An email alert has just come through from the DSA with a link to some early-stage computer generated imagery (CGI) clips they’re working on for the Hazard Perception Test (HPT).
I can see this one dragging the rats out of the sewers (at the time of writing, ten votes, three of them negative on the YouTube site).
The quality is very impressive.
Some of the negative comments seem to have completely overlooked the fact that these are EARLY-STAGE clips, and not the finished article. That’s why there’s no sound.
Clip #1
Clip #2
As the DSA says in the email:
The clips are early prototypes. DSA aims to bring these computer-generated clips into the theory test by the end of 2013. It means DSA can introduce hazards that would be hard to film safely – particularly those involving vulnerable road users.
It’s a brilliant idea. Just a shame that technology moves forward faster than the thinking of some ADIs.
Looking at some of the comments, one thing that is repeatedly overlooked by those who are anti-HPT from the outset and saying that it should be done in a real car is that it IS done in a real car – the HPT is only one small part of the training a learner receives, and much of that training IS in the car. It happens during their lessons!
Others are totally ignoring the fact that these are merely samples – very early samples, at that. The DSA is asking for feedback, and comments about overtaking the cyclist too close to a roundabout or not adhering to the 2 second rule are precisely the sort of feedback they want and need.
ADIs need to help make the clips better – not just poo-poo the whole idea. The level of reality is already quite stunning, and by the time they come into proper use I expect they’ll be better still.
This story came through yesterday. I nearly missed it, because it isn’t obviously related to driving or driving instruction – until you think about what it is saying.
It says that retail figures released by the Office for National Statistics confirm that discounting is the only factor driving sales at the moment, and consumers are reluctant to spend. It warns of another difficult year.
It doesn’t take a genius to work out that business overheads are covered by income from sales, with the difference being business profit. It’s fairly obvious that if income from sales falls then so does profit – and it’s even more obvious that if the profit is negative, you’re going to go out of business very quickly.
Well, I say it’s obvious… but it’s clearly not as obvious as it should be to many driving instructors out there.
Even in my neck of the woods, where the typical hourly rate is £23 or £24 an hour, the number of cars you see with stupid prices plastered all over them is unbelievable. The British Retail Consortium in that link is certainly not wrong.
How do these instructors think they are ever going to be able to charge a sensible price again without losing work? After all, all these special offers are designed to fill empty diaries “until it picks up”. It’s debatable whether they actually do that in any case, but the more work you get the greater your overheads (fuel) become, and if you charge stupid prices you quickly run into trouble with your profits. Let’s look at an example.
Imagine an instructor charging £22 an hour, but with very little work – say, 10 hours a week. His car costs him £100, and the fuel for those 10 hours about £70. His income is £220, and his expenditure £170. His profit (wages) is therefore £50.
If that same instructor does a silly offer of “10 lessons for £99” and drops his price to £16 (like one I’ve seen recently), then if his diary suddenly rockets to 40 hours a week (which is highly unlikely) his profit will be somewhere in the region of £250.
If his diary only goes up to 20 hours – which is MUCH more likely – his profit will be in the region of £30. So by cutting his prices he is doing twice as much work for 40% less profit!
Even at 30 hours of work – the most many instructors can expect even under the best circumstances – his profit will only rise to around £160 for a tripling of the workload to a level where most people would simply conk out with exhaustion – particularly if they are new ADIs!
Of course, with such low profits you’ll inevitably want to cut your costs, and the one that drives profit most of all is the cost of fuel – which has already risen by 40% in the last three years, with the possibility of another 15% this year. So your attempts to not drive much on lessons will have pupils queuing up for the exit.
The price-cutters simply can’t see the damage they’re doing to themselves and others.
To make matters worse, they do it in the firm belief that when things pick up they can charge a sensible hourly rate again. But if you snagged your pupils with stupid prices, how are you ever going to expect to keep them if you hike prices by 40% again? It isn’t going to happen.
I wrote this morning about the DSA’s new online statistics, and suggested that the amateur statisticians might have some fun with them.
It didn’t take long. KentOnline trumpets that the driving test pass rate is improving, and creates a whole article around that.
The simple fact is that the pass rate has gone up from 44% two years ago, to 46% last year, to 47% for the current year so far. A 3% rise over three years is hardly significant.
It also doesn’t take into account the fact that the national pass rate was 46% in 1999, and has hovered between 45-47% ever since then. In other words, the pass rate isn’t increasing – it just appears to have done so over the last three years to people who haven’t got a clue about statistics and statistical significance.
And now, the RAC is on the case with pointless prose. So far, all these have done is just repeat what is in the DSA data, but using different words.
Unbelievably, Michelle Brannigan drove her 11-year old son to school and had a crash. She had been out drinking the night before and was nearly FOUR TIMES THE LEGAL LIMIT!
Now, it would be easy to find examples of where men have been jailed for non-injury crashes whilst DUI (driving under the influence) for a year, 10 months, six months, and so on. I’m sure there are longer sentences out there.
Brannigan was over the limit by 25% more than any of those male examples – in fact, she was so drunk it is a wonder she was able to breathe unaided – and yet she was jailed for a paltry 16 weeks.
She could have killed her son. She could have killed any number of other children. She was absolutely pissed during the school run (and I won’t mention the likely head start in the bad driving stakes that conveys). All those men in the examples above were completely uninvolved with the school run.
The only reason the idiot judge could have been so lenient in “one of the worst cases he had ever seen” was that she was female and a mother. He even considered suspending the sentence “because of [her] children”.
It’s unlikely she’ll be inside for anywhere near 16 weeks, either.
The night before, this “mother” – the word “unfit” is omitted in the article – had been drinking bourbon until 1 am in the morning. The judge insisted she is “a good mother”. Quite how his logic works is obviously not clear – answers on a postcard please.
The mitigating pleas are laughable when you consider Brannigan’s haggard face, clearly weathered by years of hard living. Apparently, it was all the fault of depression, the “neighbour from hell”, being a single mother with little support, and so on. All these things do is paint a picture of the kind of people and the localities involved – best summed up by the word “rough”.
It really is one rule for men, and another for women sometimes.
And this is exactly why society is declining and people drive, for example, the way they do. This “good mother” is one hell of a role model for her kids to emulate when they grow up. The script is already written for how they could easily turn out.
This Canadian story claims that computerised tests are unfair to older drivers. In many ways, it echoes the mantra certain ADIs in this country like to chant ad nauseam.
It seems that Canada also has a permanent war on the go with the politically correct crowd:
The government needs to do a better job of explaining a computerized driving test for seniors suspected of cognitive impairment, Solicitor-General Shirley Bond said in an open letter Tuesday.
Am I the only one for whom the question “if they’ve got cognitive impairment, why the bloody hell are they on the roads in control of a 1 tonne+ killing machine” occurs?
The Canadian exam is simply a touch-screen affair – as far as I can tell, a lot of questions and hazard scenarios are thrown up (if someone from Canada can clarify that it’d be useful), and the candidate simply touches a “button” on the screen. It isn’t a million miles away from the UK Theory Test. But – just like the UK – there are “activists”, ready to oppose anything.
It seems that there was a recent protest by people who reckon that it is an unfair way to “assess a generation less familiar with technology”.
I’m sick of this childish argument. If some new technology comes along right now, and I’m not familiar with it, then I go out and make myself familiar. I don’t start a protest group or front a Mickey Mouse organisation to oppose the technology.
It reminds me of something from years ago, and which I have mentioned before. I’ve always been “into” technology, and had a home computer – long before PCs – in the late 70s/early 80s. At that time, you saved and loaded programs and data from a cassette tape drive, and many magazines included a free cassette of stuff on the front cover. When disk drives started to become popular – and you can imagine the clumsiness of cassettes compared to floppy disks – magazines started to change over. There was uproar from the Luddites who wanted to remain with cassettes.
All you have to do is look at what we take for granted now, and what those idiots were campaigning for, to see how totally wrong they were. The same applies to this case of using technology to replace pen and paper or other non-technology based methods of communication.
Reading the article in The Vancouver Sun suggests a very similar undercurrent, as the government is looking at “an outreach plan” to explain why you need to be medically fit to drive AND how to use the computerised system. There’s obviously more to it than just not being able to use a computer.
One 86-year old (who is “competent with computers”) says he was “completely frazzled” when he took the test. Look, I’m sorry, but if he was competent with computers, the only reasons for being frazzled were due a) to taking a test that he desperately wanted NOT to fail, and/or b) being 86 years old! Nothing short of an automatic drivers’ licence would have prevented him from being frazzled. He even reveals his desperation not to lose his independence, in a country where you have to be medically assessed fit to continue to drive beyond age 80. You can see that a whole raft of issues are being condensed down, and blamed on the computer-based test.
A local driving instructor adds fuel to the flames when he says he has received “numerous complaints from seniors”. What on earth does that prove? Nothing.
However, he does say that he thinks the concerns can be resolved. I think that’s being a little naÏve, when it is the loss of independence and being tested at 80 which is the real issue.
This is the first freedom of information (FOI) story of the year, but ChronicleLive (a Newcastle news site) says that a 27-year old woman from the area passed her Theory Test on the 49th attempt.
Just for the record, that means she shelled out £1,519 just on the Theory Test!
The article also says a 29-year old Sunderland man took 16 tries, and two teenagers from Morpeth took 13 attempts.
When it came to the Practical Test, a 40-year old Sunderland woman took 20 attempts (the tests alone would have cost her £1,240), narrowly beating a 32-year old Hexham woman (17 goes) and a 32-year old Elswick woman (16 goes).
I don’t know where these people get their information from – or who explains it to them!
This stupid article from ChoiceQuote reckons British cars are “bigger than the average parking space”. So you’d be forgiven for thinking that this means all – or the majority of – cars on British roads are too big.
The simple fact is that the vast majority of British cars are perfectly sized to fit in any standard parking space. ChoiceQuote is simply talking crap.
Apparently, the Department for Transport states that a parking bay must be a maximum of 5’ 11” wide (180cm), and this has not changed since 1994.
A BMW X6 is 6’ 6” wide, and an X5 is 6’ 4” wide. And of course, at around £50,000 a pop, just about everyone is driving around in one of those. Not. Even an X3 is £30,000.
Normal people drive normal cars. Fortunately, the majority of the population IS normal, and they drive cars that fit in parking bays. Well, if they park them properly, anyway.
This website is quite useful – ChoiceQuote should have used it before writing a stupid story for the tabloids.
There are over 31 million cars on the road in the UK. About 113,000 of them are BMW X3s, X5s, and X6s – which equates to less than 0.4%. Of course, there are other large 4×4 vehicles, but altogether they still account for only a few per cent of the total.
So, quite how ChoiceQuote manages to twist this into “British cars bigger than the average parking space” is anyone’s guess.
An email alert from the DSA says that more than half of all motorists use the DVLA’s digital services to tax their car or declare it off the road.
I was pleasantly surprised by this – but then I saw the bit about how “digital services” means online AND telephone services. I would imagine that the percentage using the actual “online” part is considerably less than the overall figure.
Still, Mike Penning finds a totally positive spin for the situation, claiming that more motorists want to deal with the DVLA at a time and place to suit them.
What exactly does he think they wanted previously? Or what does he think the other half want now? Do they want to deal with the DVLA at an extremely inconvenient time and place?
Maybe his daughter told him what to think, because Penning seems incapable of drawing logical conclusions out of anything for himself.
I just saw a skit on BBC Breakfast about teaching young drivers – as young as 11 – to drive. It is an initiative which is being championed by Quentin Willson (yes, two “ells”; media motoring “expert”).
In the skit, an in-car camera recorded an 11-year old with a huge grin exclaiming:
How cool is this?
…as he drove a car around an off-road circuit. Just remember that, because I will. That 11-year old was driving a car and exclaimed:
“HOW COOL IS THIS?”
It doesn’t take a huge leap of the imagination to transport him – or someone his age – from a private compound near to London to an inner city street with a gang of his mates, taking a car that doesn’t belong to him. Or on a Road Wars video, trying to evade the police as they try and catch him.
I’ve known about this scheme for some time. To be honest, I have always known it for what it is – a brilliantly clever way of selling driving lessons at almost £60 an hour! That’s around three times the normal cost of an hour’s lesson.
In that respect, I have no axe to grind with the scheme. It’s a business ploy to sell driving lessons at a ridiculously inflated price, but it is still a fantastic Unique Selling Point (USP). In fact, it’s quite similar to Mercedes Benz’s idea of selling expensive lessons in expensive cars to Hooray Henrys and Henriettas (or their provincial counterparts) in terms of its business model.
However, Willson and that 11-year old have now taken it to the next level for me. The next level downwards. You see, Willson has spoken in Parliament on this topic. He says (indeed, has said – in front of Parliament):
I passionately believe that we don’t teach young drivers to actually drive, only to pass a test, and one that’s woefully inadequate.
This is complete bollocks, and Willson ought to understand what he is talking about before shooting his mouth or, or committing himself to it so “passionately” (the same goes for driving instructors who embrace this scheme merely because it is aimed at children). Passion is often a mask for blindness and ignorance. I’m also fairly certain Willson has some links with the school mentioned, because I read somewhere else that his own son had taken lessons with them. To that end, he adds:
One of the most important things this Committee could do is to consider a revolutionary new young driver programme where driving is part of the school syllabus, much like citizenship. Teaching kids to drive at 17 is at their least receptive age. Their mindsets are already corrupted and corroded by video games like Grand Theft Auto and the worst excesses of Top Gear.
Seeing as he is a former presenter of Top Gear, is he not guilty of peddling “excesses” to the teenage masses out there for his own profit? Does he not do that now in the Sunday newspapers, as he drools over the latest supercars that less than 1% of the population could ever afford?
What does this misguided individual think will happen when kids’ minds have been filled with the desire to drive a car (and the impression that getting one is only just around the corner), AND THEN get “corrupted” by Grand Theft Auto and the “excesses” of Top Gear? Basically, you’ll be teaching them how to drive the cars they will end up nicking – and increasing the likelihood of the theft in the first place by creating a desire!
Can he not realise that a juvenile mind is a juvenile mind. In the entire recorded history of the world – and into pre-history – a juvenile has been a juvenile, requiring nurturing and protection on the way to adulthood, making reckless decisions of its own along the way. Six years (until you’re 17 and legal) is a hundred lifetimes when you are 11, and after having been tempted with HOW COOL IS THIS? experiences, the 21st century kid simply isn’t prepared to wait any longer than necessary.
Too many kids don’t wait even now. Car theft is unfortunately a typical juvenile male pastime – certainly one which too easily occurs as a viable activity to kill time to modern youth – and this scheme will just make it worse. A thousand times worse.
In any case, 17-year olds have a job remembering what they learnt for the Theory Test only two weeks earlier – I’m sure as hell that an 11-year old (even if he does wait 6 years) isn’t going to remember anything useful from pre-teen driving lessons once the testosterone kicks in and he hits 17. Even worse, he’ll probably THINK he knows everything – and what 17-year old doesn’t know it all already?
They will not wait! They will want to drive now. Those fools who start gushing that we should “pleeeeease think of the children” are totally ignorant of the likely consequences of teaching some things at too young an age. Teach them about sex at primary school, and you have an increase in teenage pregnancy. Teaching them to want a car – and want one badly – is not going to turn out any differently.
The real problem on the roads is illustrated by that thing I mentioned about kids not being prepared to wait. These days, they DON’T wait. They’ve been allowed to develop into ungovernable little savages (even the ones from Chelsea, Kensington, and those begat by TV presenters with inflated opinions about themselves).
All of this is a fault of the parents, who spoil their offspring with expensive treats – like driving lessons at 11, or in fancy cars.
Kids used to be taught road safety as part of cycling proficiency. But in just the same way that the Three Rs have fallen by the wayside (and kids are pretty stupid as a result), is it any wonder they have no sense on the roads? Willson’s plan isn’t addressing the problem – it’s just papering over the cracks, and badly.
Road safety definitely ought to be part of the curriculum. Driving cars shouldn’t be. It’s for adults, not 11-year olds. And if anything is going to change, it should be the minimum age at which people can drive, because many 17-year olds are still of the “hang-around-outside-the-chip-shop-causing-trouble” mentality – but in cars instead of on BMX bikes.
Incidentally, I love the Statement of the Blindingly Obvious from the Institute of Advanced Motorists (IAM) that lack of driving experience – not age – is the reason why young drivers have crashes. But it also conveniently ignores the biggest problem: attitude.
The problem is far bigger and much deeper than people like Willson, the IAM, and all the bleeding-heart-children-come-first clowns are capable of recognising.
sales, with the difference being business profit. It’s fairly obvious that if income from sales falls then so does profit – and it’s even more obvious that if the profit is negative, you’re going to go out of business very quickly.
(driving under the influence) for 
The Canadian exam is simply a touch-screen affair – as far as I can tell, a lot of questions and hazard scenarios are thrown up (if someone from Canada can clarify that it’d be useful), and the candidate simply touches a “button” on the screen. It isn’t a million miles away from the UK Theory Test. But – just like the UK – there are “activists”, ready to oppose anything.
Newcastle news site) says that a 27-year old woman from the area passed her Theory Test on the 49th attempt.
This stupid article from ChoiceQuote reckons British cars are “bigger than the average parking space”. So you’d be forgiven for thinking that this means all – or the majority of – cars on British roads are too big.
Just remember that, because I will. That 11-year old was driving a car and exclaimed: