View from inside a car and it's position on the road

While I had a drivers' license for a long time, I never had much experience driving a car. Getting a license is really easy, i suppose it is verification that 'This person can drive on an empty road, with markings on the road as a guideline.' However, to drive on actual road, with other people, i felt challenged.

I started re-learing driving with an automatic transmission car. Since I didn't have to change gears, or worry about engine stalling, it was very easy. Just press the peddles to Stop&Go!.

However, the main pain point for me what I just couldn't figure out how to know _where_ on the road the car was! From inside, you see the whole world. And worse, i found, is that the seemed to touch the edges of the road!

I understand that the panaromic view is so that you can see more of the world, and act accordingly. It's just that the panaromic view and my brain weren't getting along very well.

I think i might have a mini that you just basically _guess_ where the car might be. I drive a motorbike pretty well, if i say so myself. In that case too, i just guess where the bike is. I don't _know_ where it is, but knowing how long the bike is and how wide it is, you can make a guess of where the bike will be.

This is easy on a bike, as it's width is just as long as the mirrors you can see. It's front and center, and when it's not (e.g. you're carrying a cartoon of items on the back), you have to see the mirrors and guess how much longer the new size is. Experience makes this second nature.

I think that the same may be true for cars as well. You first _know_ how wide and long the car is. If your car is 6 feet long, and you're driving on a 10 feet road, it's impossible that the car occupies everything. Once you know the width of the car, you estimate where the end is, then play a bit safe from that distance.

To develop this intuition, you have to keep looking at the side mirrors. The markings on the road help a lot here --- you can try to keep a fixed amount of space from the back to the mark.

Another idea is to always keep the car as straight as possible with respect to the road. Again, the markings on the road will help with this. If you have to move around, move in little increments and then go back to being parallel with the road.

These two ideas should help you _guess_ where a car is. The experienced drivers i talked to say that they 'just know' where the car is. I think what they mean is that their experience allows them to guess very reasonably where exactly the car _must_ be.

Another point: I want to learn manual transmission before i say i've learned to drive a car. If I learn in the beginning stages, it will be very easy. If I leave that for later, then i'll have developed intuition for automatic transmission, so i wouldn't be able to make sense of manual ones. By looking at videos, it seems fairly easy, you just set the speed limit by setting the gears up and down.