Be honest now. If, like many of the team at CarBuzz.com, you passed your driving test a while ago, chances are you probably haven’t flicked through your State’s Vehicle Code, or for our UK fans, the Highway Code, in quite a while. After weeks of spine-cracking cramming, the big book of driving tips has been left to gather dust in the attic, the basement, or that drawer full of loose batteries, spare keys, and rogue USB cables you keep promising you’ll clear out this weekend.
Traffic Ticket ImageKindel Media / Pexels
Scrap Car Comparison in the UK, however, has come up with an unorthodox and scientifically valid solution to your bone idleness by transforming the UK’s Highway Code, in its entirety, into an audio bedtime story.
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The Most Boring Book… In The World
It’s true. Dubbed The Highway Code: Bedtime Story (not the catchiest of titles but it still grabbed our attention), all 300-plus rules in the UK’s Highway Code can now be listened to, for free, via Spotify, Apple Podcasts, Amazon Music, and on YouTube. With noted British automotive journalist and long-time Fifth Gear presenter Vicki Butler-Henderson enlisted as the narrator, you can listen to the Highway Code, start to finish, in just over four and half hours.
This isn’t a rousing revival of driving best-practices, however. With Vicki speaking in a very soft, relaxing tone, you’re more apt to fall asleep. If you do stay away, the theory here is that listening to rules of the road in this manner is far less taxing than wading through more than 235 text-heavy pages:
“Turning the Highway Code into something calming, and oddly soothing, appealed to my inner geek. And whilst the code may not be the most page-turning of thrillers, this bedtime-story format will (hopefully!) remove any potential boredom to learning it. Even if listeners take in just a few snippets as they nod off, that will be a very good thing.”
One thing we should clear up, however, is that the rules and regulations of the Highway Code have not been adapted into actual bedtime stories or nursery rhymes. Across 4 hours and 37 minutes, for example, you won’t hear whimsical tales of our story’s brave and devilishly handsome protagonist – whom we’ll call James, for no specific reason – learning the true value of hubris in his race to name every road traffic sign against a slower, but more methodical tortoise.
Traffic Lights
Similarly, chapters are not dedicated to our red hood-donning hero steeling his resolve and successfully avoiding stopping in a yellow box junction as he drives a picnic basket through the woods to his sickly grandma’s house (probably not illegal, right…?) “My, what big eyes you have for unsighted pedestrian.” But we digress.
Instead, the bedtime story is read, in soothing tones, in its unaltered entirety. This not only helps the listener fall asleep, but also avoids unintentionally adding ambiguity to the text.
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The Science Behind The Bedtime Stories
The Highway Code: Bedtime Story. Vicki Butler-HendersonScrap Car Comparison
Unusual as this project may sound, there is genuine scientific merit behind it. Indeed, studies have found that our subconscious tends to absorb information more thoroughly when we’re asleep in a concept called hypnagogic learning. You won’t learn something new during this state, but a brief period of hyper-neural activity as you’re nodding off means some information can be acquired subconsciously and stored as a memory.
SCC also discovered, as part of a 2024 survey, that 1 in 10 British drivers, on average, listen to a podcast to help them fall asleep. Up to 36%, meanwhile, use soft music and/or white noise to do the same. This project thus combines the two principles in a bid to help drivers sleep more soundly – the same survey suggests that more than half of the participants struggle to get a restful night’s sleep, which can impact their driving the following morning – and, sub-consciously anyway, digest rules of the road as they do so.
Source: Scrap Car Comparison
