I'd have to place a vote for my wife as one of the crappiest drivers in China (Although, now she's a U.S. menace!).
I'll never forget my first day in China a few years ago. I thought that I was going to die within the first hour. The drive from Baiyun airport outside of GuangZhou to our home in PanYu included all of the following highlights:
* Stopping, three-point-turn (More or less), and traveling the wrong way down an exit ramp to return back to the highway.
* Stopping dead in the left-hand lane of a three-lane "interstate-style" divided highway.
* U-turns across the median of a busy divided highway.
* Stopping, backing-up 100m on a divided highway in order to review the exit/direction sign that was passed too quickly.
How's that for an introduction to China's drivers? My wife managed to have half a dozen fender-benders with her poor Buick Excelle in the first year of car ownership. Luckily, they were all in the traffic choked streets of GuangZhou where no one has much chance to go over 30 or 40 mph. Doubly-lucky was the fact that her company paid her insurance as she used her car for work.
Amazingly, since she's been driving here in the U.S. she hasn't had a single incident. I chalk that up to the fact that she had to sink-or-swim to drive here. We live at 9,200 ft. and she has to drive a 24 mile tortuous canyon road to arrive in the nearest town. Of course, if I hadn't installed GPS in her car, I would never have seen her again after her first solo drive into town. She has the worst sense of direction of any person I've ever met.
Cheers,
Dan K.
