Category - News

Another story from the newsfeeds. It involves IAM – but I won’t diss it outright since just for once they haven’t tried to blame the behaviour of the last 10 generations of young drivers on their driving instructors. Not directly, anyway.

There’s a scheme in Scotland being sponsored by a former racing driver who is now a car dealer. Basically, he has agreed to pay for 100 young drivers to take an advanced driving test. He is now trying to get other dealers to provide the same offer to further young drivers throughout Scotland.

Police in Scotland appear to be beside themselves with gushing praise:

Acting road policing Inspector Brian Jones, of Lothian and Borders Police, said: “We cannot support this enough. This is an excellent opportunity for all young drivers to take advantage of a skill for life.

“It could almost be seen as a Holy Grail – it would take five to six years to get the same experience as you get from taking the test.”

On the surface, it sounds like a good idea. But is it really the Holy Grail that everyone is looking for as the Scots police are suggesting? Let’s think about it a little more deeply – which is something none of those in the article seem to have done.

The most telling observation comes from a young driver who completed the course:

Matthew Bushell is among ten young drivers in the Borders to have had the cost of their advanced driving course refunded after passing the test.

Mr Bushell, 27, who took the test two years ago, admitted to having had a completely different attitude behind the wheel in his earlier driving days.

Note the part in bold. What he is clearly saying is that when he was young he felt differently and had a different attitude to the one he has now. His decision to complete this course – apart from the fact that it was free, I would imagine – was based on his 27-year old level of maturity, and he wouldn’t have done it when he was younger. Can we really conclude from all this that a mid-twenties male completing this course is any sort of Holy Grail for the problem of all young driver death statistics?

You have to get older before you can get wiser. By definition, maturity is age- and experience-dependent. It’s a basic law of nature, and there is no suggestion that this course could have any meaningful effect on young and very unwise attitudes that, say, a properly delivered Pass Plus course or decent learner lessons couldn’t. The article continues:

Mr Bushell signed up for the advanced driving course after meeting Bill Allison of the Institute of Advanced Motorists (IAM) at his local car club.

And there’s another problem: the piston-head mentality. Both the sponsor and the sponsored were piston-heads – members of a car club. It is hard to imagine that the sponsor (a former racing driver, now a car dealer) is financing this for purely philanthropic reasons, particularly when you bear in mind it is costing him around £13,000. The advertising he is getting from it must be offsetting that somewhat, no matter how much he might deny it. And certainly you get the impression that the sponsored Mr Bushell might not have bothered at all if he’d had to pay over a hundred quid, instead of getting it for free. But even if the meeting of these two from this particular club had what is essentially a positive outcome, there are many, many clubs where the overall attitude of the membership is far less mature. Let’s face facts here: if a group of people who own fast cars meet at the “fast car owners’ club”, the main discussion topic is inevitably going to be about driving those fast cars fast!

The sponsor is also pictured holding a copy of Roadcraft – the advanced driver’s bible. It’s worth reminding ourselves of the full title of that publication: Roadcraft – The Police Driver’s Handbook  (and yes, that’s the same emphasis that is given on the front cover). But in spite of the book’s foreword suggesting that it is also for anyone wishing to take their skills “to a higher level” (cue: a bunch of anoraks falling over themselves to copy every aspect of it), you do not invite anyone who feels like it to drive as if they were police officers on emergency calls to do so when they’re just taking the Jack Russell to Tesco to pick up their milk and a copy of The Daily Mail.

It isn’t training which is the problem. It is attitude. Advanced driving is for drivers with experience, not beginners – and even then, it’s not suitable for all of them. The sooner IAM realises this and keeps its nose out of driver training at grass roots level, the better the chance something can actually get done in the areas where the problems really lie.

I wrote a couple of months ago about how DriveIQ was using raw emotions to try and push its product. They were using the bereaved mother of a girl, who was killed after driving into a tree at 80mph, in order to clearly imply that use of its software would have prevented that tragedy and all others like it!

Well, this story in the Mail suggests that they’re at it again.

In typical Mail fashion, it is hailed as a “new weapon”, when in fact it has been around for several years in more or less the form it exists in now – the only thing that’s “new” is that the Mail has got hold of it. But the really unsavoury part is that they’re now using a disabled – but, naturally, highly photogenic – teenager to suggest that what happened to her wouldn’t have if she’d have had DriveIQ available to start with. Reading between the lines there is the clear suggestion that her training (and that of all other new drivers) was somehow lacking, and this is particularly galling when you consider how DriveIQ started – as a2om, who tried to claim that it’s then-salaried instructors were better than anyone else.

The whole story is misleading rubbish.

The girl’s accident involved a car full of drunken teenagers leaving a party, speeding off (her words), flipping into a field, and rolling repeatedly (which suggests grossly excessive speed). Other important details are missing.

I can absolutely guarantee that at no point during her original lessons would she have been told that this was OK, or in any way acceptable behaviour on the roads. I can also guarantee that she will have known that speeding and distraction were dangerous. Only the most stupid of people would not. The problem is that they choose to ignore it and do whatever the hell they want.

The title of the Mail story is:

New weapon in the war against the biggest killer of young people: The cyber road test that stops teenage drivers making the mistake that left me paralysed for life

The story includes lines such as:

Traditional driving lessons concentrate on the technical skills needed to pass the test but have failed to evolve to prevent statistics that show 19 out of 20 road accidents are caused by poor attitude and behaviour, not vehicle-handling skills.

Drive iQ was developed to fill the gaping void in the current learning process.

In our Drive iQ test, Lauren [a new driver] had failed to recognise the dangers we were in [and “crashed”], despite having passed the test to hold a UK licence. If the situation had been real, Lauren would have helped bolster the shocking statistic that one in five young people crashes in the first six months of driving.

If I had had the opportunity to watch the simulation of a crash like mine play out on a computer screen, my life would have turned out very differently.

All of this is highly misleading, and incredibly naive. The author (the disabled girl in question) could have been saved by other, much more reliable ways. How?

Well, if the minimum driving age had been higher, she wouldn’t have been driving that day. If there had been a curfew on young drivers, she probably wouldn’t have been driving from a party (assuming it was a night time party). And if there had been a ban on young drivers carrying passengers, then the distractions she was subject to wouldn’t have been there in the first place. And if she had been driving a car fitted with a black box, she would have been a bit less likely to be driving at such high speed. Most of these things definitely would have prevented her from having an accident on that day. And others would have reduced the risk dramatically.

But there is no way that a computer simulation could make the same claims.

I’m not saying that road safety shouldn’t be taught in schools, and I’m not saying that DriveIQ is useless. But the claims being made for these things are just total rubbish!

The article also mentions the fact that the teenage brain doesn’t properly mature until the early to mid-20s, and still doesn’t make the connection that this cannot be hurried by sitting in front of a computer.