This story in the newsfeeds is a prime example of gloating. It tells how a learner driver in Gossau, Switzerland, ended up in a small ditch whilst on a lesson.
The story dwells on the fact that the learner had “only” had seven hours of lessons. So what? I started with a new pupil last week who’d never driven before. He’d never even sat in the driver’s seat of a car. Yet on the first lesson he ended up driving by himself for a distance of at least 15 miles. We had the third lesson today (which now totals 5 hours), and we’ve attempted all of the manoeuvres – and the only thing to sort out with those involves practice and polish.
Although it’s been a while since I had one of these, at the other end of the scale you occasionally get people who take two or three times that amount of lessons before they can even negotiate a simple junction, and even then it can still go wrong. They can’t help it, and they aren’t doing it deliberately. They just aren’t natural drivers.
We don’t know anything at all about the learner in the story. No one seems interested in the important facts, or in how that pupil must feel knowing everyone is rubbing their hands over her misfortune. They just want to gloat.
It appears that she hit the gas instead of the brake, which isn’t uncommon. Mine will sometimes do it when they first try a manoeuvre, but I never lose control. My feet hover over the pedals just in case. And it’s the same with steering – I always assume that pupils will do something strange or dramatic until I know them well enough to be sure that they won’t. They sometimes try it, especially when they see a bus or lorry coming towards them, and I even had one dyspraxic who suddenly tried to drive across a pavement next to a straight road, and who couldn’t explain why.
So the only question that seems to crop up here is why the instructor wasn’t ready for it.
However, there is a saying, often attributed to John Bradford, which goes “there but for the grace of God, go I”. In a nutshell, it means that it could happen to anyone – and that means both the learner driver, the instructor, and any other driver in cases such as these.