[s-cars] Kids and cars....

[Rich Assarabowski]

My feeling about learning how to drive is similar to learning how to fly an
airplane -- you have to put in a lot of supervised hours in the cockpit
under the watchful eye of an instructor before you can go solo.  My father
did that with me and I did the same with my son.  When I turned 15 1/2 I got
a learner's permit which allowed me to drive the car with my parents in the
car.  For a whole year I drove the family car wherever and whenever they
went anywhere (except to work!).  My father taught me all the good habits of
driving (look ahead, look around, check your mirrors, anticipate other cars,
slow down when it's wet, etc. etc.), always correcting me for any small
mistakes I made.   The first time I drove by myself after a year it felt
very odd not to have someone in the passenger seat.

I did the same with my son when he turned 16.  He had a bad habit of not
looking over his shoulder when changing lanes and not always looking in both
directions when going through an intersection.  Over the course of a year it
took a lot of correcting and drilling before he finally picked up all the
right habits.  

When he turned 19 we started autocrossing together, that taught him car
handling and what it feels like to spin and to drive at the limit.  But the
street driving techniques took a year of supervised cockpit training.
Unfortuntely 30 hours of drivers ed or whatever the minimum is these days is
not enough to make you a good driver.  Most of it is classroom instruction,
not enough behind the wheel.  

Most kids getting licenses these days have very poor driving habits because
no one ever corrected their mistakes.  You can learn fast reactions from a
video game but the consequences of a bad move and the physics of car
handling is something most kids are really lacking, too many consider
driving on the road to be just an extension of computer gaming.

-- Rich A.