Seven Steps/Phases In the Process of Becoming an "Experienced Driver"

The insurance industry, based on the surcharge placed on new teen drivers for the first few years, believes that maturity is the key to safer driving behavior. If you wait until you are 25 to learn to drive, even though you have no experience, you will not be penalized with an increased premium. Implicitly, the insurance companies are totally discounting the value of proper training for a new driver.

In thinking about the process of gaining experience behind the wheel, I have identified the following 7 steps:

1. Learning Basic Vehicle Controls

2. Learning the Rules of the Road

3. Mastering Vehicle Controls

4. Executing Normal Vehicle Maneuvers

5. Developing Situational Awareness

6. Negotiating Hazardous Conditions

7. Learning Personal and Vehicle Limitations

The steps are not necessarily serially executed. The learning process takes place over time, and application of technology available today can significantly reduce the time needed to become an "Experienced Driver", especially in the latter steps.

The real goal should be to instill safe driving habits and behaviors as early as possible in the process, and to accelerate the process wherever practical to reduce the window where the new driver is a greater risk to all of us.

Lessons To Be Learned From a NM Tragedy

On June 27, 2009, four teens lost their lives in a collision in New Mexico, caused by a drunk driver on the wrong side of the road. Rightfully so, the response has been a call for more efforts to prevent DUI occurrences.

This article gives some details about the crash:

http://tinyurl.com/lzt2wr


What caught my eye in the comments section following the article was the questioning of the role of the parents in potentially avoiding the situation in the first place. The teens were in the first car of a caravan of four vehicles carrying teens to a house party. The time of the collision was around midnight. The driver of the vehicle is listed as sixteen.

Even without the GDL restrictions, a relatively inexperienced driver should not have been on the road with 4 passengers at midnight, with the probability of a return home presumably sometime after 1 or 2 am.

The second thing that caught my eye was the damage to the vehicle:





Clearly, the driver, in a panic situation, swerved to the left to avoid the head-on collision. That is not surprising, but is exactly the wrong thing to do. She obviously also reacted too late, since the oncoming vehicle caught her in the right front quarter.

Had the driver been through our Level 2 simulation training, she would have known that she needed to go to the right, and would have been drilled on the need to get out of the way, rather than stay in lane until it was too late.

Most experts believe that the answer to teen fatalities is further restrictions on teen drivers until they gain sufficient experience and maturity. We train company fleet drivers in defensive driving techniques using this simulator, and about 75% of these experienced (>10 years) drivers either fail to avoid the head-on collision, or subsequently lose control during the avoidance maneuver. Time spent behind the wheel of a vehicle is not the solution.

The value of our simulation training lies in exposure to critical situations, evaluation of initial reaction, and practice of correct response. You simply cannot get that from an online course, in a classroom, or during supervised on-road driving with an instructor.

How to make your teen a better driver

I came across an interesting article on MSNBC titled "Study: Extra training helps teens avoid crashes" that says that teaching teens how to avoid crashes will make them safer drivers. Imagine that. By teaching teens how to react in emergency situations, we're making them better drivers. The article goes on to say that trained students have a powerful advantage over untrained drivers when it comes to out-of-the ordinary situations such as adverse weather conditions or erratic drivers.

When we send our teens out on the road, we hope and pray that they've learned enough to know how to react in situations. The problem is, they don't. They lack experience and most have only been trained on the basics of driving - how to start, stop, move the vehicle and park - not what to do if someone or something swerves in their lane or their tire blows out.

Simulation-based driver training shows teens how to react in these situations over and over again in a safe, controlled and supervised environment so that when they do encounter a situation, they know firsthand how to handle it. Will this type of training help decrease our teen driver fatalities each year? The study says "YES".

To read the study, click here.

It's Crazy Out There - What Chance Does a Novice Driver Have?

I have a short comute to and from work everyday, so when I do get out on the "big" streets I am shocked and appalled at the driving I see going on out there. Just last week I was driving in downtown Phoenix and watched a pedestrian, crossing the street, in a crosswalk, when the light changed on him. The poor man was scurrying across the street and SUV's were coming across the intersection honking their horns at this poor man. His life was literally in danger. That same day I was entering the 101 Loop when I watched a white bus cross over the gore area and nearly push a sedan off the road. The driver must have decided they DID want to get onto the freeway and those in my way "be damned." These are only two stories of many I hear day in and day out from colleagues, friends, students, you name it!!

Now think about putting a young novice driver out there with these agressive drivers, fast roadways and even faster vehicles - what chance do the REALLY have? Do parents or even driving instructors take their teens out on streets and put them in all of those precarious situations and teach them how to handle them? I think not, it's far too nerve racking, not to mention dangerous. So, how do these young people learn? The Driver Education system in the United States is failing our teenagers. Some states are better than others, but on the whole and on the average we are still teaching teens to drive the way we did 50 years ago. Things have CHANGED!! The roadways we drive on are more complex and move much faster, the vehicles we drive are much more sophisticated than the vehicles we drove 30, 40 or 50 years ago. When boomers were learning how to drive we had sensory feedback - wind noise, shaking, rattling and rolling was going on. The vehicles we drive now are made to eliminate all of that unpleasantness. So now we can be going 30 MPH or we can be going 80 MPH - we really don't feel the difference. Now, put a teenager behind the wheel - do you really think they will be able to react in time if something out of the ordinary happens? The answer is NO. The data is CLEAR. We have a problem in this country. Teenagers are dying every day in vehicle collisions.

Think of it this way - when we hand our teenagers the keys to a vehicle today, we are handing them a 2,000 to 4,000 lb. projectile with 35 to 40 lbs. of explosives and we're sending them out there with a hope and prayer that WHEN they do get in their first collision, and they will, it will only be a fender bender. We need to do better than that!

So, what is the answer to this problem? We at DrivingMBA, think we are PART of the solution! We have 3 years of experience utilizing state of the art simulators to teach teenagers the fundamentals of driving and advanced defensive driving skills. Our preliminary results (interviewing our students after 1 year) are indicating that we are improving their odds significantly. While the national average of novice drivers getting into a collision their first year on the road is >50% our graduate students are averaging < 12% getting into some kind of collision their first year. While we know we can't guarantee they won't have a collision, we know we can improve their odds.