From House To Home

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You’ve surely read scary news stories about teenager-filled SUVs rolling like tumbleweeds and high-horsepower sports cars smacking trees. The reason those stories are scary is because they contain an element of truth. Vehicles with a high center of gravity will turn over easier than those lower to the ground—just as a ladder will topple before a footstool will. As for speed, most drivers—especially inexperienced ones—haven’t the foggiest conception of the carnage they can cause with their right foot and an accelerator pedal. And how quickly and unexpectedly they can do it.

What to do? Buying a surplus, armored personnel carrier or tank might work, but they get poor fuel mileage, and the other students at Homer C. Loomis High School will poke fun at it. What’s more, not one McDonald’s or Burger King drive-thru lanes will accommodate the things. And even these massive vehicles can kill their occupants if driven stupidly or irresponsibly.

But there is a way to enhance your progeny’s chances of survival on roads crammed with vehicles weighing two tons and moving at speed: send them to defensive driving school. Maybe even go with them.

We’re not talking about boring lectures or online workbooks here; we’re talking about driving real cars, usually on race tracks, and about serious professional instruction, sometimes from real racing drivers.

About now, you’re saying to yourself, “That’s all I need to do. Pay money to teach Jason and Jennifer how to drive faster than they probably already do.”  Look at it this way: every statistic in the civilized world says that teenagers can’t drive worth nine cents and that they are already driving too fast.

The teens themselves may disagree, but you can’t argue with statistics that tell us that the 5 percent of drivers who are teens have 13 percent of the accidents.

According to the Allstate Foundation, 5,000 to 6,000 teens have died in motor vehicle accidents, every year, for the past decade. Three-quarters of the deaths were drivers. As if that’s not bad enough, another 300,000 sustained injuries, 190,000 of those classified as disabling.

The foundation postulates that there are two root causes, one social and the other biological. Peer pressure—being urged to show off behind the wheel or urging someone else to do so—combines with the 15-20 age group’s inherent tendency to take more risks than older groups and renders a formula for disaster.

On the biological front, scientific evidence that key portions of the brain’s decision-making circuitry do not fully develop until a person reaches the mid-20s continues to mount. Faced with a life-threatening, driving situation and the need for immediate action, a younger person may make the wrong choice or take too long to make the right choice.

Another telling statistic: the number one type of accident involving teenage drivers involves a single car and loss of control.

Facts such as these tell a clear and alarming story: licensed teens are less qualified to drive a motor vehicle than the rest of us—including seniors. A good driving school can address this shortcoming.

Not everyone agrees. Citing an Insurance Institute of Highway Safety study released in 2005, the Allstate Foundation says that, “Advanced, hands-on courses…teach young drivers valuable crash-avoidance skills, such as skid control and other emergency maneuvers.” But it warns, “Recent studies, however, have shown that such courses can also breed overconfidence and risk-taking behavior—underscoring the importance of addressing teen drivers’ attitudes.”

Well and good. But teen drivers already eat up most of the pie chart when it comes to overconfidence and risk taking. A good defensive-driving instructor does everything in his or her power to hammer into students the lack of “cool” inherent in taking needless chances on the street. Because they deliver this instruction from the platform they do—that of a demonstrably skilled professional—the perceptive teen gets the point.

Three-time World Driving Champion Jackie Stewart once told me, “I wouldn’t drive fifty feet without my seatbelt.” Although I was a believer in seat belts, I didn’t always buckle up. In the two decades since Stewart said that to me, I don’t think I’ve driven ten feet without my seatbelt engaged. A credible instructor can, all things being equal, change behavior when nothing else will.

Most parental instruction, however sincere and correct it may be, rarely involves a simulated emergency. For example, a favorite driving-school exercise involves moving forward at 45 or 50 mph on a three-lane straightaway. Three traffic lights, all indicating green, hang over the lanes. As the driver nears the lights, two of them suddenly turn red. The driver must steer smoothly—and immediately—toward the single green lane. You just don’t have the opportunity to do this on the streets of your town.

As off-putting as it may be to the IIHS, a real hands-on school will let the student learn how a vehicle reacts under stress. Remember the statistic about one-car accidents? If those drivers had even once experienced how a car feels just before it’s about to go out of control, many of them would be alive to tell about it.

“Most of the friends I have who sent their kids to driving schools think it was a sensational idea,” says David E. Davis, Jr., editor-in-chief of Winding Road. “And all of the kids are still with us,” he added.  The defensive driving schools—and they go by other names such as highway-survival schools—come in a variety of forms and at varying cost. Some require you to bring your own car. Most provide school cars. Some are well known, others less so. A Web site called Driving Directory (www.drivingdirectory.com) is a good place to start the selection process. From its home page, click on Performance Driving which will produce a list of schools that primarily train racing drivers. Almost all of them offer defensive driving—accident avoidance and vehicle control—schools. These are what you’re looking for.

How do the schools work? Most operate in a conventional fashion, with classroom instruction preceding on-track practice. The students drive with an instructor part of the time and are observed from trackside on other occasions. There’s almost always a one-on-one feel to the instruction that aids attitude changing.

The schools are friendly places, and the whole experience is ideal for a parent-teen bonding experience—quite without regard for gender combinations. A mother-son duo will have just as much fun and learn just as much as a father-daughter or father-son team.

One of the best-known schools is the Skip Barber Driving School, headquartered in Lakeville, Connecticut. Aimed primarily at would-be racers, the school nonetheless runs an effective driving school that will improve the street driving of all but the stubbornly dim.

The driving school is available in a one- or two-day version ($895 and $1,395), but under the in-for-a-penny-in-for-a-pound rule, we’d suggest the two-day version. It teaches vehicle dynamics and behavior, slides and recovery, threshold (panic) braking, plus lane-toss exercises, and accident avoidance. (There are less expensive schools, but probably none more effective.)

The two-day version expands to include heel-and-toe downshifting, emergency lane changes, plus additional street awareness training, etiquette, and road manners. Among the vehicles Barber uses are a Dodge Viper and a Dakota Magnum pickup, the latter affording valuable experience in driving a tall vehicle. The Viper delivers significant grins.

In addition to its New England base, the Barber organization holds driving schools in Florida (Sebring), Wisconsin (Elkhart Lake), and California (Monterey). The schools run year-round, and each location has multiple dates. Remember to check out the other schools, especially the Bob Bondurant School of High Performance Driving near Phoenix. There’s even a winter driving school—the Bridgestone Winter Driving School in Steamboat Springs, Colorado.
Think of driving school as a great gift item—a one-of-a-kind experience with far-reaching benefits. Both my wife and I have attended one or more of these schools, and each time we came away better drivers.

William Jeanes was editor-in-chief at Car and Driver magazine.