The DVLA has just announced some new health-related rules for drivers. For car drivers, there is a new stipulation regarding epilepsy; however, for bus and lorry drivers, visual acuity requirements have been relaxed.

Previously the threshold was 0.8 (6/7.5) in the better eye and at lease 0.5 (6/12) in the poorer eye. These values are now 0.8 and 0.1 (6/60), respectively.

Driving is an unusual visual task inasmuch as there are large eye movements than in most everyday tasks. It might be that with the specific angles of wing- and rear view-mirrors, there are different implications for ‘poorer right’ and ‘poorer left’ drivers, and they might notice a difference between right-hand and left-hand drive cars.

Overall, though, it seems this is all of little functional consequence. This 1991 paper suggests little or no practical difference between monocular and binocular drivers.