You’re at a seminar for safe driving, a requirement of your employment. The speaker asks everyone who believes they are a “good driver” to raise their hand. All of the 250 participants raise their hand, including you. Then, the speaker asks everyone who believes that “other drivers are the problem drivers” to raise their hand, the same 250 people do so, including you.

Does this mean that 249 of the people in this seminar might be thinking that you are the problem? Just who is the problem? Couldn’t be me, I’ve had my license for many years now, I’m a great driver and I passed my driving exam 30 years ago on the first try……no, it’s all the other drivers out there that cause all the problems, not me.

As an active behind-the-wheel Certified Driveologist™ (expert driving instructor) for well over 30 years, I come across this arrogant attitude on a daily basis. Since I’ve created a brand new highly-advanced driver training methodology, the vast majority of my lessons occur with parents observing me teach their new teenage drivers my new methodology from the back seat. At the beginning of the lesson, I usually ask the parent if they would classify themselves as a “good driver” and the response is “yes, of course I am” probably 99% of the time.

During the lesson, when I begin to discuss where the new teen driver should be practicing their driving, most parents start talking about their own driving fears and inabilities.  The parents use these fears as a reason why they aren’t going to be able to practice driving with their teenager in those specific areas or situations. The most common driving fears I hear from the backseat are freeways, mountains, heavy traffic, downtown, night driving, fog or heavy rain. Many parents tell me they’re personally afraid of driving on freeways, downtown, or mountain roads.

What happened to the self classified “good driver” statement? A parent who is afraid of freeway or mountain driving isn’t likely to take their teen driver on the freeway or mountain roads. The result of this situation is that the new teen driver doesn’t receive enough driving practice to become skilled in these areas and adopts the driving fears of their parents. In talking with these parents, I usually find that “their parents” (the teenager’s grandparents) exhibited the same fears…..and so the pattern continues to the next generation.

The problem comes from thinking the “Driver’s License” is the ultimate achievement in determining a person’s driving skill. It isn’t, it’s not even close. The driver’s license is no more than a cruel joke that gives a false sense of security to un-suspecting parents and also serves as an “achievement-based justification” to excuse parents from continuing on with the driver training process because the licensing process is complete. The driving skill level needed for a 16 year-old to get a driver’s license is a One-Star Driver skill level which by coincidence is the same skill level needed to be a prime candidate for a roadside memorial.

The One-Star California DMV driving exam lasts between 4 ½ to 11 minutes and DOES NOT address any of the advanced driving skills needed to drive safely on the road. Eighty percent (80%) of new drivers are involved in a reportable accident within the first 3 years resulting in a twenty percent (20%) success rate.  Driving is also the #1 killer of teens and has been for over 70 years.

If you are comfortable with a One-Star Driver skill level for your new teenage driver knowing there’s a 4 in 5 chance of them being involved in an accident, then I would classify you as a One-Star Parent. Knowing how to “drive” and knowing how to “teach driving” are two completely different skill sets yet the DMV and most parents assume they are the same skill set.  If you want your new teenage driver to have the driving skill level of a 5-Star Driver, then be a 5-Star Parent by becoming educated on how to “teach driving” and do what it takes to get them to that point. I’ve created the 5-Star Driver program to help 5-Star Parents achieve that goal.

John Cullington

If you haven’t read How to Set Up Your Teen for a Traffic Accident: Part 1, please do so before reading this post as the solution for preventing traffic accidents is multifaceted. In Part 1, I expressed my views on the inept Regulatory Requirements for passing a driving exam.  This post addresses the effectiveness of the Driver Education and Training Industry.  I’m bound to step on some toes so let the fireworks begin.

Driver Education and Training Schools:

As an active driving instructor (driving school owner and operator) in the private sector for more than 30 years, I’ve personally trained over 10,000 clients (from 15 to 101 years of age) so my assessment of the Driver Education and Training Industry is based upon actual experience instead of just theory.  My expert assessment of the industry is that the current driver education and training methodology is fundamentally flawed. This fundamentally flawed methodology was created as a result of a resolution by the National Safety Council in 1935 and installed in our high school curriculum in 1949 (and is still currently taught nationwide). Driving has been the #1 killer of teenagers for over 70 years so how can the Driver Education and Training Industry claim any success. Albert Einstein once stated that the definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over again but expecting a different result.  In my opinion, this is what the vast majority of the Driver Education and Training Industry does.

As I earlier stated, I’m an active behind-the-wheel driving instructor in California.  For the last several years, about 30% of my clients come to me after they’ve already received driver training from other so-called professional driving instructors.  Most of the time, these clients are teenagers who’ve scared their parents to the extreme or are classified by their parents as not having the ability to learn how to drive.  I find it very interesting that the focus of the “inability to learn how to drive” problem falls on the new driver instead of on the person trying to teach the new driver.  Since I don’t have any difficulty teaching these supposedly “difficult new drivers” how to drive, one must conclude the lack of knowledge resides with the parent or so-called professional driving instructor.

A big part of the problem is that driving instructors (including parents who teach their teens to drive) are mainly concerned with passing the driving exam and receiving a little piece of plastic called a driver’s license….in other words, they teach to the difficulty of the test.  The driver’s license isn’t the goal, that little piece of plastic never protected anyone in a traffic accident.  Becoming a safe and competent driver should be the goal. Many driving schools and/or instructors brag about their first time test passing statistics, like that’s something to be proud of.  Eighty percent (80%) of new teen drivers will have a reportable accident within the first three years so getting a teenager to pass a driver’s license test seems to have a twenty percent (20%) success rate at avoiding an accident within the first three years.  For further proof, check out the DeKalb Study at NHTSA.

It’s time for parents to stop pretending that the driving school industry, as a whole, is competent enough to prevent driving from being the #1 killer of teens.  Parents also need to realize that “knowing how to drive” and “knowing how to teach driving” are two totally separate skills and should not be conflated.  Learning how to become a knowledgeable Parent Driving Instructor is essential to teach their teen how to become a 5 Star Driver.

John Cullington

Driving is the #1 killer of teenagers in the U.S. and has been for over 70 years.  Why have we as a society allowed this to occur for so long?  During the first 10 years of the Afghan-Iraq war, approximately 6,800 U.S. soldiers sadly lost their lives, the news of their deaths were on the front page of newspapers and breaking news on the nightly newscasts.  In comparison, during the same 10 year time-frame, 392,603 men, women, and children were killed due to traffic accidents in the U.S. alone……an amount over 57 times the number of the U.S. soldiers killed.  Where’s the outrage?

It appears our society has apathetically accepted that these traffic deaths are largely unavoidable and just part of the risk of driving.  As an expert in the field of driver training (I’ve personally trained over 10,000 students), I can tell you without any reservation that this premise is wrong.  There is a solution.  There are many facets to the problem and they all have to be understood to solve the problem.

Regulatory Requirements:
During this last summer, I spent some time visiting several of our local DMV’s (California Department of Motor Vehicles) to observe the behind-the-wheel driving exams.  I kept hearing from my clients that the driving exams were as short as 4 minutes, claims that I thought were exaggerated.  They weren’t. The first driving exam I personally witnessed, from the time the student first backed out of her parking space until she returned and shut off her car was 4 minutes and 30 seconds.  I was sure the student had failed but when I asked her how she did, she told me she passed and had only made one mistake.  Four minutes and thirty seconds folks……just let that thought settle in for a moment.  The most dangerous activity that young teenage girl will probably ever do is drive and she received her driver’s license after a 4 MINUTE AND 30 SECOND DRIVING EXAM!

I witnessed well over 25 driving exams at several of the DMV’s in my area (Central California) and I discovered the driving exams generally lasted between 6 to 11 minutes with an average of about 8 ½ minutes.  The tests that I witnessed did not include any freeway driving, 3-point turnabouts, lane changing in heavy traffic, left turns at intersections, 4-way stops, and about 20% of the time, the examiner didn’t even have them prove they could reverse in a straight line next to a curb.  To say these driving exams were a complete joke would be an understatement of monumental proportions.

If you think a driver’s license is an accurate measure of driving competency, think again. Many parents assume their licensed teens are safe because the driver’s license is a measure of “driver competency”.  It isn’t.  The regulatory requirements are woefully inept to insure “driver safety and competency” but are very cost effective for “driver licensing”.

Five years ago I turned on the cameras during an actual California DMV Driving Exam to show how inept the driving exam was, it was about 15 minutes back then.  Now, five years later, the DMV has shaved about 6 minutes off of their current driving exam.  View the You-Tube video of that driving exam here to verify what I’m saying.

How to Set Up Your Teen for a Traffic Accident…Part 2 will be out soon.  Please feel free to subscribe to my e-mail notification or RSS to receive my new posts (your e-mail info will not be shared with anyone)

John Cullington

P.S.  Please check out my new 5 Star Driver Training Video Series to learn how to make your teen a 5 Star Driver.

You’ve just spent the holidays with your family from out of town and they’re getting ready to hit the road to return home.  As they start to drive away you wave and say, “Drive safe”.  Why do we say these words?  Do we say this thinking our words will actually have a positive effect on the way they’ll drive on the way home or has this phrase just become the polite thing to say to express our love and concern.

When someone says to us “Drive Safe”, do we conscientiously process a driving plan different from our normal driving patterns in order to drive safer?  I don’t think we do.  I think the normal response and/or thought process is to politely wave as if to say thank you for their concern and drive away believing that we already know how to drive safe and we will do so.

So let’s talk about safety.  Over the last 10 years, 392,603 men, women, and children were killed in traffic accidents along with over 3 million injuries (per year)…..and that’s just in the U.S alone.  Of those traffic injuries and deaths, 16% are attributable to teenage drivers while 84% are attributable to adult drivers.  Yes, the adult drivers are in the majority.

There are 2 major aspects to safe driving:

1.  Skill

2.  Behavior

Both are important to safe driving but telling someone to “Drive Safe” in reality is only a weak attempt at addressing the behavior aspect of driving and since most drivers already believe they know how to safely drive, the words basically fall on deaf ears.

Try something new.  When you want your words to have a real impact, try addressing the “skill” side of the equation.  Example:  Hey Uncle Joe, on your way home please don’t be in a hurry.  Keep an extra-large following distance so you can control the traffic behind you.  Don’t drive in other vehicle’s blind spots and please don’t make lane changes into other vehicle’s blind spots that are two lanes over. Also, when you stop to get snacks at the market, make sure the kids know that the little white lights on the back of cars in the parking lot tell them the car is in reverse and getting ready to back up so they should never walk behind those cars. Hey Aunt Mable, I know you’re upset that Uncle Joe didn’t get you that 5 carat diamond pendant for Christmas but please wait until after you get home to discuss it, I don’t want Uncle Joe to be emotionally distracted from his driving.  Apply these SKILLS and you will all get home safe.

Now which method do you think would more effective in preventing accidents?

John Cullington

P.S.  If you’d like to know how Uncle Joe can control traffic by keeping an extra-large space in front of him, pick up my book, “The Cullington Driving Concepts…Empowering Parents To Teach Crash-Proof Driving” or sign up for my 5 Star Video Driver Training Program to make both you and your teenage driver , 5 Star Drivers.  Both are available at 5StarDriver.com.  

There has been a lot of press about the problem with distracted teen drivers primarily due to texting and the use of cell phones in general.  With the focus being on the evil “cell phone” or in other words, the “object”, it’s easy to say, “just put down the cell phone and the problem is solved”.  It isn’t solved!  The #1 killer of teenagers is driving and that statistic occurred long before cell phones were even invented.

The real problem lies with the lack of proper driver training.  Distractions are everywhere and they come in all shapes and sizes but one of the most dangerous distractions is: Thinking about something that has nothing to do with what you are doing at the present time.  While you are driving, if you start thinking about something else other than driving, that is distracted driving.

We cannot eliminate distractions, it’s impossible.  What we can do is to teach the student driver not to be the effect of distractions ……… I always tell my students that nobody can distract you without your permission.

I wrote a section in my book titled, “Distractions: The Problem and the Training Solution”.  As an expert in the field of driver training, I’ve found that distractions are an extremely important part of their driver training.  During the more advanced parts of their training, I purposely try to distract my students into making mistakes (like turning the wrong way on a one-way street) while simply talking with them about their boyfriend, girlfriend, grades, sports, etc.  I make it a training game, a distraction training game.  Of course I won’t let my students make the mistakes but I prove to them, the mistakes would have been made had I not been there to stop them.

The realization by the student driver that by continuing to distract them into making major mistakes while they were expecting the distraction is a very powerful training tool because the student realizes they could easily be distracted by their best friend when they weren’t expecting it.  The more distraction training you give a driver, the greater their ability to resist being distracted.

I spent over eight hours of intense distraction training with my daughter and was rewarded when she took her first trip to San Francisco at age 17.  She called me and thanked me for all of the distraction training I gave her because as she put it, “it isn’t that hard to drive in San Francisco in fact, it’s pretty easy.”

If you don’t teach a student driver how to control their own attention, you condemn them to the effects of distractions.  Giving the student the ability to control their own attention is the key.

John Cullington

Please check out my new 5 Star Driver Training Video Series

Having been an active instructor for over 30 years, the answer is simple.  You teach teens diagnosed with ADD, ADHD, Asperger’s syndrome, or Bipolar disorder the way they need to be taught.  That’s it, just teach them the way they learn best and the problem is solved.

Over the last several decades, labeling teenagers seems to have become a national past-time.  It seems like the teens that are looked upon as “normal” escape the labeling process but the teens diagnosed with disorders listed in the title of this post, have big labels pasted on their foreheads. When it comes to teaching driving, I’ve found these labels create more of a hindrance than they help. In fact, I don’t think they help at all.

I think these labels are used by some professionals to hide their own ignorance and/or inability. It’s so much easier for a professional to say, “Your teen has (enter label) and that’s why he can’t learn how to drive like a normal teen”. What this “professional” is really saying, “This teen doesn’t respond to my teaching method like most of the other teens do and I don’t have the knowledge, capability, or want to put out the effort to alter my method of teaching”.  The difference between a professional and an expert? An expert makes the necessary changes and adaptations to surpass all others …. a professional doesn’t.

There are several different learning styles and no two students learn exactly the same way.  If a teen learns how to drive in a very short amount of time, they might be labeled as gifted or normal.  If a teen takes a long time to learn how to drive, the labels aren’t quite as inspiring. This apparently easy method of assessing the driving competency of a teen is dangerous.  Many times, the fast learning (normal) student may learn “too quickly” without respecting their mortality and may fail to lock in all of the safe driving attributes presented, leaving hidden knowledge gaps. This situation creates the illusion of a competent driver.  A slower learning student is usually more concerned about their mortality and strives harder to keep all of the safe driving attributes in place by making sure they fully understand all of the presented knowledge.  Very often, the slower learning student turns out to be the better driver so how quickly one learns is irrelevant.

Whenever I have a student where the parent has warned me of let’s say, ADHD. Here’s what I say to the student:

Instructor:  I’ve been told that you’ve been diagnosed with ADHD. I don’t care about labels in this car. Do you really want to learn how to drive?

Student: Yes

Instructor:  If I were to place $1 million in cash on the dashboard and tell you that you could keep the $1 million if you keep 100% of your attention on learning how to drive during this two-hour lesson, would you do it?

Student: Yes.

Instructor:  If I take away the $1 million, have I taken away your ability to keep your attention on the lesson?

Student:  No.

Instructor:  So what you’re telling me is that you have the ability to keep your attention on learning how to drive if you choose to do so. Do you choose to keep your attention on this lesson for the full two-hours?

Student: Yes.

I now have a commitment from the student and I’ll remind them of it whenever their attention starts to lapse, which it will, so expect it and accept it.  You can only teach a student as fast as their ability to learn allows so be extremely patient and extremely thorough. It really doesn’t matter whether a student learns slowly or fast, the only thing that’s important is that the student learns completely in order to become a competent and safe driver.

John Cullington

It’s back to school time and everyone is rushing around trying to get acclimated to their new schedules so let’s put those driver training lessons on the back burner.  There just isn’t time with football and cheer practices going on every day after school and you can’t take your teenager out of class to take their driver training lessons…..after all, it’s only driving.  Let’s squeeze in their driving lessons in the evening after a full day of school and after they finish football practice, when they’re dead tired is surely the best time for our teens to learn the most dangerous activity they’ll do in their lives.

Are you insane?  It’s only driving?  Driving is the #1 killer of teenagers and has been for the last 70 years.  We want our children to get good grades so they can get into a good college or university but the one activity they’ll do almost every day of their lives is drive.  So they get accepted to Cal or Stanford, they still have to drive there.  You want to risk getting that knock on your door at 3:00am?  In actuality, driver training is more important than all of the other school classes and activities because driving is the #1 killer of teenagers.  I checked and couldn’t find the number of teenagers killed because they missed a Spanish or Geography class.  By the way, driving is also the #1 killer of 4 year-olds to 34 year-olds. Take your teenager out of school for their driving lessons when they’re fresh and rested so they can assimilate as much information about safe driving as possible.

Next, parents need to become qualified to teach their teens.  Knowing how to “drive” and knowing how to “teach driving” are quite different and new teenage drivers are the ones that will suffer the consequences of poor training.  Check out http://www.5StarDriver.com to become a qualified Parent Driving Instructor, your teenager will thank you and you’ll sleep better when they’re out driving on their own.