In the automotive trade, a vehicle has a "driver's side" and "passenger side". This only partly solves the ambiguity, because of course some countries drive on the left.
Case in point: my wife and I live in Australia (have done so all our lives), and my wife had a 2008 Ford Focus, made in South Africa (a RHD country). Indicator stalk was on the left, wiper on the right (aka "European" style). She then upgraded to a 2020 Ford Focus, made in Germany (it's the wagon model), and the wiper is on the left, indicator on the right. Which confuses me, as I drive a BMW, which has indicators on the left and wipers on the right.
I am used to the indicators on the left though when driving my BMW, so I experience the classic "wipers instead of indicators" dance many times when I drive my wife's car. As most cars nowadays are automatics, I guess this reasoning is falling out of relevance more and more.
I also want to note that not all Australian built cars had wipers on the left and indicators on the right – many GM Holden models like the Kingswood and early Commodore models from the 1980s had them both on the one stalk – that stalk being on the right of course.
To be clear in the UK the wheel is on the right but the indicator is still on the left side of the wheel as in a European LHD car, just to keep things different.
Like position of reverse gear on a H-style gear stick, some left-and-up, some right-and-down; some with a collar interlock, some with a button, some you push the whole stick down towards the ground ...
Anecdote 1) In NZ I saw a car in the middle of a busy roundabout, wipers on, passengers visibly confused and crying.
Anecdote 2) A kayak guide also mentioned, that if you see someone entering a roundabout, windshield wiping, on a sunny day, you just wait and let them do their thing.
Anecdote 3) After a month in NZ I came back to Germany and actually muscle memory let me to use wipers instead of indicators on the autobahn when changing lanes. Oof.
Royal Oak has an ice cream parlour with a good view of the carnage.
I was surprised how easily my body got used to left-hand shifting, but I will say this: I've been driving stick shifts for nearly 40 years, and never miss a gear in the US. However, driving in the UK I find that left hand is NOWHERE NEARLY AS GOOD at distinguishing 1st from 3rd as my right is. Muscle memory!
Steering-column manual shifting (e.g. "three on the tree") is pretty much extinct today, but I assume that the "move the whole driver section over" thing means that column-shifted manuals in the UK were still shifted with the right hand. Does anyone know?
I still use is when checking tyre pressures for example, they are handy and unambiguous acronyms. For example Off Side Front ( OSF ) would be the drivers side front mostly.
Generally the indicators will be operated with the hand that's furthest from the centre so that you can change gear in a manual car and turn the indicators on at the same time.
Australia, Japan, New Zealand amongst others all operate their indicators with the right hand. Not in the UK though.
Even though we drive on the left our indicators swapped to match other EU[0] countries that drive on the right sometime in the 1980s.
I drive a manual car and you just get used to doing both with the same hand. All done via subconscious muscle memory.
In fact I never really gave it much though until going round a corner in an automatic hire car in Christchurch, New Zealand. Wipers scraping across a dry screen, my hand desperately hunting for the missing gear stick as other cars hooted at me...
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0. Let's just ignore elephant in the room for now.
He’s a sport sedan, so it applies.
Sometimes, you want to use passenger/driver side: for example, on my car, brake flushing procedure is always rear passenger first, no matter driving side.
And sometime you want to use left/right, which is always assumed to be according to the driver's position (so it's reversed when facing the engine), because some things aren't reversed, no matter the driving side: for example, on my car, the BCM and hood latch are always on the right side (which makes it inconvenient to open the hood for a left-side driving car).
P.S.: how do I know for certain? A friend has the exact same model but with opposite driving position because it's a UK import.