Do you find it weird playing games where the cars are right hand drive? When I drive in the UK in Euro Trucker it is the most disorienting thing.
I don't have a license but i find that on euro truck sim i can swap from LHD to RHD with no issues at all. But i don't ever swap the gear shifter over, so no matter whether i drive LHD or RHD i always have the shifter on the left. But i usually drive a LHD lorry because i spend more time in Europe which makes overtaking more convenient. When we went on holiday to france (they drive on the same side as US) overtaking was probably the biggest issue since the driver cant creep out to see if there is anything oncoming or not.
As a brit in a RHD car, I find it weird to play games where the cars are right hand drive. Why? Because hardly any have RHD cars except ETS. I can't drive in the interior view on any game simply because of LHD, can't do it, its just wrong to me. It can be hard enough to judge where the car is in a video game compared to real life, then throw me on the wrong side and I can't do it. I genuinely find it easier to keep my RHD truck in ETS when driving in europe.
I try to stay faithful to where I am. My English garage in Plymouth has all RHD trucks. That being said though even when I'm in England I feel like I'm on the moon with RHD. I don't know why. It's like a brick wall to my senses.
I have Newcastle and Linz, Newcastle being my starting one, Linz being the one my drivers operate from. Since its a bigger garage. I have £1.5 million in the bank on the game, i really should spend some I have already reached the point where i can free roam and still be profiting even with speeding tickets etc. But crashes would prevent that from being the case.
I have 4-5 garages just for teleporting around in MP. Only two or three have drivers in them. I have about 10 employees in cheap trucks right now. I have about ~55-60 hours in my profile alone and a lot of it is spent in MP.
I'm french and i have a american car (chevrolet orlando) and i don't see any difference; It is even better ! It is really solid and good quality !
But to be fair if you live in france you are surrounded by at least 10 ancient Renault's at any given time. Those things are everywhere.
Interestingly enough, that's not an American car. It was supposed to be, but it never saw production here. http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chevrolet_Orlando
I think a certain amount of disdain for American vehicles is just cultural bias. Classic Japanese cars have always remained undesirable and scoffed at in North America while American classic cars skyrocket in price. Conversely, Australians were very quick to jump ship from British imports to Japanese, and the culture of restoring/modding them continues to this day. Of course, American and European cultures are different and their needs and ideas about aesthetics are very different. American cars tend to be large and coarse without a lot of attention to detail, but they are simple and straightforward. European manufacturers seem to enjoy solving the same problems in new and different ways... look at a Citroen or a Saab, or the internals of a new Audi. Its a bunch of complication and expense to do mostly the same thing an American car does, maybe it feels better or performs better in some minute way. In Europe you will never be too far from a garage that can fix it, but break down with one of these things in some little town in the midwest and you are fully screwed. However, your GMC Yukon has an engine any old mechanic can get their head around. Ferrari builds a complicated v12 with internals like a watch, and the Americans come to the show with a giant block of iron and pistons the size of your head. And it turns out either method can win a race. But one can be fixed on the side of the road by a farmer. So why make things complicated? I'm sure somebody here that is European has an answer America doesn't have to squeeze their cars into small garages and parking spaces, and the distances travelled are huge. People can easily rack up 400k km on their car in 10 years, which is a lot of time spent behind the wheel. Why not have big cushy seats and lots of breathing room inside?
I was once shouting at the game for giving me tickets for wrong way offenses... Until I drove into a road and a car came the other way. "Oh.. Yeah.. I forgot I litterally just went on the ferry...". And yes, Goosah. You hit the nail on the head. And yes, I know why Europeans make things complicated and Americans don't. But let me just state first that I absolutely LOVE American cars. Even the square Cadillac/Ford/Lincoln/Chevy regular sedan sh*tboxes from 80s and 90s that litterally make no horsepower whatsoever. The answer is: Roads in America are usually more straight. It's more about highway cruising. Any road in Europe, apart from the absolutely tiny highways, has LOTS AND LOTS of twists in them, where people kind of want to take them at any sort of speed. So if you take an 80's American sedan, it would just wallow all over the place, which isn't nice to drive. I understand that in America, you also have turns, not trying to diss Americans like many people would. But the turns are generally made to be taken at a much lower speed, a much more relaxed driving style, which means body roll and wallowing doesn't come in to play as much. In Europe everyone wants to take the turns on the narrow country roads at 5 billion times the speed of sound without their car rocking all over. On top of that, fuel prices. Fuel costs about a third in America of what it costs in Europe. Therefore cars have to be seriously economical. Which means they have to be light, aerodynamic, and small(Also because our lanes are narrower than in America). So you need a small bodyshell. That means you have to find a complicated solution of packaging an actual car into the space you have, without using a lot of weight either. In America a Hummer H1 for example is a big, wide car, but you can manage to drive one on the street pretty much anywhere, a bit cumbersome but managable... In Europe, well... good luck driving an H1 into any village. It simply would not fit in our street for example, because of parked cars. In America, a Dodge Nitro is a compact SUV(apparantly...). In Europe, a Dodge Nitro is one of the bigger cars on the road, apart from say, a Dodge Ram. A guy in our street has a Dodge Nitro. He parks it with 2 wheels on the curb so people don't have trouble getting passed it. If people see an old GMC Sierra Grande / Chevy Suburban in Europe, they would regard it as a MASSIVE MASSIVE car. They don't look all that big in those Roadkill Episodes You get the idea. That's why we complicate things. To get good handling so our cars don't wallow across our tiny country roads, to save weight, and to be able to fit the whole thing into a tiny bodyshell. Personally, I'd love to own some big American landyacht. Especially the one James May had in the American road trip, the Cadillac Brougham Sedan. I'd love to own the type of Camaro from that same roadtrip, or best of all, a 69 Charger.. And imho, that's saying something, seeing as I own a European car that was once voted "best handling car in America"... I'd not sell that for a million bucks either right now though.
SPEAKING of fuel prices, the government has announced that they estimate gas prices to stay UNDER $3/Gallon for all of 2015, so we shall have even lower gas prices then usual
I hate you. We pay about $8,60 per gallon here... I think average between $75 to $125 to fill the tank, depending on the size :/ I would be paying $149 to fill the whole tank + 8 liter reserve because I have a massive 62 liter gas tank excl reserve...
Yeah the gas prices here dropped dramatically recently. Just a few months ago it was hovering around $3.70 to $4.00 and they are now just under $3.00. It's rather incredible. When it was up towards 4 dollars it cost nearly $90 to fill my truck.
$90? dang your truck has a tiny gas tank, our expedition uses over $100 within the $3.50-$3.70 Mark for a full fill up (usually we just get about half a tank though as we generally don't go out of town)
Well, I've never let it get dangerously low. I'm sure it would be $100 easily if I actually let it start running on fumes. I'd rather be safe then sorry and not let it run too low, considering I can actually watch the gas needle go down as I drive. I've lost an eighth of a tank in a matter of 5 minutes before. The damn thing gets like 10 mpg.
