The New South African Road Menace

 I am back from holidays and boy oh boy was there a learning experience.

Specifically, my father learned why I despise a very specific car that is everywhere on the South African roads. Now, I can hear the ever present “OH! Must be the taxies!”

Dear, sweet, innocent, unaware reader, taxies are a city only problem. They are controlled and keep to where they feel safe. No, for this holiday season my parents decided to stick all of us to a vacation down by Gordon’s Bay then Sedgefield.

Now, being a family of seven people altogether, this meant we were driving down. Once you go beyond Kroonvaal, the humble, insane, rusted up, Taxi, is not an issue. No, instead you will find that there are other, much more insane, much faster beasts roaming the N1, N2, and N12 highways.

In fact, I would say that these beasts are unable to do what they do in Gauteng because there are some rich bastards here with sports cars that laugh in their arrogant faces.

Okay, so who is this monster I am talking about?

Simple. The Toyota Fortuner.

There is no person worse a driver than the one that gets behind the wheel of these monstrosities. They are large SUVs that always find a way to just annoy, speed, turn, over-take, honk, swerve, or just whatever they can while driving on the highways.

Now, from an objective standpoint, I know it’s not the car. But from an experienced and totally irrational view. It must be the car. I have met people that are the calmest, coolest, most sane people when I talk to them. Only to see them completely ignore every traffic rule that has ever been conceived by mankind.

Before my parents went to the UK, I had made this theory, and back then the Fortuner was a rare sight on our roads. So, it was just thoughts of old Victor being weird and insane. Fortunately, on our trip down to Cape Town, and then back to Pretoria from Sedgefield, we encountered more Fortuners on the road than I thought existed.

And the issue is simple. These people seem to completely lose track of what they are doing, in what they are doing it, and that there are indeed other people on the road.

Several times we were driving at 120km/h, or even slightly over, and we’d see a Fortuner start to overtake nearly a full kilometre from behind us. Skipping passed a truck, another SUV, a VW Polo (always one), my brother behind us, and then straight in front of us.

They would then proceed to either speed up, far exceeding 150km/h, or worse, realize just how fast they are going and slam on the breaks. This is behaviour that could be kind of understood if we’re all stuck behind a truck going only 80km/h on a long flat road. But no. Oh no, no, no.

Toyota Fortuners seem to always choose the absolute worst, most dangerous, insane spots to do this. If a line is double solid, they will overtake. If there is a truck barreling towards us, they will overtake. If we are going uphill, they will overtake you right before the crescent of the hill.

Dear reader, if we are on a mountain pass, in a storm pissing down on us with no visibility and a speed limit of 60km/h with trucks on either side of us, a Toyota Fortuner will overtake us.

And honestly, if I could understand the thinking behind these actions, it may help our extreme displeasure with these drivers. But they just kept getting worse.

As we neared the border to Gauteng the roads started shifting from the normal two-lane highway to full on four lanes with a proper divider between us. And I shit you not.

At one of these sections, they had those hard, yellow, speed humps meant to pop your tires when you drive at speed on them.

We got stuck behind a truck. It was going 100km/h according to our GPS, and the charge started. First a Fortuner, then a Polo, then another Fortuner, and then a BMW X5. All jumping out from kilos away behind us, forcing oncoming drivers to swerve out for them, and then barely overtaking the truck ahead of us.

All driving at an insane speed on the speed humps. All nearly crashing.

And the irony of it all is that in less than 2 kilos we reached a spot where the road opened again and we overtook the truck at a leisurely 120km/h.

These are not things that I found only to be true for the open road, in fact, I invite you reader, to take a moment to look around you when driving around next time.

Is it really all SUV drivers being insane, or is it the scourge, the atrocity, the insane, Toyota Fortuner? Along the West Coast, these were the drivers skipping robots, stop signs, speed limits, I once saw one overtake the police down there.

I have no idea what happens to you once inside a Toyota Fortuner, but it must be a combination of testosterone induced memory loss along with steroid fuelled road rage. Now, normally this would be gender specific, but I can tell you, it does not matter. I don’t care if you are a man, woman, chair, or attack helicopter, if I see you behind a Fortuner, I think you drive like an asshole.

 

It is also important to mention here, below the picture, that ironically enough, Taxi drivers are a pleasure once you leave Gauteng’s mayhem. Why? Simple really, they know they are slow, in fact they are one of only a few vehicles that move over to the yellow line to allow you to easily and comfortably overtake them.

But, back to the Fortuner. If you are reading this and know of someone that drives one, or worse you are a driver of one, you need to be aware of several things.

You may be able to reach 200km/h with your honking chonker of a SUV, but you are also in a HONKING CHONKER OF AN SUV. This means that you roll, flip, fail to stop, and can kill others when you start speeding.

I don’t care if you are late or if your family took too long to finish their ablutions at the last pitstop, the speed limit is 120km/h. And that is legitimately considered very fast in many countries, because get this. That is a very fast speed to be going in any vehicle.

If you don’t value the life of your family or your own, I don’t care, honestly. Do what you want. But I do value the life of others, and more importantly that of my own family, and you speeding and nearly causing an accident at every, single turn you make, that pisses me off.

If you want to go be a speed demon, use some of your millions and buy a farm. Go roll your SUV with family members inside somewhere where the Zebras and Hyenas can laugh at you. Not on a national road where you will, and have, caused the death of others.

Because ironically enough, when a Fortuner does cause an accident, they are also most likely to just speed off and go “That wasn’t my fault, that driver was going too slow!”