Young Drivers

Driving Skills for Life: Crash Course

Drivers beware! Teens are hitting the road, and there's nothing you can do to stop us. You have two options: Keep clear, or die.

With a race driving dad and an ultracautious mom, I grew up fairly oblivious to the plight of the teenage driver. Since age 12 (I'm now 17) I had been driving in parking lots, practicing emergency stops, spinouts and the like. Not everyone grew up like I did, so I didn't realize how bad most teen drivers actually are. I figured it was just another stereotype.

It's not. It's a disease. Attending the Driving Skills for Life program, a one-day defensive driving course for teens, opened my eyes.

Terror at 15 mph
My first scare of the day was unrelated to driving. Our bus chock full of sweaty students pulled into a flooded parking lot. This was the "skid pad," as the instructors affectionately referred to it. When the bus pulled to a stop, a voice called out in all sincerity from the back, "Why did the rain stop at the yellow line?" She obviously missed the fact the sky was anything but cloudy and that there were giant white pipes lining the lot, pouring out volumes of water. Besides, when does rain ever stay within yellow lines? Only then did I begin to understand what I had gotten myself into.

We climbed into cars, belted up and took off on an emergency lane-changing exercise. For this adventure, you drive straight ahead toward three lanes. Each lane had a signal above it with one red and one green light. As you approach, an instructor sitting off to the side turns two of the three lights red. You're supposed to drive through the lane that's green. We started at 15 mph. One problem, how many emergencies occur at 15 mph? A bit confused, I played along, and they did eventually raise speeds for the gifted and talented (to 40 mph); however, the other students had to remain at lower speeds to keep everyone's breakfast in their stomachs.

Will we ever learn?
Another exercise had students drive a marked distance behind another car in an adjacent lane. The lead vehicle then stops suddenly, proving that if you are unfortunately in front of a teenage driver and need to stop abruptly, you had better kiss your car's back end good-bye. Only two teens out of the dozen in my group were able to stop their vehicle short of the back bumper of the lead car.

During a third exercise, a slalom where you weave the car quickly through cones, something further surprised me and removed any remaining naïveté about teens being good drivers. I climbed into a Mustang with two girls who both had valid Michigan driver licenses. Neither knew how to get the car in Drive. That was a shocker.

I now understand that teens really aren't good drivers — especially not as good as they think they are. I have a hunch the reason is that their parents are not doing their job, and that a good number of those permit practice hours never happened (not being able to put an automatic in Drive? Come on). As a student, I feel out of place "telling" parents what to do, but from what I see, they need to get more involved in their young driver's education.

Learning something new...without killing anybody
I did my best to move past my initial startle, and reassured myself that I would indeed live through the day since the worse thing us crazy kids could run into in the course were 8-inch-high orange cones. With my mind at rest, I began to absorb my defensive driving school experience.

I definitely left with more skill than I entered with, picking up a handful of evasive techniques to make my driving smoother and safer. Believe it or not, I've even found myself using them in real-world driving situations these past few weeks — a sure sign the school did its job.

As for the girls who couldn't put the car in Drive, I can't help but wonder how overloaded their brains were at the end of the long, hot day, and what they remembered even one day later.... At least they learned how to get a Mustang in gear.

And now for the real test
No doubt this clinic did something for me. I learned several techniques that I had never seen before, like looking out the side windows when driving on really curvy roads and a special steering technique used to go faster through the slalom. I also had a good time driving, spinning out and chatting with the other students. I picked up some good information that will likely help me later in life. I can only hope that the other students did as well. But since this clinic in Detroit only reached 900 teens, I suggest we clear the roads until more kids have access to programs like this.

My dad, Rex Roy, a regular Edmunds.com contributing editor, also attended the clinic. Check out his story for his take on the course.

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