Driving Secrets - Notes for New Drivers

 Notes on Driving – New Driver Edition ver 04b

2015- 2016 Hugh Tayler

People who don't drive think that parallel parking and keeping the car out of the ditch are the hard parts of driving, but that hasn't been true for many decades. For most people, interacting with dense and aggressive urban traffic is way more difficult. But drivers have lots of other less obvious issues, some of which I will discuss.

How My Sister Learned to Drive
My sister once set the record straight: “I drive more than all three of my brothers put together.” It wasn't just the mileage, though. She can also handle a 24-foot long RV or a sedan with 300 horsepower. I've lost track of the sporty cars my sister has driven. I remember the MGB convertible, the Beetle convertible, the Cabriolet, and more recently, the turbocharged Golf. But she learned to drive on a big unsporty four-door sedan, probably Dad's luxurious blue-green Pontiac Parisienne with brocade seats and effortless but insensitive power steering. We went to a parking lot and drove around and around, left and right, forward and reverse, until she was so familiar with the vehicle that she was bored. Then we drove on quiet side streets until she was bored and so we gradually worked up to light traffic. The secret is that, generally speaking, she stayed in her comfort zone. Well, mostly. We did spend some time off road, a hiking trail through an orchard, I think, but the details are hazy. It helped that she had a natural talent behind the wheel and that decades ago there were such things as big empty parking lots and light traffic. These days, almost everyone recommends new drivers spend at least some time with a school like Young Drivers of Canada.

Not Everyone Should Drive
Some people should just not drive. An energetic pedestrian neighbour in her forties wanted to learn to drive for the first time so I used the same system I used with my sister.  I was successful in that my neighbour learned to start and operate a car, but she never seemed to develop a sense of roads and traffic. Not everyone has the level of  focus, or the ability to process spatial data, or the social skills to be a safe driver. Someone else took over the lessons and I think our neighbour even spent some time with a professional instructor, but never got her license. Thank goodness.

Misunderstanding the Problem
When I was a little kid one of my nightmares was being at the wheel of a moving car and not being able to drive it. I used to wake up just before the crash. When I learned to drive, those nightmares went away. As a child I understood a lot about operating a motor vehicle, I just didn't have the skills yet. My generation grew up being driven in cars and listening to our parents while they drove and commented on other drivers. We developed a sense of navigation, learned some of the social basics of driving, and developed a more adult and expressive vocabulary.

If you grow up without a family car, you have to acquire both the skill side of driving and the social side later in life or maybe never.  If you just can't get the hang of all three pedals and all those levers and you don't interact well with other drivers, then you tend to lurch and creep around way too slowly, the classic timid bad driver of thirty and forty years ago. These days, if your whole family is new to driving but now you have bags of money and roads that aren't jammed all the time, you can become a new kind of bad driver. Your parents buy themselves an oversize luxury SUV like a Range Rover to make up for their lack of driving skill, but you get to talk them into a Mercedes with a Kompressor. (Kompressor is German for “supercharger” but has come to mean “object of ridicule” in English.) Your parents get to drive slowly and badly and you get to drive fast and badly, part of a new generation of arrogant bad drivers. Arrogant new drivers have no clue that good manners and skill are the fundamentals of driver status among North American adults, and tend to mistakenly think that vehicle selection is the key to driver satisfaction. There is a tiny bit of truth to this: new drivers should have a modern car.

Modern Cars
The theoretical dividing line for modern cars is the year 1986, the year that North American cars got computers managing fuel injection and ignition and pollution control. Computers also gave us anti-lock brakes and air bags. I have owned a lot of cheap, crappy cars over the decades, and I can tell you that modern cars are much safer to drive. Their better steering and braking and suspension design means that they handle way better in everyday driving and emergency situations. The biggest change for the average person was the widespread adoption of front wheel drive. Given the same power, the same weight, and the same tires, in the hands of a good driver on a dry paved road, a rear-drive sporty car like a Miata  or a classic BMW or a classic Porsche will be fastest around a track. But if there is a little rain or other bad surface conditions, a sporty front-drive car will feel safer, be more predictable at the limit of adhesion, and be quicker. I have owned a rear-drive Buick Century and a front-drive Buick Century and driven both through snow storms and would never go back to a rear-drive car. People with money get the best of both worlds: they buy cars with all-wheel drive. These cars typically have an onboard computer to handle traction control and the best of them are very quick but still well-behaved.

Good Value
I like used popular cars that came in a cheap version and a sporty version. The cheap version still has the basic good manners and strong mechanicals of the sporty one, but it is – uh – cheaper.  A guy who used to drive new cars off the boats explained it to me: even cheap cars have lots of power and traction if you are prepared to drive hard. Inexpensive sedans like a Honda Civic or Toyota Corolla or a Mazda 3 can be driven scary fast at their limits. But the limits are higher if you go for the sports version with more acceleration, better braking, and grippier tires.

Don't Go Cheap on Tires
Most people who talk about cars – horsepower blah blah cylinders blah blah turbo blah blah alloy wheels blah blah - are just posers. You can tell serious car people, especially racers: they talk about tires. Buy good ones suited to your type of driving. After a couple of visits to a snowy ditch in my old Dodge Dart, we learned long ago that when winter comes you want four matched high-quality tires designed for ice or deep snow mounted on their own rims. We bought a set of studded noisy monsters that were incredible, making my cheap station wagon nearly a match for most four-wheel drive SUV's. Now we buy Michelin X-Ice's – not as capable in deep, deep snow, but quieter and better behaved on bare pavement. This spring we will probably go looking for good all-season rain tires. The off-brand  summer tires we have now feel a little skaty in the wet.

Manual or Automatic Transmission?
I have had cars with automatics and with manual. I like the extra zip you get with a manual, but driving in the Lower Mainland you spend so much of your time crawling in traffic that you will be much happier with an automatic. Any good driving instructor will teach to you to drive an automatic using just your right foot on either the gas or brake. That way, when it comes time to use your left foot to work the clutch on a manual, your brain won't be cross-wired. But if you have driven a big variety of vehicles, you can learn to drive any automatic like a go-kart: left foot on the brake and right foot on the  gas. This left-foot braking is a racing driver technique that can also be employed in taxi-style very aggressive and precise urban driving, something that I think is stupid, even though I used to do it.  A saner use for left foot braking is in tricky parking and for precise control over power in mud and snow and on ice. Some recent cars have sophisticated new computer-managed dual-clutch transmissions –  often with sporty paddle shifters on the steering wheel – that shift faster and better a human, giving you the best of both manual and automatic, although they are still expensive and sometimes fussy.

Car or Truck or Van?
For economy and ease of driving you just can't beat a small sedan like a Civic or a Corolla or a Jetta. But guys love trucks and my brother used to have Chev truck after Chev truck for camping and transporting tools and mountain bikes. But then he drove my dad's Chev van for a few years, and found in his words that “A van is a toolbox that you can sleep in.” With a van or an SUV your tools or groceries or bicycles stay dry and and you have more room for passengers. If you do a lot of gardening or concrete work or you own a pony, a pickup truck is the right vehicle, but my brother switched to Chev SUV's and now he can haul cabinet making tools without having them stolen during the week, and sleep in the back of the SUV (safe from  bears) when he goes mountain biking with his buddies.

Minivan or SUV ?
Marketing and design people have blurred the lines between all kinds of tall boxy vehicles designed for people who want to haul friends with indecently short skirts and older relatives who can't crawl into low sporty vehicles. If you have too much money, you just buy something to match your purse dog or your fall outfit  - maybe a Porsche Cayenne painted in Cinammon Mist. If you have less money but still need something to co-ordinate with your Coach handbag, then you max out your credit and buy a Kia Soul painted in Pumpkin Surprise. If you are strictly practical and you don't have much money then a cute little van-wagon-hatchback thingy like a used Honda Fit Sport in Refrigerator White is just the ticket. When we scrapped our Oldsmobile station wagons, we looked at all kinds of small to medium boxy things – Subarus, Jeeps,  Honda Elements, Volvo wagons, Mazda 5's, Grand Caravans, Jetta wagons and on and on. We crawled around cars with tape measures for a month. For our needs now, it came down to a choice between a Toyota Matrix or Ford Focus wagon. A neighbour had a Ford Focus for sale and the price was right so the decision was easy. You can obsess about cars but when you get a deal, just go with it. Free is the best deal of all, of course.

When Free is Too Expensive
I have always owned cars that were so cheap they were pretty much free. I spent way too much time working on them. The best advice I ever got was from an old VW mechanic who said to me when I was looking at VW Rabbits: “Don't get a shitty vun!” Car makers design cars to deliver a certain amount of kilometers. But when car bodies and powertrains are newly redesigned, the manufacturer needs a few years to find and fix the bugs. If you are looking at an unfamiliar vehicle, you need to do your research and find out about recalls and service bulletins. Another piece of research is to find the book value of the vehicle, something your ICBC agent can tell you. Modern cars don't rust the way the old ones did so in theory high-mileage cars can be fixed up to go farther but it might cost you more than the old car's book value. Ford designed the motor in our Focus to run 240,000 kilometers so people typically scrap them rather than fix them if anything big goes wrong after 180,000 kilometers. A Honda or Toyota will often go farther, sometimes doing 300,000 kilometers if the mileage is mostly highway mileage. You might see a Focus for sale and still running with 300,000 kms on it, but generally you should stay far away from old high-mileage Fords. Other cars that you should stay away from are cop cars (abused), Subarus that leak a little coolant (the motor has been overheated), anything with huge holes in the back where the previous owner had giant speakers (idiot), old luxury cars that have been stored for years ( the fuel pumps tend to fail and the brake lines rust), and any car that has smells strongly of Febreze and still has dog hair in the corners of the upholstery. Sometimes you can get a good deal on a low-mileage well-maintained brown car, since people are slower to buy a used car in any of the colors you might find in a diaper.

When Free is Good
Older people who have stored cars learn that after only a few years of storage, most cars parked outdoors are just scrap metal covered in algae and blackberries. Better to just donate newly-retired Old Reliable Toyota Camry to a young relative who needs a car for school. Wow. Such a deal. What you want is anything – it's free right? - with reasonable mileage, from a relative or friend, not stored too many years, and big enough for a couple of friends with hockey gear. Plan on an inspection and set aside money for brakes, tires or a new battery if you need these items. If it has been used to transport pre-schoolers, set aside a day to vacuum up the lost Cheerios and to shampoo the  yogurt off the seats. If the car is not stylish, wax it. The difference between “sad old” and “ handsome classic” is often just a good wax job and some detailing work on the vinyl trim and alloy wheels.

When You Totally Have to a Have a Cool Car, Not an Appliance That Some Old Person Drives
A mid life crisis – where a person feels the need to forge a new social identity - can happen at any age. It is not just confined to old guys who have to buy a Dodge Ram Hemi 4x4 that never leaves the pavement or Holt Renfrew ladies who get a Jaguar to match the plastic surgery and the tennis instructor boyfriend.  But if you are an old jerk driving a cool new machine, people just think that a nice vehicle like that is wasted on an insensitive idiot like you. Besides, in my books, there is only one truly cool car: the Caterham, a street legal race car  handmade for you personally. Boring people and parents are terrified and hate them on sight. Most other mid-life crisis cars like Mustangs and Camaros and Porsches and Audis are pleasantly tame by comparison, but still enormously popular and profitable. Car companies love personal insecurity, but the truth is that no car can fix this problem. You are either cool or not cool or you are beyond the whole cool thing and people take you for who you are even if you drive up in a P.T. Cruiser or a Thunderbird.

But I Just Have to Have a Cool Car Or I'll Just Die
Okay. If you say so. Cool cars coming up:

Any BMW station wagon. It's a BMW so it is nice to drive, but a wagon so people remember your car as different, kind of European, but not freaky.

A flawless Volvo wagon – any age – with roof racks and two or three sports decals. Blackout tint on all the windows, a roof pod, and turbocharging are all good for extra points. An Audi Allroad is equivalent.

A Miata convertible with the top down even though it is freezing out. You need a silk Hermes scarf to keep your hair from getting mussed up, but they are only $400 or so.

A new Beetle, the ones made after 1998 that came with a blumenvasen (flower vase) on the dashboard . The old classic aircooled Beetles were slow, noisy, cramped, treacherous in a crosswind, and generally villainous. The new ones are basically a nice safe boring Jetta with less room and more styling, which makes them cool.

Any cheap sedan – not a wagon – with a row of Hello Kitty or other Asian collectibles across the entire back window and another row across the front dash. Crocheted doilies on the headrests are a nice touch.

Hippie cool: any older truck in good condition with a “spirit catcher” hanging from the inside rear view mirror and worn upholstery hidden by a Navaho blanket.

Any Subaru with a rainbow decal and two dogs wearing bandanas that just go berserk when a man comes within 3 metres of the vehicle.

A Mini, but only the later models. The actual old ones are too cool for ordinary people. My wife Joan had two of them, but she is a trained professional artist, used to handling levels of coolness that would put most people in the hospital.

Any truly boring and forgettable car like a Corolla or a Civic with paint the color of sand or pavement. Clean, no rust. You step out of the car with The Look dialed right in and the car vanishes into the background when people see You just like You stepped off the cover of Vogue or GQ.

Any truly boring and forgettable car like a Corolla or a Civic with paint the color of sand or pavement. Clean, no rust, never driven more than 10 k over the speed limit, and blending right in with traffic. You are wearing a baseball cap and a dark hoodie and blue jeans. You look like a pizza delivery car but without the giant Domino, because while you deliver, your product is far more profitable than pizza. You are unimaginably cool, but only to your customers, a few of whom consider robbing you for your giant wad of cash and whatever extra product is stashed under the spare tire in the trunk.

Anything with the steering wheel on the wrong side. Someone thought that this vehicle was so cool that they imported it from Japan, even if it looks like a motorized breadbox with roof racks. (Yep. We really did keep our bread in a big tin box with a sliding door. I'm actually that old.)

Any French car. But there are no French cars in Canada. They are that cool.

Any real Jeep. Some of the new Jeeps look like Buicks or Kias and the Patriots and the Libertys are not good quality, but serious real Jeeps are inherently cool, even the huge wood-grain Grand Cherokees that doctors used to buy. Extra points for the Sahara if you are African-Canadian and extra points for the Cherokee if you are Native. More extra points for a winch, a real Search and Rescue decal, and a first aid kit with a blanket stowed in the vehicle.

Any five door hatchback, wagon, or SUV that is bright red so no matter what car it is, even a Hyundai, all your friends can see you pulling up to the bus stop at junior college to give them a free lift home. You need four doors to get everyone in the car fast before the bus pulls up and a hatchback because if your friends are cool somebody will be packing a guitar, or their portfolio, or a box of clean socks and towels for homeless people. Just remember: bright red, not Lemon Yellow, Lime Green, or Berry Purple. While these colors are even more visible, they are both too visible and uncommon. If you drive by somebody because you are too busy or they aren't cool enough, they'll know.

Never Mind Cool, I Feel the Need For Speed
This is a common problem, and I have the tickets to prove it. Like most young idiots, I actually liked driving too fast. But there is a problem to spoil the fun: reality. There you are zipping along the Sea to Sky Highway and you come around the corner to see a mama rock the size of a coffee table and two baby rocks  the size of toaster ovens sleeping on the road.  Or there you are like my nephews zipping along the Hwy 97 Connector when they hit a patch of ice and slide for a half-a-kilometer until they come to a stop by erasing the side of the BMW on the guardrail.

Really, I Hate Driving Slow
Okay, if you insist. I shouldn't tell you this, but there is a set of a secret techniques – Kim's System -  for driving up to 185 kph (top speed in a Datsun Fair Lady) on public roads. I learned it from Rick who was Kim's co-driver and navigator for a couple of years.

First, accept the fact that you might die. Have you been saved by Jesus? Good.

Second, you need a friend who is willing to die with you, somebody young like you who might leave grieving parents and friends, but not an actual widowed partner and orphaned children.

Third, you need a motive. A girlfriend 400 km away is good, but being young and crazy is actually closer to the truth.

Now: one of you drives full-out, like a European rally driver, and the other reads maps, hands the driver drinking water, and watches the road for cops, road signs, road conditions, deer, slower vehicles, side roads, driveways, kids waiting for a schoolbus. Anything to reduce the demands on the driver's perception and attention. You both need total concentration: the driver needs to focus on the feel of the car through the corners just like a race driver on the track. Except that race tracks don't have cows that wander onto the road or logging trucks shedding the occasional chunk of bark, so the second person is looking way down the road and watching the radar detector and communicating navigation and traffic information, sometimes digging into his memory for past hazards if the road is familiar.

Drivers like Kim who are actually scary fast – not pretend fast - do not tailgate. On a freeway, they flash their high beams European-style to warn someone to move into the slow lane. If they need to pass someone on a two-lane non-divided road, they hang back from the vehicle they are going to pass, they anticipate how the passing will play out if the road is clear, then they accelerate so that they are already going a good speed when they pull out to pass. If there is not enough room to pass, they get on the brakes, tuck back in behind the car they are following and allow a cushion to build up in anticipation of their next attempt to pass.  The navigator supplies an additional set of eyes, looking way down the road, as I said before.

You are thinking, “This is too crazy to apply to me.” So far, I agree. But Rick had more practical advice: “Make sure your car is the right size for you if you are a big person or a small person. Get better tires than the ones that come with your car, ones that give you a warning sensation before they lose adhesion. And better headlights. And do up your seat belt and stow all the loose stuff that slides around a car.”

And here's the best part: “Get yourself a cop runner.” A what? “A cop runner is another fast driver like yourself except not as smart. They always want to pass you, so let them. Then follow them, just close enough to keep them in sight. If there is ice on the road and they slide off, you have just enough time to brake. If they go through a speed trap, the cop will launch and catch them, giving you just enough time to brake.”

Notice that brakes are mentioned a couple of times in Kim's System. Rick told me years ago that your overall speed in real-life fast road driving is determined more by your brakes and tires than by the power of your engine. At night, the limiting factor is how far your headlights reach.

Actually, this is a bit of an oversimplification. Assuming daylight and dry roads with very little traffic,  the limiting factor for many drivers on twisty roads is skill in cornering, just as it is in various types of racing. Rick used to talk about “the line through a bend” and “braking before the corner, not in the corner”  and “getting on the power out of a corner.” In the old old days, before racing schools and racing simulators, you used to have to learn about these things from other motorheads or read about them. Now you can watch all kinds of videos that will teach you the theory of cornering and other racing skills.

But theory and video only take you so far. When stuff goes wrong and the car starts to skid, you do not have time to think. You need to get a physical feel for vehicle dynamics.  Every car you drive has slightly different manners at the limits of adhesion and there are typically a couple of chapters on this in books on driving and especially books on racing. My old NSU Prinz was tail-heavy and the back end would swing out on hard corners. My Austin-Healey Sprite had perfect balance and impeccable manners, but those qualities were wasted because I had crappy tires. My Dodge Dart was nose heavy and would plow wide in most corners, unless things got crazy and the back end wanted to slide. And on and on. Hearing or reading about the handling of your car is almost meaningless in a practical sense. You have to spend some time in your own car sliding around, but at safe speeds, and under safe conditions. Just as Rick taught me, every year that it snows I take my current vehicle out sliding around a parking lot to get the feel of how it behaves when the tires let go. I recommend that you do the same but only in an empty parking lot. Really: empty. And beware of curbs hidden in deep snow

Why You Should Not Drive 185 kph Like Kim and Rick
For one thing, your reflexes may not be fast enough. There is an old drinking game that will test your speed. Have a friend hold a $5 bill vertically in front of you. Your fingers are poised at the bottom of the bill, ready to catch it when your friend lets go. Your friend lets go of the bill without warning and if you catch the bill by pinching your fingers together, you get to keep the $5. Very few people can catch the bill. If you can catch it, you might pass the reflex test that is given to some professional driving trainees.

For another thing, fifty years ago only a handful of rich kids like Kim had fast cars like his Fair Lady with 150 horsepower or his Camaro SS with 300 horsepower.  These days, any kid with two thousand bucks can easily find a sedan that will use 130 horsepower to give deliver ill-advised speeds in the neighbourhood of 180 kph or more. Of course, the roads are more crowded and your tires are not speed rated to 200 kph. Speed rated? Yes. All tires are speed rated. They teach you this and other cool stuff if you take driver training.

For yet another thing, Kim developed his system half a century ago. If you were in a high speed accident back then in a tiny convertible Japanese sports car with only lap belts and no roll bar and no air bags, you would probably die, leaving you with no problem other than an embarrassing interview at the gates of Heaven. With modern cars, it is now unlikely that you will die if paramedics arrive in time, and emergency medicine can keep you alive even though you have lost your good looks, your mobility, your charm, and your independence from your parents. Parents? Yep, and relatives and friends. Nobody will say it, but when they push your wheelchair around, or clean you up with a wet wipe, they will be thinking “What a fool. I feel so sorry.” Even worse, if you involve other people in your accident or if you put first responders at risk, they won't even feel that sorry.

Why Most of Rick's Advice Still Applies
Rick's take-away lesson for ordinary drivers is that your mind should be always be focused on your driving so that you build your own set of skills and techniques that you can draw on in bad road conditions or in emergencies.  Even though I drive like the old person that I am, I still use modified versions of the lessons Rick taught me.

For normal drivers who want an easy drive through twisty mountain roads on a winter night, you need a pace car, not an actual cop runner. You find a car going about your speed, someone who takes corners the way you would but who seems to know the road better. Then you follow them, not crowding them, never shining your high beams on them. If they are good drivers, they will let you tag along if you behave yourself. When the road is truly awful, like a snowstorm, any vehicle will do as a pace car, the bigger the better. Greyhound bus drivers know the road in detail and those big tires push the snow out of your path. Buses are a better choice than semis which have a tendency to jackknife in bad situations.

As I explained above, you don't need a cop runner if you are not traveling 140 kph, but you can use a good pace car if the road is tricky and unfamiliar. You don't need someone to watch for cops if you are just doing the customary 10 kph over the speed limit, but you do need a navigator on an unfamiliar road, and a companion to make sure you are not getting drowsy if you are doing a night run after a long day at work. You don't need to pick the same line a race car driver would through a corner to just to prevent you from sliding off the road, but that same line at normal speeds is easier on your tires and the rest of your car. You don't need to drive super-smooth with easy braking and acceleration to prevent loss of adhesion at high speed, but those same gentle techniques work well at normal speeds on wet or snowy roads. Skillful smooth driving is what you need when you don't want to wake the cranky baby sleeping in the car seat or your cranky parent who is finally confident enough in your driving to take a nap while you are at the wheel.

How to Drive Your Parents
The limiting factor in how soon many young people become skillful and responsible drivers is their relationship with their parents.  If your parent is a highly skilled driver and easy to get along with, there is no reason that you, a non-driving teen, can't sit in the navigator's seat, read maps, run the GPS, put CD's into the player, handle phone calls, and carry on a dialogue with the driver about what is happening on the road, something like police driver training. Since most teens are pretty much allergic to their parents, you are not very likely to do this.

But there are other methods of selling your parents on the idea that it would be so much easier for the family if they had another driver to handle transportation chores. At any age, you can begin to manage family car use. It can be subtle at first, like making sure your younger sibling has their Blankie and Mr. Fuzzy Bear in the car and has used the washroom before a long drive. If you help with the loading before a trip – particularly the checklist – this establishes you as a serious car user, no longer some whiny kid. You can move up a notch in the family car hierarchy by bagging the loose Subway wrappers and terminating retired coffee cups. You can use Windex and a microfibre towel and clean the smudgy inside glass, something adults never have enough time do. These things are all subtle, all positive, all preliminaries to get your parents into negotiating with you as an adult instead of simply trying to placate you as a demanding child. I don't have to detail them all for you because if you have the maturity that effective parent management requires, the appropriate strategies will come to you naturally. Once you have established your basic status as Transportation Captain, you move on to the vehicle itself.

If you scrape the car windows and turn on the defroster and heated seats on icy mornings, then you need the keys to start the car and warm it up. If you vacuum the crumbs out of Dad's truck on Father's Day, you need the keys to move the truck in the driveway. If you are enough of a grown-up to check the oil and other fluids under the hood and to check the tire pressures before a family drive, then you need the keys to get the tire gauge and so on. Get the parents used to the idea that you can be trusted to use the keys and always bring the keys back to the hook where they live.

Anybody old enough to babysit should at least have kid keys to the car doors anyway. Just take the car door key and get a cheap duplicate cut for yourself. Reassure your parents that your kid key won't have the chip that allows the car to be started, but it “saves them trouble” when you are shopping or traveling or just whenever. Cars are a good place to go and sit to get away from your annoying boring parents even if your kid key won't start the car. Take a math book and your phone tucked out of sight under a blanket and announce to your parents and siblings “ I just can't study in here.” Get comfortable in the car with the blanket, prop your math book  in front of you and phone your friends in privacy. Your kid key might even turn on the stereo, which is surprisingly good in most cars.

I Can't Wait to Get a License
If you find a lot of what I have written doesn't really apply to you, maybe your impatience to get a license is more impatience for independence than the actual need or desire  for a motor vehicle. Young adults should be really suspicious of people who talk up the idea of independence from one's family. They are not all pimps or cult recruiters or pedophile coaches or exploitative older friends but some of them are not much better. So I encourage a different route to satisfying the teenage desire for independence: the boring road of responsibility.  The bad news is what parent interpret as signs of responsibility are things like: doing a little more than your share of the housework, cleaning out the pet cage without being asked, getting the family dinner started, managing your own laundry, mastering the bus schedule and taking public transit, working in the school office, trading clothes with friends and looking for bargains rather than buying all new all the time, wearing a bike helmet, sticking to a fitness program, not failing Grade 10 math, having polite friends and on and on.  You may find it hard to believe, but most adults are overbooked and if you demonstrate the ability  to look after yourself, your parents will respond to the age you seem to be rather than your chronological age. The irony is that they don't respond well to the things that most teenagers intuitively think of as signs of independence: staying out late, hanging out with older friends, trying out new foods, trying out new drugs, trying out new ideas, trying out new tattoos and body piercings, and so on.  

It Really is About Driving and I Really Need to Learn
Some people truly are in a family and personal situation that requires driving as early as possible. There are a couple of things that can speed up the process. One of them is taking a training course that will take six months off your two year wait. The other only applies to a few people. Perhaps you have a  family member who finds driving difficult and they no longer drive or hardly drive at all. But they still have a legal driver's license and they qualify as a learner's supervisor. In theory, someone with an L – if they have the necessary road skills - could start driving a family member with medical difficulties the minute they pass the written test, assuming that the person with medical difficulties has kept up a valid driver's license. I would not like to counsel anything illegal or unsafe, but it is something to keep in mind. If you decide to pull this stunt, it only works safely if the new driver arrives at her sixteenth birthday ready to drive in the real world. That implies three things. The first is knowing the driver's manual in detail, better detail than needed to simply squeak through the exam. The second is understanding how to drive in real traffic by spending hours and hours as a navigator and co-pilot, always sitting up front with the radio and phone off and discussing each turn and each lane change with the driver. The third is acquiring solid vehicle skills without driving on the public roads. That means regular access to rural or maybe even paved industrial property. If you are actually prepping someone to act as a driver as fast a possible they need hours of driving and parking practice in the vehicle they will be driving in real life.

My Parents aren't Cooperating but I Really Want to Drive. Now.
Many of the world's best drivers started driving early by driving farm vehicles. Tractors are interesting but farm trucks are even better. A real old farm Jeep with no license plates and sheep poop in the back is still a Real Jeep with all the controls of a real vehicle.

If you can afford it, spend a little money learning to drive a go-kart. The pedals are different, but all the other skills transfer to a real car. If you fall in love with karting,  and your parents have bags of money they can sponsor you for kart racing. (Ha.) If they don't have money, get a job at the go-kart track. No. Really. Not kidding. My nephew actually did work as a go-kart attendant, put in lots of free time on the track, and he is an excellent driver.

But any job improves your odds of early driving. From your parents point of view, there is the hope that your workplace will teach you a new level of maturity.  They hope you will realize that a driver's license is just a symbol of adulthood that has only a little to do with the real fun and the challenges of adulthood, just the way a wedding dress is a symbol of marriage that has only a little to do with the fun and the challenges of life with another person.  But if you perform responsibly at work and responsibly save money towards a vehicle of your own, how can they say you are not responsible enough to drive? It's not fair. Besides, if your parents have to drive you to work three times a week, they will want you driving yourself in your own vehicle as soon as possible.

More Learning Opportunities
If you are serious about driving, you will have the PDF of the Driver's Manual on your phone to study in spare moments. There is some preachy stuff in the manual, but most of it is stuff you will actually need to know in real life. But if your phone has a low battery warning and you are stuck waiting in the car for your parents and you could die of boredom before they get finished wandering around IKEA, there is a source of minor amusement hiding in the glove compartment: the manual that came with the car. These are huge fun to read if you are a motorhead, but still worthwhile for normal teens. Most adults are too busy to ever read the manual, so the minor amusement payoff comes when you get to correct your parents or reveal some feature in the car that they had no clue about. Use some judgment and don't program all the buttons on radio to death metal or bhangra stations. And if you are digging through the glove compartment, don't play with the emergency rescue tool. The carbide point really can break glass and the seat belt blades on those things are razor sharp. Don't drink the contents of bottles, either, and don't touch road flares, flare pistols, hand guns, or spare underwear.

I'm a Parent and I'm Appalled.
Be appalled if you like. But a certain percentage of kids just love cars and the independence that cars represent. They don't just dig through the glove box, they sit behind the wheel and play with the controls when you leave them alone in the car. Some steal cars before they have a license.  If they don't have some basic driving skills, then their chances of being in an accident are near certainty. Kids who know about cars and have had a little actual time behind the wheel off the road with a parent beside them understand that video games and movies like “Fast and Furious” break not only the laws of the road, but the laws of physics.

More Appalled
Haywire kids who go for an unlicensed drive-n-crash when parents are gone for an evening have often consumed alcohol first. Since you are not going to lock up your beer fridge when you are gone, at least secure your vehicle keys the way you would the keys to your gun locker. Your firearms are locked, right? Right?

Refuse to Be Appalled
We had a deal at our house: the Free Ride card. The card was invisible, but the deal was real. If your kid is out late at night – possibly driving, possibly at a social event with alcohol - they get one free ride home with no questions. Any time, any place, no questions. Just phone and we'll come and get you.  You don't want to be a patsy, so further Free Ride cards are negotiable, using your judgment as a parent.

Emotional Impairment
Okay, you don't want your kids driving impaired with alcohol. Agreed. And you don't want them driving without enough sleep. (We know that no one gets enough sleep, but that is another topic.) But you really truly don't want them driving when they are emotionally upset. I was a young and clueless passenger in a car accident and only later found out that the young driver was not only reckless, but prone to drinking and depression and had already put another vehicle into a bridge abutment. I knew enough to do up my lap belt, but didn't have the emotional intelligence to get out of the car when I had a chance earlier that night.

As clueless as I sometimes am about human emotion, I am not alone. Humans in general misunderstand their own emotional landscape, which forms the basis for reality television, celebrity culture, organized religion, industrial capitalism, and family law practice. But I have learned one thing: don't drive when some crisis has just put you through the emotional wringer. I know at least three smart young people who went on long all-night drives after a breakup with a boyfriend or girlfriend. Your hair should stand up when you read this, because the risks are crazy, like mixing alcohol and pills, another way that young adults die “accidentally”. If your friend has just gone through a breakup or a fight with parents, invite them over to have some Kraft Dinner and fried Spam with another friend. If your parents have any brains, they will just shut up and fry the Spam, and leave the three of you to talk all night in your bedroom.

Emotion and Driving
We can't turn our emotions off, nor would we want to. Memory and judgment and action all need an emotional component to function. But people attach all kinds of emotional and social meaning to driving that gets them into trouble. I have had a lifelong hatred of bullies and jerks, and have great difficulty not getting drawn into their little road games. But I read a book by Curt Rich (Drive to Survive) that taught me that you just have to let road bullies go. Your safety and the safety of everyone else on the road with you is more important than some petty mutual threats and status posturing. A certain number of people on the road are bad, or on drugs, or armed. Or all three, plus steroid use which makes them pretty much like The Hulk, except not as nice. If you really have to react to one of these people, pull over, find a pay phone and 9-1-1 them as a possible stolen car or impaired. This is not a nice thing to do, but at least you are off the road and have a chance to cool down.

Tailgaters versus Slowpokes
Every morning commute I watch variations of the same drama played out. Most drivers pick a speed. It might be the speed limit, or it might be my preferred 10 kph over (the margin that police will let you get away with) or they might decide to push it a little and move along with the fast traffic, usually about 15 or 20 kph over the limit. They find a place in a string of drivers who think like they do, set a “cushion” of space in front of themselves to allow for surprises, and have a low-stress drive to work while they listen to the radio.

But four kinds of drivers just can't seem to manage this routine social behavior. The first are the profoundly distracted. They drive very slowly, perhaps having a big chat with a friend because they are delighted to be driving a car, something their mothers never got to do. Kids and mobile phones and mattresses held on the roof with string are other typical distractions. The distracted are a minor annoyance in the slow lane, and a hazard in the travel lane.

The second group is the “I'm so righteous” slowpoke. Even on a dry day with good visibility they do precisely 2 kph under the speed limit in any lane they feel like, oblivious to the natural flow of traffic and the concern of other commuters who are running late and need to make up a couple of minutes.

The third group are tailgaters. Tailgating is simply bullying and a stupid form of bullying at that. You drive up really close behind someone, with no cushion between the two cars, trying to bully him to pull over into the slow lane. But often there is no slow lane or no empty slots in the slow lane traffic, and there is a string of thirty cars ahead of the car you are tailgating so no one is going to pull over and you are just being a jerk. A jerk who will sooner or later be involved in a multi-car rear-ender. If you are the person who rear-ends another vehicle, your insurer will automatically consider you in the wrong. Because you are.

The fourth group are the psychos. At first you think they are just tailgaters in heavy traffic, except stupider than usual. Then suddenly they cut in front of another car, even when the slot is too small. Then they cut in front of another car and another. They typically cause huge disruption in the stream of traffic, putting everybody at risk of a multi-vehicle pile-up. Even scarier, they are sometimes followed by another psycho and sometimes a third.  If you train yourself to remember license numbers and you are driving with a navigator you could consider making a call to 9-1-1 and reporting a possible car theft, impairment, or conflict involving one car pursuing another. Without lying, present the event as possible bad guy activities. Don't just phone the cops and say that cars are driving too fast. Cops know that people drive fast, especially themselves. But they really don't like bad guys doing bad guy stuff and just might pull the psychos over for a chat and a look in the trunk.

Letting the Exit Go By
You have to let interactions with bad drivers go emotionally, but the other thing you have to let go of is your own impulsive reactions to your own mistakes. If your GPS or your human navigator signals a freeway exit too late, you have to let it go by. It is no fun to have to phone your destination and say you are going to be late, but better to miss an exit than risk lives. Just the other day I watched a small blue sedan with an N on the back cut across three lanes of fast traffic in heavy rain to catch an exit. The car skidded with a violent butt-wiggle, but youthful reflexes and modern tires and suspension allowed the driver to correct from what would have been a multi-vehicle pile-up. I hoped he scared himself enough to learn something. He certainly scared me enough to get me thinking and finally type up these notes.


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Supplementary Appendix: Old People and Vehicles

One of the big cards young people hold in the driving game is that middle-aged parents are short of time to visit with and run errands for their own elderly parents. In my experience, the problem with driving the elderly is that they are not good jumpers and can't get into a tall truck or van. They are even worse at folding themselves into low vehicles like a Honda Prelude or a Chevy Cavalier, so the observant driver will notice lots of minivans on the road with dutiful Asian teens driving Granny to No Frills to stock up on frozen chickens. The easy way to load people with minor mobility problems is get a vehicle just the right height that they can put their bum on the seat first, then swing their legs in. We found that the Dodge Caravan worked for us but there is a big selection of minivans and SUV's  that are similar.

As useful and easy to drive as they are,  granny-friendly minivans suffer from a marketing problem. People bought millions of them and kept them for years at a time, the way they would a fridge or washing machine. The car industry hates this and has conducted a successful war to make them uncool. People who are  beyond cool/uncool accept the minivan for what is: a giant box that can also be a small bus with the magic ability to haul all your windsurfing gear or all your closest friends and their cheerleading costumes. Not everyone realizes that to move this giant box Toyota and Honda gave some models over two hundred horsepower. If you haul out some of the seats and all of the people and all the tools and all the frozen chickens, these things just fly when you step on the gas. Even our wimpy Caravan had lots of acceleration left when the cop stopped me doing 140 kph. You kind of have to watch minivans actually, because every so often you will see a dirty and dented old minivan driven by a  person of indeterminate age and social status carving through traffic in Psycho Intimidator mode just as if they were a currency trader on coke in a Lamborghini.

Well-behaved old people love their minivans and mid-size trucks and SUVs and tall sedans and those who still drive often choose them. And there are lots of retired and elderly people still driving and still driving safely within their limits. The key to driving safely well into your eighties is being able to keep adapting and learning. My dad had a handful of accidents one year when he was in his fifties and he got a letter in the mail ordering him to a Defensive Driver course. It could be coincidence, but after the course,  his string of accidents stopped.

We all have our weak points that we need to watch. One of mine is the shoulder check. I like to use my mirrors and I get dependent on them, but there is a blind spot on each side that mirrors don't see, and even after fifty years, I have to remind myself to do the shoulder check.

Understanding your limitations is important. Drivers are crazier than ever, and more of them are on drugs and medication than ever before, making intersections more dangerous and more demanding of attention than when I used to drive my Morris Minor. The Morris had no radio to distract me, which was good, considering that it had a three-quarter race motor intended for a sports car under the hood and that I drove the thing like it was a Corvette. The Morris is long gone and for years I have had excellent car stereos, but at bad intersections I now turn the stereo off to increase my concentration and speed of reaction. When freeway traffic is fast and heavy, I also turn it off, even if Credence Clearwater is playing.

The biggest change over the years is that I no longer drive four and a half-hours without a break. I used to get in the car in Vancouver, get out in Penticton and vice-versa. That stopped when we had kids and it really stopped after I scared myself by nearly falling asleep in Manning Park. Now I pull over, have a nap for five minutes, use the washroom, feed carrots to the ground squirrels, have a drink of water and then get back on the road.

Another change that I have made is no more eating donuts while I drive. Actually, I was pretty much cured of that when I stuck my hand in the box (with my eyes still on the road, naturally) and pulled out  a donut with powdered sugar all over it, powdered sugar that ended up on my hands, the steering wheel and my shirt. Amazingly, no powdered sugar got on my pants. I fixed that quickly enough when I got to the center of the donut, bit into the Mystery Fruit jelly, which promptly dripped into my lap. Now I stop when it is time for a snack, because I'm stopping for a washroom and exercise break anyway.

So don't all these stops make my trips longer? Yes. No doubt about it. But I don't actually drive any slower than traffic, I just go with the flow. I got in the habit with the first car I owned, which had a broken speedometer. Of all the driving habits of my youth, watching the traffic, not the speedometer  was one of the good ones, and still serves me well.

What really convinced me to take more breaks was the medical science around blood clots (deep vein thrombosis) that happen when people sit for hours in a plane or bus or car. After a long drive back from California, I  had an unexplained pain in the back of my knee. The ultrasound didn't find anything, but the emergency department said that I was correct to come in and they didn't let me go until I had been scanned. Now we never drive more than ninety minutes at a time and I always get out of the car and go for a little walk when we stop.

At rest stops you see other seniors doing the same thing, walking or even running around the rest stop. They look like the same active gray-hairs that you see wearing sun hats and buying fresh vegetables  and carrying yoga mats. You can think of this refusal to accept the inevitable as undignified, but what the hell. You can sit in your rocking chair and wait to die, or you can take care of yourself and keep on having fun. I recommend something similar to younger people: eat your veggies, learn some driving skills, pay attention to your emotional states, and drive with self-awareness.  At your age, the fun will take care of itself.

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2022: We drove from Vancouver to Ontario and back. That's when I really learned to use cruise control for the first time. Here in the Lower Mainland there is so much traffic that I never touch it. But out on the Trans Canada, especially through Northern Ontario, sometimes there is no traffic to show you how the fast the locals drive. So: engage the cruise control set to 9 kph over the speed limit. Cops typically allow 10 kph. Now you are not going to get stopped and ticketed. 

A lot of the traffic will be going faster than you, so make sure you cooperate with other drivers at passing areas. But don't get caught when the slow lane pinches out. A small percent of Ontario drivers will not let you back into the main fast lane and you have to allow for this nasty surprise.

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Questions or corrections or additions? Let me know.
                                Hugh