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I used to live in UK (RHD car on left of road), took my car on holiday many times on mainland Europe (right of road), now live in Sweden and have bought a car here (LHD on right of road) which I have taken on holiday to UK (LHD on left of road). That's all the combinations, if you exclude those places where it's customary to drive down the middle of the road, or F1-like cars with a central driver's seat.
I don't normally have trouble switching hands - you learn fast after you have smashed the back of your hand into the door a couple of times. The positioning of the indicator and wiper stalks is, I believe, not a function of the steering wheel position - it is often constant for each model of car, but varies between models. My 4 RHD and 2 LHD Saabs have all benn the same.
However, I was taught to use a different grip on the gear lever for different changes, so that it naturally moves in the right direction, with the minimum effort and strain. Some of these hand positions do not transfer well to the other side. For example, changing from 2nd to 3rd with your left hand, you cup your hand with the palm pointing towards you and forward, but to do the same change with your right hand you need to push with the ball of your thumb, which I find less natural, and not a standard operation with the other hand (would be 4th to 1st).
Changing road sides is a little more hazardous. On one mainland holiday, turning left too sharply out of a one way street I was confronted by four lanes of traffic waiting at a red light, and on a holiday to UK I travelled a couple of hundred metres on the right of the road after driving out of my host's driveway, before I realized why the cars coming towards me were spending so much time on 'my' side of the road! (I was driving a UK car at the time, so they wouldn't have been very undertanding...)
But what takes longest is, as some of the other contributors mentioned, learning to position the car correctly in its lane when the steering wheel is on the 'wrong' side.
Incidentally, until 1967 the Swedes drove LHD cars (compatible with the rest of the mainland) on the left side of the road (no idea why). Apparently the change went smoothly, one night in August: 5 minutes before the appointed time, everyone was to stop; on the hour, they were to move slowly to the other side of the road and wait; and 5 minutes later they could drive on. During those 10 minutes, the old signs were obscured and the new ones uncovered by the students, army, local authority workers, etc deployed around the country.
Imagine doing that today, with motorways and several times more vehicles on the road.
, Fri, 29 Jun 2001 14:41:11, Thu, 28 Jun 2001 09:11:22
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