Polo drivers: (Possibly) the lowest form of life

Some of my best friends are Polo drivers. Honest. In fact, one of my very dearest friends drives a sensible blue Polo Classic. We were all tremendously relieved when he finally went out and got a proper car after years of driving around in the tuna can on wheels otherwise known as a CitiGolf.

But this weekend, while driving around the North West and western Free State in a quest to explore some of the more obscure dorps in the area — notably the busting metropolis of Britten, a railway siding some 20km south of Bloemhof — it became clear to me that Polo drivers are the most egregious four-letter words on our roads, worse than BMW and Audi drivers, worse even than double-cab drivers, if such a thing can be believed.

(Sorry Malcolm.)

As proof, I offer you the Roadhogs top ten worst offenders list. Four of the ten vehicles are Polos. (Seven in total are Volkswagens, suggesting that the people’s car has now become the poephol’s car. The other three places are filled by a Peugeot, an Alfa and a Toyota Hilux.)

Oh, there were a couple of X5 drivers who demonstrated, with alacrity, that all the slurs against those behind the steering wheel of BMWs are justified. But that’s an X5: we expect bad behaviour and we adjust for it. A bit like taxis — nobody honestly expects them to obey the rules of the road, surely?

But Polos? Why should a Volksie that competes with the Fiesta, the Mazda 2 and the Corsa prompt those who climb into it to turn into aggressive, inconsiderate arseholes (assuming that’s not how they behave at all other times. They’re probably the sort of people who cut into queues at banks, the scum)? In the two days we spent braving the highways and byways of the platteland, we encountered vehicles that drove up our backside, overtook dangerously, swerved in between lanes, failed to indicate, drove with fog lights, diced with taxis, sped up to toll plazas in order to get in front of the queue and exceeded the speed limit to a degree that would indicate a forced visit to Weskoppies might be in order, on the grounds that the individual in question was displaying suicidal tendencies and should be placed under observation.

Virtually every single one was a Polo. Some were Classics, to be sure, and some were Playas; the drivers were a microcosm of the rainbow nation. But the correlation between badge and behaviour was remarkably high, to the point where this cannot be a statistical anomaly.

Why is it, then, that Polos attract the worst drivers on South Africa’s roads, people whose spiritual home is the creaking, frayed driver’s seat of a Zola Budd? My husband has a theory that the kind of people who used to be able to afford BMWs are now forced to drive a lesser German vehicle. I am not sure that it is that, but the brand definitely attracts a different kind of driver from, say, a Toyota. Toyotas code for reliability. People who buy them are sensible. (I should know; I used to own one.)

Not that driving a Toyota necessarily guarantees that one is a decent law-abiding human being. I saw a couple of Corollas passing us at crazy speeds considering their lack of safety features, virtually all Hilux drivers seem to be maniacs, and as for taxis, the less said the better.

“You’ll think you can” reads the campaign line on the Volkswagen website. It’s quite possibly the most stupid, irresponsible slogan ever invented for a car in this country. Because that’s the trouble with a lot of Polo drivers. They think they can. But on our roads, all too often, you can’t.