How to overtake when you’re all going the same speed!

[EvangelicalAboutButteredToast]

I’m going a lot of motorway driving this week. Three/four lane motorway. Average speed cameras the length of it. Don’t want to be a middle lane wanker so trying to move lanes as one should. However the left hand lane is lorries and anxious people. The middle lane is a convoy of cars cruise controlled at 70. Over taking lane is either empty or another car doing 70, nose to nose with the middle lane wanker or occasionally used by someone flying down at 80 with, I assume, false plates.

what’s the etiquette here? Do I try and sit in the left lane and go out into the middle lane every 30 secs to overtake and go back in? Do I join the convoy in the middle or do I accelerate over 70 in the overtaking lane to get in front of the dude doing 67?

My driving instructor said you should look down the road ahead of you and position yourself to deal with upcoming traffic. If you’ve pulled out to overtake and can see that you’re rapidly catching up with other cars and would need to pull in and back out - don’t, just stay out.

He said this was an important part of eco driving. Pulling in might mean you can’t easily pull out again when you need to, and then you have to brake and lose speed, then accelerate again when you pull out. So it’s more efficient just to stay out and maintain a constant speed until you have finished overtaking however many cars.

I do wonder if modern driving conditions require a change to the Highway Code in areas. I’ve been driving for 33 years and things have definitely changed in that time. Particularly with motorway driving and urban/city driving.

I was driving home this afternoon and the gantry signs were all indicating a 50 mile speed limit for over 10 miles (I think it might be due to the weather conditions) and pretty much no one but me and perhaps one other were sticking to that limit. Everybody just carried on driving at 60-70 mile an hour and I had HGVs roaring up behind me aggressively. How come no one actually follows the gantry signs? It’s so weird.

Same here.

IME people go over the speed limits because they lack the imagination to understand the risks of speeding, until something happens to them and then they're all evangelical about safe driving.

So many people drive like total idiots it really is amazing there aren't more accidents.

The safe stopping distance at 70mph is about 100m (spacing of marker posts) so don't feel obliged to pull in to the left unless there's a 200m-300m gap, even then you would need to pull straight out again to overtake the next HGV.

It's sitting in the middle lane with no vehicle in sight on the left which is the problem.

If only middle lane hoggers were banned from driving, as they should be.

Use the left hand lane when empty, OP. Be one of the 75% who should have a licence, not one of the 25% who should not.

Lorries are speed limited to, er, less than 70 on motorways so where there's average speed cameras I'd predominantly middle lane hog at 70 unless there was a huge gap in the left lane.

I sit on the slow lane until I need to move tbh and move maybe half a mile before I need to

When I went down the m25 on Sunday the inside lane was mainly empty and everyone was hogging the third lane. I reckon the inside lane was moving faster!

This question of how long you loiter while overtaking is one of experience. One persons "keep left except when overtaking"is someone else's "zigzagging in and out of lane 1". Someone else who stays out to overtake cars with some distance between them looks like they're middle lane hogging. There's no hard and fast rule, you'll see people using every possible way of doing it. As I say, experience is the only way to learn what works. FWIW, I get over as soon as possible; don't be scared of changing lanes (that does seem to be a real problem for some people, tha's why motorway lessons are worthwhile).

But what do I know?