Slightly late in terms of the Christmas period, but the latest advice from the DSA concerns the use of alcohol and drugs when driving:
Rule 95
Do not drink and drive as it will seriously affect your judgement and abilities. You MUST NOT drive with a breath alcohol level higher than 35 microgrammes/100 millilitres of breath or a blood alcohol level of more than 80 milligrammes/100 millilitres of blood.
Alcohol will:
give a false sense of confidence reduce co-ordination and slow down reactions
affect judgement of speed, distance and risk
reduce your driving ability, even if you’re below the legal limit
take time to leave your body; you may be unfit to drive in the evening after drinking at lunchtime, or in the morning after drinking the previous evening
The best solution is not to drink at all when planning to drive because any amount of alcohol affects your ability to drive safely. If you are going to drink, arrange another means of transport.
Judging from the media stories, a lot of people ignored this over Christmas.
Some strange things come in on the newsfeeds. A recent one was from a Yahoo! question someone had asked about a film they saw where the driving examiner put a cup of coffee on the dashboard and told the candidate they would pass if they didn’t spill any during the test.
Apparently, the film (American) was called License to Drive (1988), and you can see the clip on YouTube.
I use the same technique sometimes. Not with an actual drink – I’d just get wet if I did that – but if I have a pupil who tends to drive and brake a bit unevenly (e.g. “like a sack of spanners falling down some stairs” is one description I have used before), I might suggest that they imagine they have a cup of tea sitting on the dashboard and that they should try to avoid sloshing any of it into the saucer as they move off and stop. It’s surprising how often it works.
Mind you, before the benefits have kicked in there are other occasions where if we’d been using a real cup and saucer it would have ended up through the windscreen and 20 feet down the road.
Ronny Edry is an Israeli graphic designer. He shared this poster (left) on Facebook, and the Iranians responded in kind (right).
Maybe there is hope for the world with people like this guy (and those who can accept his sentiments openly). From media coverage, you’d never think that there were peace-loving Israelis and Iranians out there.
You can view his Facebook page here. It has become something of a phenomenon, as this site shows. Edry simply has to be the No. 1 candidate for a Nobel Peace Prize for this simple but effective gesture.
I’m watching Live Football on the BBC website, alternately pulling out my hair and breathing sighs of relief as Arsenal throw away three leads against Newcastle, then steal the lead a fourth time.
So the score is sitting at 4-3, when this Tweet comes in on the BBC scrolling updates:
SpartanDetritus on Twitter: “Newcastle may have conceded eight goals in a few days but we certainly haven’t been embarrassed in two difficult away games against Man Utd and Arsenal.”
About 2 seconds later the score goes to 5-3, and three minutes after that 6-3. Finally, 7-3 in the 90th minute (Theo Walcott hat-trick).
I think SpartanDetritus (aka Jonny) may have spoken a little too soon!
Another unbelievable story tells how police stopped a man driving a black Mercedes on Christmas Day and found that he was three times over the drink drive limit.
He was arrested near Brighton, and officers discovered his baby on the back seat. The story doesn’t make much of the fact that the man’s partner was also in the car, so she must shoulder some of the blame for this. He was also found to be a banned driver, which means he was driving without insurance.
The man spent Christmas Day night and Boxing Day in the cells.
When it goes to court, you can bet that they don’t keep his name secret to “protect the identity” of his kid (see the previous story).
Every year, on Boxing Day, you’d be forgiven for thinking that bad things stop happening everywhere else in the world and that the only item worth reporting on the BBC news is a bunch of toffee-nosed Hoorays dressing up in silly costumes and racing around the countryside.
Actually, until the foxhunting ban was imposed in 2005, it was really quite sick watching these privileged prats set off to chase foxes to exhaustion, then tear them apart with packs of hounds. But it seems that some are still at it!
A few days ago, the RSPCA brought successful charges against the Heythrop Hunt in Oxfordshire, where Richard Sumner and Julian Barnfield were found guilty of hunting foxes with dogs. In other words, they were deliberately breaking the law. The Heythrop Hunt also pleaded guilty to the same charges.
As a further nail in the coffin of the pro-hunt lobby, a story today suggests that the government isn’t going to allow a vote to take place that it is likely to lose, so a repeal of the foxhunting ban isn’t likely to happen in 2013.
Research/opinion polls suggest that only 15% of the population supports the idea of scrapping the ban. It isn’t hard to imagine who the 15% are. A more recent update to the story makes it clear that the government would lose a vote if one were held.
Some of the comments at the bottom of that earlier article make interesting reading.
And since the BBC has nothing else to report on Boxing Day, it makes a big deal out of a French hunt. The title just about says it all – a city man can’t understand our life – but this quote says even more:
Hunt Master Mathieu Berge explains that while he accepts hunting is “cruel”, he believes it is a part of country life that “a city man will never understand”.
Those who are pro-hunting over here should just man up and admit they have the same sentiments. It IS cruel – but they just don’t care. And they think they’re special – but they aren’t.
A newly-qualified ADI recently mentioned that they were looking to go independent straight away, having just passed their Part 3. Their reasoning behind this was that if they didn’t have to pay a franchise, all the money they take from lessons would be theirs.
This is one of the main reasons new ADIs go out of business so quickly. I’ve covered this topic before, but it’s worth running through it again.
A Car
The first big mistake new ADIs make is to assume that you can somehow run a car for absolutely nothing! You can’t. Consider this…
You are a normal member of the public who decides that they want a new car for the family, and you decide that you’re going to pay £10,000 for it. You drive it away from the showroom and park it on your driveway. If you keep it for three years, it is costing you £65 a week just to own it. At the end of three years its value will have approximately halved, and you use it as part-exchange on another new one costing £10,000. The bottom line is that for the first three years the car is costing you £65 a week, and after that the calculations get more complicated but the weekly cost gradually declines. If you always trade in after three years, and pay the same £10,000 for a new model, the absolute minimum the car will end up costing you is £35 a week (this is over-simplified, but you get the idea). And none of this includes insurance, which could easily be another £20 per week! So you cannot keep a car for nothing.
A driving instructor has a few more boxes to tick when choosing a car, so the cost per week is always going to be a bit higher in many respects. To quote Hitachi Capital, who lease cars to driving instructors:
Purchasing an instructor vehicle outright might seem like an attractive option. However, when the real costs of running an instructor car are calculated, for many car leasing is a simpler, more cost effective route.
A driving instructor vehicle can typically do 30,000 miles per year and will often suffer more wear and tear than the average car.
Instructor vehicles tend to go through more tyres, clutches and brakes than normal – and many driving instructors underestimate the cost of repairs.
Repairs can be costly, not only in terms of garage bills, but also in terms of vehicle downtime. A vehicle off the road means cancelled lessons – and no income.
A franchise deal including a car will cost something in the region of £150-£200 per week. It’s basically a lease with extras, like advertising, diary management, all repairs, and pupil supply. It sounds like a hell of a lot of money, but all you have to then do is pay for fuel and give lessons.
Leasing a basic car will cost you at least £60 per week not including insurance, but a decent car is typically around £80-£100. All repairs are included. It will be entirely your responsibility to find work once you have the car. Note that leasing a car is only slightly more costly than buying one outright (in spite of the idiotic comments many ADIs insist on making about anything that has even a whiff of lease of franchise associated with it).
If you buy a car outright, wear-and-tear replacements are down to you, as is tax and insurance. And you won’t have a replacement car ready if yours breaks down.
Some Pupils
The next big mistake made by new ADIs (and some established ones) is to assume that it is easy to get pupils. These instructors go through the qualifying exams assuming that once they have a green badge, learners will be queuing outside their door. The reality is a million miles away from that.
There are a lot of driving instructors out there, and they’re all looking for work – if not for today, definitely for tomorrow. So somehow, the new ADI needs to try and let people know he or she is there, too. And that means advertising. Fairly simple, right? Well, yes… and no.
An example: the smallest advert in Yellow Pages (other than a single line entry) will (or used to) set you back about £600 for a year (that’s another £10 a week). However, all those other instructors out there are also advertising, so you end up being just a small voice amongst many – some of whom are paying for full-page ads. From personal experience, I can absolutely guarantee that £600-worth of Yellow Pages advertising can easily generate absolutely no work whatsoever (and that was when YP was a thick, A4-sized book, and not the A5-ish pamphlet it has become today). And another drawback to advertising in Yellow Pages is that you’ll get dozens of calls from people trying to sell you phones, advertising, and all kinds of other crap – and it persists even years after you aren’t in it anymore!
What about those local free newsletters with “guaranteed circulation of 10,000”? Again, I can state categorically that £300-£400-worth of advertising (up to £7 a week) in one of those for three months may easily generate absolutely no work. It all adds up, so you may well end up spending £20-£30 a week on advertising for no return.
The latest fad is for people who have only just realised that technology exists to glibly inform everyone that “a website is essential”. Well, it can certainly be useful, but when they say “essential” they mean for generating work – and in that sense they are wrong. Why? Well, just as Yellow Pages got flooded with driving instructors, so did the internet, and if you type “driving lessons” into Google for your area, once you’ve sifted through the big names – many of whom are abusing Google’s terms by appearing more than once under dubious search terms – you’ll realise that the likelihood of you appearing anywhere in the first 20 pages anytime soon is a bit of a long shot. Let’s face facts, here. It is impossible for everyone to appear in the Number 1 position on Google, no matter what the guy from Y***** P**** (or the people who got your name from them) promises you (and every other instructor) when he cold calls you repeatedly.
Now, I’m not saying that advertising, being in Yellow Pages, or having your own website doesn’t work. It does – in time, sometimes, with a bit of luck, and if you do it properly. But it is not a tap you can turn on and off just like that, and it’s expensive. And even if it gets you enough work for one moment in time, that work can easily dry up at any other moment.
A Special Offer
For some reason, every ADI who passes Part 3 seems to be under the impression that they will corner the market by advertising. Believe me, you won’t. And when reality dawns – by which time you’ll probably already be struggling to make ends meet – you’re going to want to look for an angle that sets you apart from the crowd.
You’re not going to attract work by charging more than everyone else, so… hey, here’s a great idea! Why not cut your lesson prices to snag customers? Instead of charging £25 an hour, you can do £23 instead. Oh, but wait, there are already loads of others doing that so let’s try a bit lower – £20, say. Even that might not be enough to stand out, and you could end up going as low as £15 in an area others are still successfully charging £25.
Hold on, though. Here’s another great idea. Free lessons. Give away the first lesson free. Damn, people are already doing that, so let’s do a package and sell 10 lessons for something silly, like £99 – or even as low as £56.
Can you see what I’m getting at here? There are over 40,000 ADIs in the country, and the newly-qualified ADI is not special or unique. Far from it, in fact. A huge proportion of ADIs who got on the Register before you are already offering deals and trying to undercut each other. And is it working for them?
The short answer is no, it isn’t. There are instructors giving the job up all the time – not just new ones, but established ones who have been doing the job for years. It can be very area-specific, but even established instructors are finding it hard to get work – and more and more of them are joining franchises in order to survive even after many years of being independent.
So the question you have to ask yourself is: can I make it on my own when I’m just starting out when so many others cannot?
Your Bank Account
Let’s imagine you’ve gone with a franchise, that you’re paying £200 a week for it, and that you’re charging £23 an hour for lessons. Now let’s imagine that you’ve been running for a few months and have between 20 and 30 hours of work. Your total turnover will be up to £690, which leaves you with about £290 after your normal overheads. That works out to a wage of around £15,000 a year.
Now let’s assume you chose one of the other options where you’re totally responsible for generating your own supply of pupils. You’re struggling to get 20 hours of work, and you’ve cut your price to £20, with a special offer of “10 or £99”. In a typical week at the moment, 5 of your 20 hours are therefore at the £9.90 rate. Your turnover is around £350, which leaves you with about £150 after normal running costs. You will also have to factor in anything you have spent on advertising, which will also come out of that £150. This equates to an annual wage of considerably less than £7,800, and you can knock off another £50 for every £1 per week you spend on advertising!.
Even if your scheme manages to bump up your diary to 30 hours your total weekly wage will still be less than it would be if you were franchised – about £200-£250. So for all that work – and 30 hours of lessons isn’t easy when you’re starting out – you’ll still be on less than around £12,000 a year.
Summing Up
Obviously, it is necessary to make a lot of assumptions when explaining this. My assumptions are realistic and based on reality, whereas the newly-qualified ADI unrealistically assumes that they can get as much work as they need as soon as they start trading. Honestly, it doesn’t work like that, and you need as much help as you can get for the first year at least – possibly for longer than that.
Let me make it absolutely clear that IF you can generate enough work, being independent is the cheapest option by a long way. But if you desperately need to make the job pay then it is extremely risky to choose that option right from the start. You really must not rule out a franchise on the naive assumption that the money you save will be all profit, because you simply won’t have the money to save in the first place!
I’ve had a number of hits from people asking about driving lessons over Christmas. Some appear to be from ADIs asking if they should give lessons over Christmas. Others seem to be from learners asking about doing lessons.
Get one thing straight: if you become an ADI intending to make a living out of it, you do not turn work away needlessly, and you don’t just do what everyone else does (or says they do) – you make your own decisions. But where do you draw the line?
Well, you’ll see people boasting how they “don’t work in December” or they’re “off now until February”, and I think this has spawned some of the hits. Many of these people who pull down the shutters for so long do the job for fun, not to make a living. Indeed, you rarely see them driving around and you never see them at the test centre. They’re part-timers who are living off other financial resources, and while there’s nothing specifically wrong with that, no normal or serious ADI could possibly afford to shut up shop for a month. Even with the oft-cited cancellations you get at this time of year any income is better than no income at all. No decent businessman whose living depends on it will turn away lessons like that.
On the other hand, everyone both needs and is entitled to time off. Quite how much time, and when to take it, is an individual choice.
Personally, I only ever draw a line through Christmas Day and Boxing Day – and even then I can envisage scenarios where I’d give lessons if there was a good reason to – and if I was being paid double time! It’s never happened, but I wouldn’t rule it out on my conditions.
Let me stress that you don’t get queues of people wanting lessons on Christmas Day!
If you’re a learner, chances are you’ve been given lessons as a present and you’re eager to get started. Good for you! Check out whether or not you can get lessons over the Christmas period – many decent ADIs will be working a few days between Christmas and New Year. Those that aren’t might also have funny ideas about not working weekends and evenings the rest of the year, and that might not suit you, so do your homework before committing.
I noticed someone on a forum comment that 20% of newly qualified drivers under 25 have an accident in the first six months of driving – therefore the remaining 80% are totally safe and responsible.
This shows a complete lack of understanding of the problem due to gross oversimplification of the statistics.
The fact that 20% of them have accidents is just the tip of the iceberg – the part that you can see. Under the waterline is the larger number who get away without having accidents, and yet who still behave recklessly or in an unsafe or inexperienced manner.
The only reason many of these people don’t have accidents is because of the evasive action taken by more experienced drivers. I frequently have to slow down to let some juvenile tosser in a Corsa with blacked-out windows and loud exhaust pipe cut in after they’ve overtaken at traffic lights when they shouldn’t have, or decided to turn left and need to cut across several lanes because they’ve approached a junction at speed in the right hand one. The reason they didn’t have an accident is because of me, not them. And I am far from unique in these experiences.
Every prat who turns a corner on a sixpence, believing themselves to be clever, is an accident waiting to happen, with their tiny, racing-car steering wheel, dropped suspension, and blue LEDs. Their underlying attitude and experience is the problem – not the basic percentage who actually get caught out and have accidents. In fact, even “nice kids” are capable of succumbing to this attitude thing because it isn’t something they set out to do on purpose – it goes with being young and immature. And new drivers are automatically inexperienced, by definition – no matter how “good” or “nice” they are. You don’t give a loaded gun to someone who is diagnosed as a psychopath, so why give the inexperienced and immature driver free access to a fast car? Restrictions are urgently needed.
And that’s why any legislation MUST apply to the entire group. Individuals who get caught driving dangerously should have a whole heap of further legislation bear down on them. And all legislation must ignore any namby-pamby rhetoric about rights of the majority and deal with these fundamental issues of attitude and inexperience.
It’s frightening that ADIs build up such a supposed relationship with their pupils that they feel they have to defend them as being blameless, or that legislation would victimise them unfairly. Every single young, new driver is capable of having a serious accident as a direct result of being young and inexperienced! The statistics prove it – if you understand them.
As I say, the recorded number accidents is just the very tip of the iceberg.
On my way to Radcliffe On Trent this morning I got to end of Lings Bar (A52) and traffic was at a standstill heading into Nottingham. I picked up my pupil and we drove off towards Bingham, and got into Nottingham via the A46 and A6097 (it only took about 20 minutes going that way). The Nottingham-bound traffic was solid right back to the Bingham roundabout, suggesting that it extended even further back than that – so a jam of at least 6 miles in length.
I turned on the radio and enabled traffic announcements and very quickly discovered the problem. Roadworks. Again.
Yes, at Gamston – where there are three lanes – it was down to a single lane because of yet more idiotic roadworks. And this was during the rush hour, of course – there’d be no point doing it any other time because it wouldn’t cause enough of a problem, would it?
I’ve written several times about how the idiotic Nottingham City Council has authorised long-term road and lane closures for the waste of money that is Phase II of the tram system at exactly the same time as allowing National Grid (gas) and whoever Morgan Sindall (electric) are working for to tear up dozens of roads all at the same time. There are temporary lights in literally dozens of places, the majority of which are 3- or 4-way in order to cause the utmost inconvenience to the motorist. To make matters worse, the idle layabouts responsible are missing completion dates repeatedly, and the already pointlessly long predicted durations are over-running by weeks at a time. National Grid in particular appear to have made a huge mistake commencing work in so many places at once, and evidence suggests they are unable to actually complete many of the individual jobs they have begun.
As I’ve also said before, work like this used to be completed in a fraction of the time it does now. They actually plan to close roads for long periods, only engage in actual physical activity for perhaps 10% of the available time, and still miss the completion dates they originally plastered all over the place on their signs.
The particular case referred to in this article was again down to National Grid. I have no idea if it was a repair they were carrying out, or yet more of their highly inefficient gas-main replacement jobs, but to say it caused chaos during today’s rush hour is an understatement
during the test.
bunch of toffee-nosed Hoorays dressing up in silly costumes and racing around the countryside.
showroom and park it on your driveway. If you keep it for three years, it is costing you £65 a week just to own it. At the end of three years its value will have approximately halved, and you use it as part-exchange on another new one costing £10,000. The bottom line is that for the first three years the car is costing you £65 a week, and after that the calculations get more complicated but the weekly cost gradually declines. If you always trade in after three years, and pay the same £10,000 for a new model, the absolute minimum the car will end up costing you is £35 a week (this is over-simplified, but you get the idea). And none of this includes insurance, which could easily be another £20 per week! So you cannot keep a car for nothing.
it is easy to get pupils. These instructors go through the qualifying exams assuming that once they have a green badge, learners will be queuing outside their door. The reality is a million miles away from that.
inform everyone that “a website is essential”. Well, it can certainly be useful, but when they say “essential” they mean for generating work – and in that sense they are wrong. Why? Well, just as Yellow Pages got flooded with driving instructors, so did the internet, and if you type “driving lessons” into Google for your area, once you’ve sifted through the big names – many of whom are abusing Google’s terms by appearing more than once under dubious search terms – you’ll realise that the likelihood of you appearing anywhere in the first 20 pages anytime soon is a bit of a long shot. Let’s face facts, here. It is impossible for everyone to appear in the Number 1 position on Google, no matter what the guy from Y***** P**** (or the people who got your name from them) promises you (and every other instructor) when he cold calls you repeatedly.
by which time you’ll probably already be struggling to make ends meet – you’re going to want to look for an angle that sets you apart from the crowd.
few months and have between 20 and 30 hours of work. Your total turnover will be up to £690, which leaves you with about £290 after your normal overheads. That works out to a wage of around £15,000 a year.
Get one thing straight: if you become an ADI intending to make a living out of it, you do not turn work away needlessly, and you don’t just do what everyone else does (or says they do) – you make your own decisions. But where do you draw the line?
n accident in the first six months of driving – therefore the remaining 80% are totally safe and responsible.
ards Bingham, and got into Nottingham via the A46 and A6097 (it only took about 20 minutes going that way). The Nottingham-bound traffic was solid right back to the Bingham roundabout, suggesting that it extended even further back than that – so a jam of at least 6 miles in length.