivers vaped or smoked (self-declared)

Only 15% of the UK smokes.