The post about my most recent test pass got me thinking. You see, when you do this job you meet all kinds of people – and lots of them – so you build up a sort of statistical image of people in general. There is one small group that causes the most grief for me as an instructor, and it’s the one which has its emotions very near the surface and ready to bubble over at the slightest prompt.
This over-emotional group – however small it may be overall – does seem to consist mainly of… women. There, I’ve said it. And it’s simply a statement of fact.
Having said that, I do care what pupils think, and on the relatively rare occasions when one of them breaks down in tears I’m always worried that it might be due to something I’ve said or done. Of course, technically it always IS something I’ve said or done, because if they weren’t in the car with me in the first place then they probably wouldn’t be crying. But I’m a scientist, and I’m logical enough to be able to work out whether something really is my fault or not, so I don’t worry for too long over it.
In one extreme case some years ago I had a German pupil. Right from the start she came over as loud, confident, and full of herself. She didn’t like having any sort of fault pointed out at the best of times (when you get someone like that, you wonder why they’re paying for bloody lessons in the first place), but sometimes she’d get in the car and her eyes would already be red from crying. On those lessons she was a liability. She’d be flinging the car round corners without any thought for what might be coming the other way, and clutch control was out of the window. At these times you just couldn’t talk to her without her either getting angry or bursting into tears (sometimes both). I worked out that this happened every month – like clockwork.
Now, the $64,000 question is: what does an insignificant male do in these situations? It’s a complete no-win scenario when someone is so emotionally unstable, because if you bottle it and don’t pick up their faults they’ll accuse you of ripping them off, and if you do pick up their faults they’re in tears. If they leave you, you can bet your bottom dollar that their next instructor will be told that you were “always shouting at them”. A mere male doesn’t have the option to put his arms around someone (not without ending up on the front page of The Sun, anyway), and this is even less of an option when you’re dealing with someone who was probably a founder member of the militant wing of the Teutonic Women’s Liberation Front. You can’t “identify” the cause, even though both of you know damned well what the cause is (that would get you on the TV as well as in the papers).
Men – especially driving instructors – are programmed to give advice whether people want it or not, whereas women are programmed to reject all advice by default, especially if it’s from a man. Women also have the additional option of tearing the man’s liver out if they’re in a bad mood over something when he offers his advice. I gather it’s got something to do with wanting “empathy”, but it’s bloody hard to sit there nodding empathetically when your life is flashing before your eyes as some maniac with messed up biochemistry is taking every corner on two wheels.
The famous statement that you can’t please all of the people all of the time was never more apt, and I’d go so far as to add that you can’t please some of the people any of the time.
The German woman was an extreme case, but pupils crying when they have made even the smallest mistake isn’t that uncommon. One recent pass of mine had a habit of doing it, even up to the last lesson before her test. With her, it was a fine balance between anger and tearfulness (it usually started with the tears, followed by the anger), but the problem was still as difficult to manage for me. I mean, what can you say or do? It was only on the way back from her test that she confessed that she cries whenever something goes wrong for her. Feeling on safer ground this time (she was, after all, holding her Pass Certificate and wearing a big shiny smile) I commented that whenever it happened I always got the impression that she was blaming me for something. I was slightly put out that she didn’t deny this as emphatically as I would have liked, but this defensiveness is another aspect of the problem.
Another example from several years ago involved a young girl. She was a great driver, but she was also a serial test failer (six times, and always for something different – in fact, she was the one whose mother said to her just before a test “now remember what we told you, Sarah: drive SLOWLY everywhere”, and within 2 minutes of us moving off she applied this when joining a busy dual carriageway). After each of her test fails the volume of tears she cried as she rested her head against the window all the way home must have rusted the door panels on my car.
A current pupil has her test coming up, and I have no real worries because she is also a good driver. However, a few days ago she made a couple of small mistakes during a manoeuvre and suddenly was in tears. As usual I felt terrible, but to be fair to her she was strangely upbeat about it (this is another thing the male of the species can’t understand: how the waterworks seem to be able to be turned on and off at will). We discussed it on the next lesson and she told me that a few days later her husband told her that the firemen dealing with the Australian bushfires had been feeding water to Koalas, which made her break down again! What the hell can you (as a man) do in situations like this?
I think that in many cases it has a lot to do with upbringing. Somehow, I can’t imagine that the typical Iron Age woman burst into tears over insignificant details – if she had, we’d all be extinct by now. The problem with many youngsters is that they’ve been mollycoddled for 17 years and they simply don’t know how to handle any sort of failure, however small it may be. With many of them, crying is a form of emotional blackmail that they’ve grown up using because – certainly with mummy and daddy – it has always paid dividends. In the adult world, though, it often doesn’t get them what they want.
That previous (well, previous to the previous) story about tests only being carried out in English from next year is hot news at the moment. A follow up story from the Beeb tells how Allyson Ng cheated on tests she was acting as interpreter for by giving the answers to pupils. The licences of 94 people were revoked as a result. Her operation was mainly based in Cardiff, with a small number in Birmingham.
Ng was charging people £110 a time for her “services”. DSA staff became suspicious when there was a sudden upturn in those using her.
She was jailed for 12 months for fraud.
However, this story illustrates one big reason why it is important that foreign language tests are eliminated as soon as possible.
Much of it is a rehash of what has been said before. However, it is worth taking a look at the TRL paper it’s based on, because that is quite new and it outlines all the proposals to be considered. I just wish they’d talk in English instead of convoluted gov-speak. Attempting to sift out the important bits, we have:
graduated driving licence
minimum learning period
mandatory daytime and night time lessons
mandatory training log book
12-month probationary licence on passing the test at age 18+
mandatory P plates during probationary period
night time 10pm-5pm curfew unless accompanied by someone 30+ years old
ban on carrying passengers under age 30
lower alcohol limit
ban on use of mobile phones (including hands-free)
Let’s hope they get off their arses and do something before we all die of old age!
I have edited this article significantly to make it clearer. The first card reader I purchased was an iZettle, and I was happy with it for a while. I had looked at the PayPal option when it first launched and PayPal’s support staff gave me conflicting information about money be tied up ‘in reserve’, which was totally unacceptable and I went with iZettle. iZettle performed flawlessly right up until the time they botched an app update and blamed it on my HTC phone suddenly being ‘unsupported’, and basically just told me ‘tough’. They almost killed my business overnight, so when they came back and apologised after acknowledging the fact that they had screwed up, it was too late. I had opted for the PayPal system after discovering that what they had told me over a year earlier was incorrect. I now use the PayPal system and it is perfect.
Something I’ve always wanted to be able to do is take credit and debit card payments for lessons in-car. However, the traditional way of doing this has been to open a merchant account and then purchase (or rent) a suitable credit card terminal, which is costly – particularly if your turnover is small. The terminal rental alone would have cost upwards of £10 a month (they’re about £200 to buy), and then there would be transaction fees on top of that, plus any set up fees for the merchant account itself. Plus, they were about the size of a toaster.
Yes, I could have done it. But driving instructors do not operate with high margins, and the cost would have been unacceptably high to me as a sole trader.
But all that is changing. There are a number of new solutions which combine a simple card reader with a smartphone. I’ve looked at several and have finally plumped for PayPal Here’s system.
A definite contender was iZettle’s option. The attraction here was the fact that their transaction fees operate on a sliding scale. However, what tipped the balance against this for me was the fact that payments only appear in your bank account 3-4 working days later, and I was also a little unclear on what would happen if someone’s card effectively “bounced”, since iZettle’s website at the time said that clearance didn’t happen immediately. (NOTE: THERE IS A DELAY WITH ALL SYSTEMS – NO METHOD PAYS MONEY INTO YOUR ACCOUNT IMMEDIATELY – actually, this is not true: PayPal’s system pays you pretty much straight away.).
As an example, the Friday before Late Summer Bank Holiday I received a cheque in the post. I paid it into my bank account the next day (Saturday) using the automatic paying-in machine at my branch. It didn’t actually clear until very late the following Friday – shortly before midnight, as far as I could tell. I had phoned my bank that Friday to find out what was happening, and the story was that the cheque wouldn’t have been processed until Tuesday, thereafter it would clear 3-4 working days later. I definitely do not want any credit or debit card payments taking that long to be cleared – I’d be getting paid up to a week later!
PayPal’s system clears payment immediately and pays it straight into your PayPal account.
Since it was announced in the spring, I’ve been canvassing my pupils on the subject – and all except for two have said that being able to pay by card in the car would be a huge advantage to them (i.e. it would mean not having to go to the cash point the night before). It would also be a huge advantage to me, since:
I wouldn’t have to go to the bank to put money (or cheques) in
I wouldn’t have to pay parking fees while visiting the bank
I wouldn’t have the hassle of driving pupils to cash machines if they forgot
The one minor drawback is the transaction fee – 2.75% per transaction – but this is offset by not having to deal with those problems listed above. However, 2.75% appears to be the standard fee – iZettle’s sliding charge down from 2.75% only kicks in if you take more than £2,000 per month, and it only hits 2.00% if you take around £4,500. Although on paper I would easily hit that, I haven’t started taking card payments and cannot be sure how many pupils will use it after all. So once more it comes down to payments being cleared and going into my account immediately.
The PayPal terminal costs £99 outright. You order it by downloading the PayPal Here App on your smartphone, then requesting the reader via your PayPal account within the app. With the app, you can either take straight payments of any amount, or set up a stock list of products (i.e. lesson durations) with fixed prices. The terminal connects to your smartphone via Bluetooth, so there are no wires or connectors to mess with.
Mine’s on order, so I’ll see how it goes. (NOTE: PAYPAL TURNED OUT TO BE INCOMPETENT IN THE EXTREME AT ANSWERING QUESTIONS ABOUT THEIR DEVICE. THEY VARIED BETWEEN BEING CONTRADICTORY AND BEING TOTALY INCORRECT. THEIR DEVICE APPEARED USELESS FOR THE JOB I DO. EVEN NOW, EVEN WITH HINDSIGHT AND A THAWING IN THE STUPIDITY OF PAYPAL REPRESENTATIVES, IZETTLE WAS THE BEST CHOICE TO MAKE, AND THE ONE I SHOULD HAVE MADE.
Update 6/9/2013: Hold the press on this! DO NOT GET THE PAYPAL CARD READER UNTIL I GET A REPLY FROM PAYPAL OVER THE FOLLOWING ISSUE.
The website clearly stated that money is paid into your account immediately. That was why I signed up. However, there is now the confusing matter of “reserves”. It seems that if you take more than £200 in any seven day period, every penny of the additional money goes into “reserve” which you cannot touch for 30 days, after which it is released to you.
This is ridiculous. If it is true, then the card reader will be going back without me even opening it, and I will opt for iZettle instead. There is no way I am going to wait 30 days for what could amount to anything up to £800. I have business running costs which are payable daily.
This was NOT made clear on the website before I signed up, and only now is the information showing in my PayPal account information pages. It is such a hugely significant detail that it should have been mentioned right at the top of the bloody page!
PayPal Here would be totally useless for driving instructors if I am reading things right. The service would be pointless for anyone taking less than £200 a week, and yet only those taking thousands would be able to withstand having their money held in reserve for a whole month.
Update 7/9/2013: Panic over! The reserve only applies to payments taken over the phone – where details are keyed in – and is a security feature that type of transaction requires. I am assured that chip & pin payments in the car have absolutely no reserve.
The guy I spoke with in Support said that he had had 20 others call before me with the exact same concerns. I pointed out that the online documentation is appallingly bad and needs to be made clearer. Even my online ticket attracted this response:
Thank you for contacting PayPal regarding reserves when using PayPal Here.
I have reviewed your account and it shows we will hold 100% of payments processed using PayPal here for 30days. This means that on the 31st day your payments will be released from the initial day of using PayPal Here. This is a rolling reserve so once the initial 30days have passed money will be released to you daily from your reserves.
You have 200GBP per week that will not be held in reserve anything over 200GBP taken in a week using the PayPal card reader will be held for 30days. So if you took 700GBP in a week you would have immediate access to 200GBP then 30days later the other 500GBP would be released to you.
The reserves only apply to payments taken using the PayPal Here device.
This is exactly the opposite of what the guy on the phone told me. The last sentence in particular is highly misleading.
Update 7/9/2013: Hold the press again! DO NOT GET ONE OF THESE CARDREADERS UNTIL I HAVE CLEARED THINGS UP WITH PAYPAL… AGAIN!
The online support is adamant that all monies above £200 are on a rolling reserve for 30 days. They have asked me to call them.
Update 8/9/2013: Everything is OK again. In spite of the totally incorrect information provided by PayPal’s email support – twice – telephone support has confirmed again that chip & pin card payments are not subject to the rolling reserve. Only payments where the card number is keyed in fall into that category, and in theory 100% of cards in the UK are chip & pin. So it shouldn’t be an issue at all.
Update 8/9/2013: Hold it again! DO NOT GET A PAYPAL READER UNDER ANY CIRCUMSTANCES.
I wrote to PayPal asking for confirmation of what phone support had said in writing, and they have again said that every penny taken above £200 will be held in reserve, no matter how it is taken.
At this moment in time I have demanded return and refund.
Update 8/9/2013: Final confirmation – DO NOT UNDER ANY CIRCUMSTANCES SIGN UP TO PAYPAL HERE UNLESS YOU ARE HAPPY FOR YOUR MONEY TO BE HELD “IN RESERVE” FOR 30 DAYS BEFORE YOU CAN ACCESS IT.
I have arranged to send my card reader back before it’s even arrived.
In spite of the absolutely appalling confusion and lack of consistent explanations by PayPal, it is now clear that every penny taken by card payment – from whatever source – is subject to this idiotic policy.
Take my own situation. Let’s imagine that I do a 40 hour week, and let’s imagine that everyone pays by debit card. My turnover will be £920, but I will only be able to access £200 of that – the rest will be held by PayPal for 30 days until it is released to me (and released “daily”, whatever that means). My business expenses for that week could easily exceed £200, so I will be in big trouble.
But if I do a similar busy week the next week, the same thing happens. And the week after that. And the week after that. And most of the week after that. So I could do 5 weeks of 40 hour weeks, with all that that entails as far as expenses go, yet only have access to £1,000 out of a total turnover of £5,000.
The PayPal Here service is not fit for purpose. I cannot imagine what sort of lunatic would be happy with such a system controlling their business. And who, I wonder, gets the interest on all the money held in reserve?
I have now ordered my iZettle reader. A 3-4 day clearance time is peanuts by comparison – and the need for me to take card payments is too great.
PayPal has shot itself in the foot big time on this one.
Update 9/9/2013: And one final word. PayPal has written to me twice more – once to contradict itself, and again to apologise for MY misunderstanding. In doing so, I think it is worth comparing the second to last email I received.
Regarding your queries, I can assure you that the majority of payments you take through PayPal Here, will be available immediately for yourself. The only payments that will be held are payments where you manually enter your buyers card details.
With the one before that:
I have reviewed your account and it shows we will hold 100% of payments processed using PayPal here for 30days. This means that on the 31st day your payments will be released from the initial day of using PayPal Here. This is a rolling reserve so once the initial 30days have passed money will be released to you daily from your reserves.
You have 200GBP per week that will not be held in reserve anything over 200GBP taken in a week using the PayPal card reader will be held for 30days. So if you tool 700GBP in a week you would have immediate access to 200GBP then 30days later the other 500GBP would be released to you.
I apologise if you were given incorrect information previously as we have only just had this confirmed by the PayPal Here development team.
And then the last one:
These reserves were in place dependant on the characteristics of your Business account. Reserves are common industry practice used to help ensure that you are able to meet the liabilities you may incur from a chargeback, claim or bank reversal, when no other funds are available.
Ordinarily, if you have a reserve on your account and receive a chargeback or dispute, we will deduct that amount from your available balance and not from your reserve balance. However, if a seller goes out of business or stops processing payments through PayPal, we will deduct any payment reversals that subsequently come in from the reserve.
I appreciate your understanding in regards to this, and I am glad that we have had this opportunity to assist you further.
I wrote back explaining it wasn’t the bloody reserve per se – but the fact that almost every penny I was likely to earn was going to go in it according to half of PayPal’s staff. However, according to the other half chip & pin was exempt. I returned the device on the strength of the final phone conversation last night which confirmed every penny went into reserve – no matter how it was taken. That was absolutely what I was told, and I even tried to argue the point.
And then I got that email above (the first quote) this morning! Well, it’s too bloody late, now. They clearly don’t know what they’re doing.
SEE THIS ARTICLE ON THE IZETTLE READER. I USE THIS DEVICE AND IT IS PERFECT FOR WHAT I DO. IT WAS PERFECT FROM THE FIRST TIME I USED IT – UNLIKE THE PAYPAL SYSTEM, WHICH NO ONE AT PAYPAL UNDERSTOOD.
I know this is terribly politically incorrect of me, but I just saw this story on the newsfeeds, and the one question that keeps dancing in front of me is: WHY?
A special off-road driving day was set up to allow “young drivers with sight problems” to have a go at driving a car. The story makes it clear that those involved are unable to apply for licences – or have had licences revoked when they started to experience issues with their sight. One driver is quoted:
I am on cloud nine.
It is now my dream to be a driver one day.
How? It can’t possibly ever be possible in a manually operated vehicle (and by “manual” I mean one that is actually controlled by the driver). If you can’t see, then there’s no way to circumvent that problem in any vehicle which depends on the driver being able to observe what is around them. Fair enough, if you put on your H G Wells hat and start imagining what might be possible then there is some hope. But realistically the best that can be expected is that self-driving cars become common – but that would be no different to riding in a taxi or bus, and would not constitute real “driving”.
There’s nothing wrong with running these sessions, of course. But someone somewhere needs to be a little more honest and realistic about the expectations they are creating in the minds of young people with eyesight problems. Being young and visually-impaired doesn’t mean you are any less susceptible to the issues that afflict other young people. In that case, let’s hope that these falsely-inspired youngsters don’t get it into their heads that they can joyride like some of their peers are wont to do.
The story reports that a company has launched a “free driving school”. It goes without saying that if there really were schools offering genuinely free driving courses and running successful businesses out of it then the rest of us would go bankrupt overnight. But I’m not going to lose any sleep over it, and nor should you.
Teaching people to drive for free is not a business model. In reality, someone somewhere has got to bankroll the free lessons. This applies to any “free” service or product. Bearing that in mind, the fog clears a little when you discover that the company who’s doing this, Stoneacre Motor Group, is a new & used car dealership.
The story says that Stoneacre had a problem with its apprentices not being able to drive. Since apprentices tend to be very young, very skint, and highly unlikely to have started driving lessons by themselves, and since Stoneacre needed them to be able to transport vehicles between branches, they decide to get around this by introducing their own in-house driver training. Up to this point, it’s a great idea.
However, due to the “success” of the scheme, it then came up with the idea of extending it “to the public”.
In actual fact, this statement is somewhat misleading, because when they say “the public” they mean “anyone who buys a car from us”. The story (and Stoneacre’s website) makes that quite clear. The website also says that there’s “no catch” – well, since they are up front about you having to buy a car from them first, that statement does appear to be otherwise true. They claim on their website that the number of lessons provided is “unlimited”:
The scheme allows you to take as many free lessons as you need in preperation (sic) for your driving test and could potentially save you £100’s of pounds in fees.
This rather strange wording, and quite reserved. If lessons were really “unlimited”, you’d expect it to definitely save many hundreds – and possibly thousands – of pounds so you’d be shouting that from the rooftops. The website also says:
In order to take advantage of the Stoneacre driving school you either have to buy a car from the group or recommend a family member or friend who goes on to buy a car.
Again, this is odd wording. It seems to preclude anyone from buying a car and then just giving the free lessons to someone else (like a son or daughter). The person who gets the free lessons appears to be required to organise the entire transaction in advance, and I can’t see too many parents listening to their 17-year old for advice on where to buy the next family car, or choosing one dealer over another purely on the basis that they give free driving lessons from them. But I guess that Stoneacre is relying on the likelihood that the offer will attract enough attention to sell a few extra cars.
Anybody who has ever looked into buying a new car will have encountered the enormous and confusing range both of models and prices quoted for the same model across different dealerships. In just one example resulting from a quick Google search, prices for the Corsa Ecoflex S model range between £7,990 and the list price of £11,570 (a whopping 30% range). Even the dealer with the lowest price will still be making a huge profit (when was the last time you saw a car dealer driving around in a banged up Micra?). So with a 30% price range to play with, who would ever know if you slapped a monkey on the price to cover a course of “free” driving lessons? Alternatively, of course, you could simply take the hit of the “unlimited” number of free lessons right in your profits, but let’s be realistic about this…
Used car prices present an even more fertile area for creative pricing. At least with a new car you do have the list price as distant baseline to refer to. With used cars there is nothing. Even where attempts are made to provide guide prices the interpretation over what constitutes “good”, “poor”, or indifferent in terms of the condition of the vehicle is will be subjective. And a bit of chromed plastic stuck on the back, turning a basic model into a “ghia” or something with an “i” in it, can add hundreds. Hiding £500 within used car prices would be easier still.
And then there’s the “package” you get. In the 80s I bought a used Ford Cortina Mk IV from a dealer. It looked immaculate on the forecourt, and came with “free servicing and repairs* for 12 months”. The most important part of that phrase turned out to be the “*”, which roughly translates as “unless you need anything doing to it, and excluding certain things such as labour, brakes, and clutch, and all the other stuff you’ll most likely need”. It meant that I was liable for significant labour costs at the service if it needed anything doing to it (a huge part of any repair bill) and the whole of the brakes bill (things that wore out naturally were excluded from the “free” service). And although that car looked immaculate on the forecourt, after a few weeks it became clear that it had had a substantial paint job carried out on it to conceal corrosion. By the time I got rid of it some years later it was a rust bucket, and I spent a lot of time and money patching it up while I owned it.
That “free package” was part of the dealer’s justification for the price I paid, and that was probably around £500-£1,000 more than I’d have paid for the same car from a private seller. But since I had to buy it on finance, buying privately wasn’t an option – something that applies to many car buyers today. The dealers know this, which is why they offer attractive “packages” in the first place. Things are no different now – dealers do not give things away. They just word their offers to make it look like they do.
Another version of the story quotes the company MD:
As far as we’re aware the scheme is a first for the motor industry and our initial trial has been a huge success with the demand for free driving lessons heavily outweighing capacity and far exceeding our initial expectations.
This is misleading unless you take it in context with what they have to offer at the moment. At the time of writing they only have two instructors – one covering Doncaster, the other Peterborough – and it doesn’t take much to “outweigh capacity” in one instructor’s diary, particularly if he or she is salaried (Stoneacre implies that theirs are) and not working weekends or late evenings.
I don’t begrudge Stoneacre trying to sell more cars using this scheme – good luck to them – but I think they will run into serious problems somewhere along the line. The first issue to catch up with them is likely to be that word “unlimited”. As long as their pupils are passing their tests after 30 hours or less then the necessary costs will be easily soaked up and everyone will be happy – but pick up a few people who have difficulties and start running into 40, 50, or more hours, and bells will start ringing in the finance department. Moreover, if one of those learners appears who you know absolutely should not be driving, and who is going to end up taking lots of lessons and lots of tests, is Stoneacre going to stick with them? And if it does, should it? Also, has Stoneacre considered that as time goes by you tend to collect a sizeable group of slower learners, and there will be periods when most of your capacity is taken by these?
Another issue is the value of the lessons relative to the purchase made. I had a pupil pass his test recently who is planning to get a car in the next few weeks. When I asked him how much he was planning to spend he replied “under £1,000”, and he is far from being untypical of decent 17-year old drivers. The lower the value of the car, the harder it is to conceal “free lessons” in its price – try it, and the price immediately goes outside of the range the buyer is interested in. OK, you might entice a few to spend a little more than they intended – and maybe that’s what is being counted on here – but it will simply result in hugely overpriced cars which, in time, will pull overall sales down.
Remember that there is no such thing as a “free lesson”. If the pupil doesn’t pay for it, the instructor has to. And driving around using up fuel just increases the amount of money the instructor loses – which is why the “free” lessons from certain pseudo-national driving schools always involve an hour sitting in a car park talking. The margins on driving lessons are already small, leaving no wiggle room for creative pricing. Stoneacre has effectively forced itself to either cut profits or increase prices – and that second option is likely to lead to reduced sales, which then cuts profits anyway.
If I didn’t know better, I’d say Stoneacre’s finances were being run by one of those cheapo driving instructors who are trying to commit business suicide with a business model like this.
It seems that the offer of free lessons isn’t as all-encompassing as was originally implied. This article says that the only people eligible are those buying a 63-plate car (i.e. a brand new one). So unless the lessons are freely transferrable, the people who would most benefit probably won’t.
“It’s good to see that young drivers are confident in their driving ability and believe that, because they’re going through or have recently been through the driving tuition and test procedure, they’re better placed to drive safely and competently.”
So this new story makes interesting reading – not least because it has appeared on every PR site imaginable, suggesting that the most important detail to someone somewhere concerns the use of “RED” in the title. Again, something as simple as playing around with a spread sheet and a data set that is in the public domain is touted as “research”.
The reports are misleading because although they refer to the 17-24 year age group, it isn’t clear if the data given refer to this group alone, or if they are for all motorists. Similarly, look at the table below – it apparently shows “accident hotspots”:
I would just love someone to explain to me the Westminster entry. Apart from the question about why it is there at all, how the hell does it manage to get above Manchester except based on the lesser category of “number of road accidents”? Sure, this category is significant – but not in the context of the RED press release. For a location to have such a high number of accidents, but to buck the trend and have such small numbers of serious/fatal incidents, is completely overlooked in the “research”. One way or another the Westminster data are both highly significant and highly suspect, which automatically casts doubt on all the other data..
But RED’s CEO chimes in with:
Many young people are seriously hurt or killed on our roads every year and it is self evident that reducing this carnage needs to be a key objective for both Government and the driver training industry.
Research has shown that the majority of casualties in the UK are on urban roads. In 2010, a total of 98,550 casualties occurred on urban roads, with 6,500 on motorways.
Apart from stating the bleeding obvious, at no point does he explain HOW the driver training industry – or the Government, for that matter – is actually going to deal with it. The press release itself deals primarily with nonsense issues about how Manchester has made “the biggest improvement” without identifying precisely how; and how Birmingham is the “most dangerous urban area foo young drivers” without stating why. Surely, if Manchester had managed to identify, isolate, and bottle Miracle Ingredient Z-247 (read Catch-22 if you don’t know what that is) then everyone would be buying it by the truckload. Councillor Nigel Murphy (from Manchester) tries to explain:
Over the last few years we have set up dozens of 20mph zones across Manchester and we have now revealed plans to make the city’s roads even safer. This includes the introduction of Dutch-style cycle paths and bus priority lanes on major routes into the city centre.
This is complete, misinformed, political rubbish. Not one word of that in any way explains why Manchester has fallen from 1st to 10th in the rankings – it is just designed to milk to fact without understanding it. On that idiotic comment about cycle paths, any possible benefit will be completely smothered by the huge increase in the numbers of cyclists since last year – you simply cannot evaluate a change in one variable when lots of others are changing at the same time. Manchester’s “victory” results from comparing 2005 with 2011. A lot happened 9 years ago – and in the intervening 6 years – most of which had nothing to do with the current nonsense Nigel Murphy is rattling on about. And the effects of the Olympics and Tour de France (both in 2012 and 2013) have yet to be seen. This story certainly casts a lot of doubt on Manchester’s ability to stay at the bottom of the rankings once new data become available (43 accidents on just two roads over a period of about 18 months)..
The simple fact is that although Manchester may have seen a 40% reduction in its casualty rate between 2005 and 2011, we’re still talking about similar orders of magnitude in every city. Manchester’s figures just aren’t as appallingly bad as they were, that’s all.
The article also quotes RED (it doesn’t say who, but probably the CEO again):
…RED is offering enhanced lesson plans to help learner drivers not just to pass their driving test but also to be safer drivers during that critical newly-qualified phase.
This, too, is complete rubbish. All driving instructors are self-employed and no driving school can guarantee that they will all be performing to the same standard. I pick up lots of pupils who have taken lessons with other instructors – independents, local schools, and national ones (RED included) – who have certainly not experienced the “enhanced” lessons RED’s CEO is talking about. “Safe Driving For Life” is the DSA’s strapline, and ALL driving instructors should be teaching in accordance with that. If some aren’t, then unless the driving school whose name they operate under is very selective in who they take on (and most simply require a Green Badge and signs of life) they will be distributed across the entire spectrum.
…a 5% discount [is given] to all new drivers who have had 10 or more hours of professional tuition with RED Driving School. For the average 17 year-old customer, this represents a saving of around £100 on their annual premium.
This raises a huge number of questions of an ethical nature. To start with, 10 hours of lessons is not going to change how someone drives – even if the instructors were recruited straight from Mount Olympus and are fed on an exclusive diet of Ambrosia, with the threat of transfer to Hades should any of their pupils ever be involved in an accident. So is it right to offer insurance based on this?
But you also have to ask how much the average new driver is being ripped off by in the first place, when meeting such a simplistic goal is going to get you a £100 discount from a named insurer? In any case, in my experience those offering discounts are usually charging more than the rest in the first place, so there really is no discount that couldn’t be obtained by shopping around.
But the biggest question has to be how RED can make all those statements about “reducing this carnage” when it has signed a deal with an insurance company to offer cheaper insurance to drivers if they simply take a few lessons with it. It hardly seems to be a positive move towards road safety, and rather more focused on marketing.
Oh, yeah. And RED’s “research” isn’t research. Nor are current accident statistics going to be influenced (i.e. reduced) by driving instructors.
Flashing headlights is only supposed to be used as a warning, but as everyone knows it is used well outside of that remit. The Highway Code says:
110
Flashing headlights. Only flash your headlights to let other road users know that you are there. Do not flash your headlights to convey any other message or intimidate other road users.
111
Never assume that flashing headlights is a signal inviting you to proceed. Use your own judgement and proceed carefully.
The problem is that if someone flashes you to emerge in busy traffic, and if you can see that they’ve stopped, and if you can see that it is otherwise safe to emerge, then there is every reason for you to do so. If they are scammers and decide to drive into you, they could just as easily have done it if they hadn’t have flashed and had just sat there obviously inviting you to pull out. The flashing headlights thing is a red herring.
I make it clear to my pupils how they should both use and interpret flashing headlights. There’s no point saying “don’t do it. EVER”, because they will once they’ve passed, so it is important they understand how to do it properly.
This short article came through on the newsfeeds. It’s in The Telegraph, and it centres around a question posed by a reader who says that their 81-year old mother wants to return to driving after a minor stroke. The reader asks about refresher training for older people.
Honest John – The Telegraph’s “expert” – replies:
The Institute of Advanced Motorists can help with this ([website link]) and so can RoSPA. But your county council may offer this kind of course. Many do. Take a look at its website.
Any driving instructor can do this – and legally. I’ve signed off letters for such assessments myself. Unless IAM and RoSPA can guarantee that the assessment is carried out by a registered instructor, anyone else who is a member of those organisations would be breaking the Law if they charged for any such assessment. Let’s face facts: these people will not be giving such training away for free. Even “your county council” will be paying someone somewhere to do the assessment, and if they’re using IAM or RoSPA they’d better make sure that qualified and registered ADIs are being employed.
IAM and RoSPA might well be able to put people in touch with suitable ADIs, but whether that’s what they would do is another matter. On top of that, IAM and RoSPA membership does not automatically mean that someone is an expert at medical driving assessments. The majority of members of groups like these are simply anoraks who see a vastly enlarged image of themselves when they look in a mirror. These groups regulate and audit themselves, unlike ADIs who are regulated and monitored by the DSA. ADIs are licensed to take payment for their services, whereas IAM and RoSPA members are not.
At the very least, Honest John is in error for not mentioning driving instructors alongside IAM and RoSPA. His advice is potentially very misleading without much more detailed qualification.
You can’t help sense a certain irony in this report, in which “instructors” claim that the falling numbers of people taking driving tests is the fault of insurers. The driving school making the claims is one which specialises in giving lessons to 11-17 year olds. Just for the record, it charges £60 per hour – the typical cost of a lesson for adults is only £20-£25 an hour.
In an expanded story on the same topic, a mother is currently paying these inflated rates for her 12-year old on the basis that “she’s certain costs will rise by the time he’s 18”. I bloody well hope she’s right – I’d love to be able to charge £60 an hour. But there is no way that will happen, so you almost feel sorry for her for being so stupid! She doesn’t know what she’s letting herself in for by encouraging her child – because that’s what he is – to drive, when it will be another 6 years before he can do so legally. And whatever the costs of running a car in 2019, he’ll still have to pay them – so the costs she has in mind can only be those associated with learning to drive! Silly woman.
The irony comes at you on several fronts, as well. Apart from charging almost three times as much as normal instructors to teach children to drive and then bleating about costs, you have to remember that it is the 17-year old petrol heads who keep having crashes who put car insurance for their age group through the roof in the first place. Insurers charge increased premiums because of that. So encouraging even more of them to get into cars a) while they’re still under age, and b) as soon as they come of age is not going to bring those premiums down.
The problem is much deeper – perfectly illustrated by the attitude of the mother mentioned above.
The best new drivers will inevitably be found among those who have to work hard to gain a licence. Those who have it handed to them on a plate – especially when they’ve been brought up to expect that plate to be brought out whenever they want something – are more likely to have the kind of attitude that will push premiums higher still.
a sort of statistical image of people in general. There is one small group that causes the most grief for me as an instructor, and it’s the one which has its emotions very near the surface and ready to bubble over at the slightest prompt.
about £200 to buy), and then there would be transaction fees on top of that, plus any set up fees for the merchant account itself. Plus, they were about the size of a toaster.