Frazzled...all fingernails gone.

[Bravo]

My oldest daughter had her 15th birthday in January and got her Driver's License Learners Permit. About a week later, I read in the paper about something called the New Car Driver Control Clinic, sponsored by the Sports Car Club of America....The fee was $95 and I enrolled her. Today was the day of the clinic and we reported to a local church at 9 am..I was told to bring proof of insurance and her drivers license learner permit...and curiously, they told me to "add five pounds of air to your tires"...I'm thinking, "whats up with this?"

After a short period in a classroom environment, they took the nine students in their nine cars with their nine parents in the passenger seat out to a "course" set up in the parking lot. The course consisted of a series of orange cones, set up in a line. They had the students weave in and out and I though the whole affair was going to be rather dull when we went back into the classroom for the next "chalk talk".

The next drill, they explain, will be the "cloverleaf drill" where the cones are arranged in a "cross" that appears to be like the intersection of two streets. As he diagrams it up, I figure the are going to teach them how to turn from street to street. "This is really going to be dull" I am thinking to myself.

Wrong...he explains that he wants everyone to drive through the middle of the intersection and go straight through each time, turning only when emerging from the row of cones on the other end, and then turn either left or right and reenter from another angle 90 degrees away....so the 'cloverleaf' is created from entering the row and going all the way through, emerging on the other end and making a 90 degree turn left or right. I am figuring that this will at least be a bit interesting.

So we get in the car and the instructors are standing all around...my daughter enters the row of cones and comes out the other side...and they start shouting "faster, faster!!....speed up!!"

Oh crap...now the tires are squealing and she has the car on the edge of control as we whiz through the row and out the other end...."SPEED UP....HIT IT!!

I am effing white knuckling the arm rest on the passenger side...My gawd the child has been driving for 9 weeks and these amateur race car drivers are urging each driver to squeal and smoke the tires....

Finally, it is over and I get to relax so we go inside...

The next drill goes like this....

The cones are lined up linearly, perfectly straight - except at the very end, two "channels" are set up with a barrier in the middle. Behind this is a light pole. So as you start the drill, you see a straight row of cones with a barrier at the end with two channels, one left and one right.

And they say, "When we say go, we want you to stomp it all the way to the floor...maximum acceleration...keep it all the way to the floor, until you see the light at the end telling you to swerve right or left. When the light comes on, pound the break pedal to the floor and swerve around the barrier..

I cannot imagine this...so here we go outside..my car is a Nissan Pathfinder SUV. This is a medium length SUV with a 255 HP engine...so while it is not a BMW, it will pick up speed pretty good.

The instructor gives the word and she floors it....we are screaming straight toward the cone barrier and I am pleading with him to hit the light signalling left or right swerve...closer and closer and finally it comes on...

She jams the brakes and flies through the cones, straight toward the curb at the end of the parking lot...beyond this is a grassy downhill slope.

My fingernails are jammed into the armrest when the car finally comes to rest about three feet from the curb...the instructors have scattered right and left....

They are applauding her and saying "good job for your first time...go faster next time!!" Gawd...

So we go through these high speed accident avoidance drills on wet pavement for the next 4 hours. My daugther gets pretty damn good at it by the end of the day...and they even give us a turn at the end. It was a hell of a lot of fun.

I think I am ready for an early vodka though...

[SiberianDVM]

my car is a Nissan Pathfinder SUV

Wow. I have a Montero Sport SUV with 220hp. It zips for a mid sized SUV and handles well, but it would not be my first choice for a aggressive driving course, due to height of COG. Would much prefer a 350Z.

Good job not pissing your pants.

[DouginGA]

So Bravo,
I am assuming you thought it a good thing and put your daughter in somewhat more challenging circumstances? or did you think it gave your daughter more of sense of "driving can be a thrill" ? just curious

[VtDivot]

Originally Posted by Bravo

something called the New Car Driver Control Clinic, sponsored by the Sports Car Club of America....

I think I would have run in the opposite direction when I saw this LOL

[Bravo]

SDVM: The instructors told us to bring the car that the student would be driving the most...all of the kids at the clinic were either 15 or 16. The 16 year old kids drove whatever car their parents had provided for them and the 15 year olds were (mostly) driving one of their parents cars. In my case, my daughter was driving my wife's car, which will be paid off before she is 16. On her 16th birthday, it will become hers. When I bought it four years ago, my long range plan was for the car to become hers on her birthday...

DouginGa: The real purpose of the school is 'defensive driving'. The last drill was basically..."What do you do when you are driving at high speed and a vehicle in front of you slams on its brakes, or a piece of metal falls off the truck in front of you?" So what they were ultimately teaching was how to avoid an accident, by driving around it at very high speeds. The first few drills were oriented toward teaching the students 'the performance limits of their vehicles' learning about understeer and knowing when you can feel the rear end getting ready to come loose or even rolling the car completely over. As we all know, this is especially a factor with the SUV's...so they really pushed the kids to understand how/where the car could go at its limit and then they put them in an accident situation and showed them that simply slamming on the brakes and piling into the object in front of you - rather than driving around it - is a good way to get hurt or killed.

[SilverUberXeno]

I don't know where you are really, Bravo, but aren't there Driver's Education courses around sponsored by a highschool? I know they have them over the summer.. I think that'd be a lot better of an idea. I took one though a high school a few towns over and I think it was a pretty good experience. You can identify the faults of the other drivers in your car, which in turn helps you become better. Not to mention that your own driving is constantly helped by the teacher.

What you did seems to me like sending your daughter to a boat-school run by pirates.

Yarr.

[Big Brother Dunk]

Awesome post!!



I can just imagine your state of mind!


Props to your daughter for driving well!!!

[Eracer]

I can't believe they made you sit in the car with her. I can't believe they put your vehicle at risk like that.

What's next? Sex education where they strap the parent into the backseat of the car, muzzled and handcuffed, at a drive-in, while an instructor gives the kids directions on the proper way to use a condom?

How about "safe drinking" class. The parent gets to watch their child learn to drink vodka (your vodka) while the instructor yells out "faster, faster..."

Sheesh!

[Rockford35]

Originally Posted by Eracer

What's next? Sex education where they strap the parent into the backseat of the car, muzzled and handcuffed, at a drive-in, while an instructor gives the kids directions on the proper way to use a condom?

Hear that grinding noise? Thats Bravo chewing off his toe nails...

If it makes you feel any better B, she'll probably date somebody better than E here...

R35

[Bravo]

Originally Posted by Eracer

I can't believe they made you sit in the car with her. I can't believe they put your vehicle at risk like that.

What's next? Sex education where they strap the parent into the backseat of the car, muzzled and handcuffed, at a drive-in, while an instructor gives the kids directions on the proper way to use a condom?

How about "safe drinking" class. The parent gets to watch their child learn to drink vodka (your vodka) while the instructor yells out "faster, faster..."

Sheesh!

Here's an interesting set of statistics from the .....State of Florida...(for all places) indicating that graduates have 77% fewer accidents.....

http://www.carcontrol.com/FL-DHSMV.htm

And the homepage of the organization that puts these schools on...

http://www.carcontrol.com/

[Bravo]

Originally Posted by SilverUberXeno

I don't know where you are really, Bravo, but aren't there Driver's Education courses around sponsored by a highschool? I know they have them over the summer.. Yarr.

Read below about the comparison with "drivers ed" which she will go through next Fall at high school...

http://www.carcontrol.com/email.htm

[Slingblade61]

Here in Connecticut you can spend like $900 to put you kid through the special course at the skip barber racing school at Limerock Park....intense skid and control training on an open course and you get to use their cars.

My oldest is only 12 but it is something well worth considering.

The kids only learn car control through experience, unless they get specialized training, most of it will be bad experience.

[Rockford35]

Not that i'm dogging this or anything, that's really not my goal. However, the question does come to mind: "How the hell did we all survive this long without these new fangled sessions?"

Just curious. We have 6 session driver training courses implemented by the highschools with REQUIRE 6 hours of in car training before a driving exam can even be booked.

Does that make me a better driver? Probably not. But how many times in the next two weeks is anyone going to need to remember how to turn out of a wet, heavily accelerated stop? How many people get their license in the summer (here) only to have 4 months of snow and ice with ZERO experience?

You still learn through experiences, it's really as simple as that. Some people pick it up faster than others. That's why some start off in the Walmart parking lot and others are driving the family tractor at 7 years old...

Just my thoughts.

R35

[Slingblade61]

You're still too young to be very introspective, Rock.
I often marvel at my sheer luck over the years regarding vehicles.

When you are a parent (when this happens to you, you'll understand) you want to give your kids every advantage possible.

Drivers ed only teaches you how to drive not how to react in a "situation" on a snowy road or one of a million other possible occurances.

I would hope that my parents would have sent me to "school" had it been available back in the day. I know I will.

[Rockford35]

Originally Posted by Slingblade61

You're still too young to be very introspective, Rock.

Or are you too old that you've become forgetful of "how it was when you were young..."

It's a fact that more adults die every year from falling asleep at the wheel than teens die from speed related deaths. So should we create schools to teach older drivers to keep from falling asleep at the wheel?

I'm not negating the fact that you want your kids to be safe. Or that you want to get the most car-directed education into your kids. What I think would be just as effective, both economically and for a sense of knowing your kids better would be to ACTUALLY DRIVE WITH THEM.

If you're worried your kid is going to die, wouldn't your 40 years of experience be worth it's weight in gold? You even said yourself, "I marvel at my own shear luck..." What's better than a parent teaching the ins and outs of something that really is experienced based?

All the driving schools and education in the world isn't going to stop a kid if they speed or get drunk behind the wheel. In fact, the "more in control" they are during the first year would actually make me believe it may instill a sense of "invicibility" in them.

I know in my first year of driving, i'd be damned if I would drive drunk or speed. Call it a learning experience with my first speeding ticket at 23 years old....

R35