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The Overtaking Calculator helps people to understand the distance it takes to overtake another vehicle and how much time it takes to overtake. I find people, including myself, are not very good at estimating time or distance when driving. You hear of people saying they speed when they overtake a "slow" vehicle going 98km/h when they're going 100km/h on a 100km/h road. People generally know that speeding is illegal and that doesn't change when overtaking. People on two lane highways often cut in too early when overtaking because someone else is on their backside trying to overtake them. Cutting out late, cutting in early, not understanding the time or distance involved in overtaking are all dangerous driving behaviours. Once you understand the distances and times involved, you'll probably reconsider the need to overtake that "slow" vehicle. It certainly changed my perspective on when to, or not to overtake. Probably the worst-case scenario any of us could be faced with when overtaking, is for someone coming from the opposite direction to also overtake at the same time. Sitting in a car the maximum distance we can see on a flat road is roughly 4.5km due to the curvature of the earth. If two cars decode to overtake at the same time, the gives each car roughly 2.25km to complete their overtaking. You can see using the calculator the distance to overtake a "slow" car doing 98km/h when you're doing 100km/h is 5.7km which is greater than the distance you can see. Leaving a one second gap brings this down to 3km. The Overtaking Calculator assumes you are travelling at the speed entered as you approach the slower vehicle and move out to overtake with a two second gap, complete the overtaking manoeuvre after your car has a two second gap in front of the slower car. This is a simplification but it helps us to estimate the time and distance involved in overtaking. You can see by entering different values the time and distance required to overtake is affected. As an example, overtaking a slower car doing 90km/h when you're doing 100km/h would take 41 seconds and 1.1km. That's a huge amount of time you'll be exposed whilst driving on the wrong side of the road. Cutting out late and cutting in early by leaving only a one second gap, which is certainly not recommended, does reduce this to 21 seconds and 583m. Increasing the speed to 110, which is illegal on a 100km/h road, reduces this to 11 seconds and 336m. In the near future more people will be faced with a slower driving car because up until now, most car speedometers have been calibrated by the manufacturer and when the speedometer shows you're driving at 100km/h, you're actually driving at 95-96km/h. Most cars are currently calibrated like this. In the near future because standards are changing overseas, cars will be calibrated to be accurate. So for a period, one group with older cars will be driving at 4-5km/h than those with newer cars, if they're both driving at the speed limit according to their speedometers. Of course, that's just in theory because at the end of the day there's a range of driving styles and that includes the speed we like to drive at. Car related calculators
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