This came through in the feeds [dead link], and tells how a 15-year old learner killed her mother by running over her twice.
It isn’t from a reputable news source and details are initially sketchy – until you look at one of the links, which reveals that it happened in Kentucky, USA. The mother, Kimberly Riggs, was conducting a lesson in a church car park. She was outside the vehicle with the door open when the car suddenly lurched forward. She was knocked down by the door, and the car left the church car park – but then it turned round, went through a fence and backyard of someone’s house, reversed into the car park again, did a 180 degree spin, and pinned the mother to a fence. The mother had apparently been chasing the car at the time. She died in hospital later.
It raises quite a few questions. But taking it at face value to eliminate some of the possibilities (conspiracy theories) both sources hint at, the main questions in my mind concern allowing people of such a young age to drive cars, and the dangers of automatic transmission in such cases.
I’ve heard some weird comments recently from ADIs in the UK extolling the virtues of automatics. Kimberly Riggs almost certainly wouldn’t have been killed if the car had been a manual transmission. It would probably have just stalled – if not in the first instance, at some point during its odd path out of, and back into, the car park.
Automatics may be easier to learn in. But dumbing down the learning-to-drive process unnecessarily makes little sense when you hear a story like this one.
As I mentioned recently, learning in an automatic car is the only way some people are ever going to have hope of gaining a full driving licence. Those with certain disabilities are obviously included. But there is no way that any of that makes learning in an auto a “better” choice for the majority of drivers.
The original source also raises the valid point about why someone whose control of the car was apparently so poor was left inside alone in the first place.
EDIT: The story has now appeared in the next days’ Daily Mail.