This story from Wales is quite disturbing. The case is ongoing, so I won’t make any personal judgements just yet.
Robert James Delabertouche is alleged to have told a female pupil that he would “put her over his knee and spank her”. He is also alleged to have regularly put his hand on her knee “to help her with clutch control”, and to have made “overly friendly comments”.
Delabertouche denies 10 charges of sexual assault against five women.
I suppose I’d better be careful when I joke with pupils that if they “do that again” I’ll make them walk home.
Update: Delabertouche was found guilty. He was cleared of two offences, but convicted of eight others. He is to be sentenced in January, and the judge reckons a community order or suspended sentence is likely.
I know the two crimes are considerably different, but even so you can’t help wonder at the paltry sentence handed down to that teenage tosser in the last story when you see one like this.
Colin Smith, 42, was stopped by police when they saw his 38-ton lorry weaving on the M90 in Scotland. He was about a quarter of the way into a 180 mile journey, but when breathalysed was found to be more thanfour times the legal limit. He’d been stopped for an identical offence only a few weeks previously!
He reckoned he was over the limit because of a heavy session the night before. It doesn’t say what time he was picked up, but if that were true then he must have drunk more than 30 pints! That would be enough to kill a normal gorilla.
He was jailed for four months and banned for 66 months (nearly 3 years).
One would hope that the idiot never gets another job driving lorries if he is so irresponsible. It’s hard to imagine what he could have done to innocent drivers in the condition he was in – but to do it twice just takes it to another level.
Callum Lines in that last story should consider himself lucky he lives in a place where you don’t really get punished for breaking the law. And he should never even think of moving to Scotland. They do things properly up there.
This story from Staffordshire (link now dead) tells how Callum Lines, 19, took a car without telling the owner, and “panicked” when police tried to stop him. He got up to speeds of 90mph in Tamworth. When he was finally stopped by several police cars, he refused to get out and police smashed the windows to drag him out.
In the car were two 14-year old girls and a 17-year old girl.
The story (and, no doubt, public sympathy) appears to dwell on the plight of these darling little girls at the sole expense of Lines. I’m going to take the more objective position and point out that they bloody well knew what they were doing when they got in the car with Lines, so they easily share in a significant part of the guilt.
In fact Lines, his passengers, and the girl he stole the car off sound like a class group of individuals all round, and provide all the evidence needed for why insurance is so high for 17-24 year olds in the first place. You see, Lines only had a provisional licence and no insurance. Since he took the car without permission, he effectively stole it. Furthermore, he could have killed someone as a result of his childish behaviour.
You will note from the story that the best defence his lawyer could come up with was that Lines was “a very immature young man”.
You will also note that he was sentenced to six months youth custody, suspended for two years, banned from driving for two years, and ordered to take an extended test when he eventually gets there. Not a lot, really.
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!
Someone recently asked which cars are suitable for use on the driving test – specifically, is there an approved list of acceptable cars? The DVSA website on GOV.UK gives the best answer.
Basically, there isn’t a list of cars you can use, but there are several named ones which you can’t. Those deemed unsuitable are usually classed based on the all-round visibility, so many convertibles are automatically at a disadvantage, as are some vans or van-like cars with side panels instead of windows, and super-minis like the Toyota iQ with strange body styling.
The best option for anyone who is unsure is to contact the DVSA on the number given in that link. This goes for both test candidates and driving instructors looking for a suitable tuition vehicle.
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 originally posted this back in February 2012. Something I saw recently made me think it was worth bumping it right back to the top. I’ve highlighted the relevant parts below.
It was the fact that people are still finding the blog on the search term “bsm on bbc watchdog” (or similar) that made me write this – harping on and on about a TV show that was shown over two years ago. Since then, BSM has gone bust and been bought up by the AA, and any issues that were reported on Watchdog back then are totally irrelevant now (and they were pretty irrelevant then). Oh, and then there’s the old one about “how much the BSM franchise costs” – that’s another one that is ancient history now that the AA is operating it, yet still gets bandied about as current. And then there are the repetitive comments about the HPT (usually by the same people), which was also introduced a long time ago. So…
There are a fair number of ADIs out there who hate the Hazard Perception Test (HPT) to distraction. There seem to be two main reasons. The first is that they simply couldn’t do it themselves when required to do so a few years back (sour grapes) and have developed an irrational hatred of it. The other is that their pupils can’t do it (or at least the ADI thinks their pupils can’t) for some reason. The first reason fuels the second in certain cases.
One of their main arguments was that it isn’t “real world” and is just a “video game”.
It’s funny, therefore, when you hear the same people trying to argue that because the HPT can penalise you for spotting hazards too early (i.e. guessing), it has therefore taught people to wait until the last minute before reacting to situations out there in the real world! This is absolute crap!
The HPT was never intended to replace the real world. It was never intended to directly reduce accidents. It was intended to introduce people to the kinds of things they needed to look out for as they began their driving careers. It was a foundation. Their driving lessons and subsequent driving experiences with their instructors would then fill in the gaps.
Prior to the HPT there was NOTHING. The ONLY introduction to hazard awareness pupils had was when they got behind the wheel. ALL their experience had to come from practice. They still have that as an absolute minimum.
There is absolutely no way that the HPT makes pupils’ awareness of hazards worse, and it is shocking to hear so-called driving instructors feeding their own personal prejudices by suggesting it does. I’ve even seen some try to suggest that accidents have increased because of it!
The latest advice from the DSA is about driving in crappy weather – more of which is forecast for the UK.
Rule 229
Before you set off:
you MUST be able to see, so clear all snow and ice from all your windows.
you MUST ensure that lights are clean and number plates are clearly visible and legible.
make sure the mirrors are clear and the windows are demisted thoroughly.
remove all snow that might fall off into the path of other road users.
check your planned route is clear of delays and that no further snowfalls or severe weather are predicted.
One of my pupils was boasting last week how his mate could drive the van to work safely with only a small patch of the window scraped free of ice. With the aid of a pen, his finger pointing at it, and opening or closing his eyes to track the pen as my moved it, I think I successfully managed to convince him what a twat his mate is.
An email alert from the DSA advises that from 19 January 2013, driving licences in the UK will change to comply with new European Union rules.
To be honest, the changes aren’t that significant, so it isn’t anything to worry about.
Unfortunately, in keeping with the UK’s desire to remain backward for as long as possible, the licence will still consist of a photocard and a paper counterpart. Remember that the counterpart is that bit you put away somewhere safe and then can’t find when you need it, or which gets mangled because your wallet gets wet if you’re daft enough to keep it with you all the time.
The sooner we get biometric licences the better. But, being the UK, this is probably a decade or more away.
This story from California is interesting. It begins:
My neighbor said her 98-year-old father was beside himself recently. He told her he had failed his driver’s test. He’d been a Teamster, for heaven’s sake — he drove for a living without an accident — and now some DMV goon decided his driving was unsafe.
“I hear the same story on a daily basis,” said John Locher. “A senior will say, ‘I’m a safe driver. I drove all over Europe in World War II. I’ve driven all over the country and haven’t had a ticket my entire life.'”
In fact, he was failed for macular degeneration – which means he couldn’t bloody well see properly!
In the UK it is a huge issue because older drivers don’t have to take a re-test. All they do is fill in a form once they’re 70 (and every 3 years thereafter) declaring that they’re still medically fit to drive, and back comes the licence. And they don’t even have to pay for it!
The problem is that many septuagenarians just lie so they can keep driving.
I’ve mentioned before about my dad. He has macular degeneration (right now, he’s almost blind) but about 10 years ago when he was having trouble seeing properly he was planning to hire a car and travel 250 miles to Portsmouth (after I refused to lend him mine). I warned him there and then that if he did I would report him to the police. I confess to being selfish – I didn’t want him to kill himself – but having someone who can’t see out in a car or van is a frightening prospect as far as other road users are concerned.
The UK has no maximum age for driving. It should have, though.
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?
It was the fact that people are still finding the blog on the search term “bsm on bbc watchdog” (or similar) that made me write this – harping on and on about a TV show that was shown over two years ago. Since then, BSM has gone bust and been bought up by the AA, and any issues that were reported on Watchdog back then are totally irrelevant now (and they were pretty irrelevant then). Oh, and then there’s the old one about “how much the BSM franchise costs” – that’s another one that is ancient history now that the AA is operating it, yet still gets bandied about as current. And then there are the repetitive comments about the HPT (usually by the same people), which was also introduced a long time ago. So…
One of their main arguments was that it isn’t “real world” and is just a “video game”.
will change to comply with new European Union rules.