Take the fact that 16-21 year olds are physically incapable of the kind of judgment they'll develop later in life, because their frontal lobe, the part of the brain responsible for judgment, isn't fully developed until about age 24, add in an unhealthy dose of Invincibility Syndrome that convinces them "that won't happen to me", mix with a real lack of experience that is only overcome with time and effort, and you have a recipe for disaster that gets played out every day in this country.
Well, I'm out to change part of that. I can't change physical development, and I can't do much to change attitudes or behavior, but I can teach car control skills that simply don't come naturally to people, so that when a driver finds himself or herself in a challenging situation, they have the skill and the muscle memory to do make the proper response.
Problem is, every 18 year old already considers himself an Expert Driver because the state gave them a license they think deems it so, and becuase, well, they haven't died yet.
Let's face it, 99.999% of the time, driving is ridiculously simple. You steer in the direction you want to go, and you speed up or slow down with your right foot. Easy! Problem is, none of the experience gained during all that time prepares you for what to do in those .001% of occasions that are way outside the norm.
So here we go...all of the following applies whether you're 16, 36, 59 or 70. In fact one time we had a Street Survival class that was undersubscribed, so we opened up to those older than 21. I had a 44 year old student in one class tell me "I've learned more about car control in just one day than I have in all the years of driving leading up to it".
Our brains are conditioned to follow instincts that have developed over a few million years of encountering dangerous animals in the wild and catching fish with our bare hands.
But we've only been driving cars for 5 generations!
This is not nearly enough time to develop instinct, and our instinctual responses to fear behind the wheel are almost always the exact wrong things to do. We tend to stare at what scares us, which when behind the wheel virtually gaurantees we'll drive right into it in a classic case of the human condition known as Object Fixation. We tend to lift off the gas or apply the brakes in an attempt to slow down, which oftentimes makes things worse if we're in a corner, because it causes load to shift off the rear tires and onto the front ones, leading to a spin.
You don't need a big fancy school but if you can swing one, go for it. Meanwhile, keep an eye out for Street Survival clinics. Street Survival, and autocross schools put on by local clubs and the SCCA, and driving events put on by the Porsche Club of America and the BMW Club of America. All three run great events on race tracks that include car control drills beforehand.
The main principles of accident avoidance are:
First and foremost: As an instructor at the Bridgestone Winter Driving School years ago told the class: "There is no substitute for speed control. Because if you know car control, but you're still traveling too fast for conditions, all that means is you're going off with style"
So please, if you think you're going too fast, you probably are.
With that...as I tell my students, it's not enough to miss the deer. Anybody can miss the deer. You have to miss the TREES afterward, that's what matters. A lot of people die trying to miss the deer because they didn't know how to follow through with it.
1) ALWAYS look where you want the car to go, not at what you're afraid you might hit. Your hands follow your eyes and your car follows your hands, but we humans suffer from a condition called Object Fixation. Scared you're going to hit that pole? Stare at it, you'll hit it, 100% guaranteed. Stare at the gap next to it, and that's where you go. Really, really hard lesson to learn without practice.
Object Fixation at Work:
The driver in the above situation came into the corner too fast for his nerves, and he stared at that wall, and by golly, he skidded right into it. If he had only collected his nerves and looked through the corner, I guarantee you he would have made it just fine. He may have had to clean his seats afterward, but he'd have made it. Cars are kinda like horses, they're capable of amazing performance until you treat them wrong or give them the wrong input. You can't blame poor performance on the car or the horse, most often it's the driver or the rider who did something he shouldn't have, that caused the performance to be less than it could have been.
2) Look WAY ahead of the car at all times. Further than you think. Further. Further. This gives our brain time to process information, slows things down for us, averts panic, lets us look where we need the car to go. We can't do anything about where the car is or where it's going for the next full second, because it physically takes that long for the brain to take input, process it, and respond to it. At 60 mph, your car will travel the length of a basketball court before you can even do anything about where it's going. So look way ahead. The faster you go, the more important this becomes. Most people are familiar with magazine-test stopping distances sayin the SuperDuperGT can stop from 60 mph in 120 feet. They don't usually tell you the LumberMaticXL takes almost twice as long:
They also don't take into account reaction time. Look what happens to stopping distance when we add reaction time to the mix:
3) Understand the balance of your car. Your car is only connected to the road by 4 spots where the tires contact the road. These are known as Contact Patches patches, and each is about as big around as a grapefruit:
Think about that for a second. What you do with the controls is manage the size of the patches, and with it, traction. Lift off the gas or apply the brakes, the front patches get bigger, the rear patches get smaller. That means you get more traction in front and less in the rear, until you overwhelm the grip of the front tires. Step on the gas, you get less traction in front and more in the rear, until you overcome the rear tires' grip.
Unfortunately, again, our natural reaction to fear in the car is to look at what we're afraid of (see #1), and then to lift the gas or step on the brake. And gusss when we're most likely to get scared, other than an impending collision? When we're in a corner. What happens? In an effort to slow down, all we do is shift traction to the front and away from the rear and make the car spin. One of the other counter-intuitive things about car control is when the back end is sliding out and you're not on the gas, either give it a little gas or let off the brakes...load transfers to the rear, the rear gets traction, it stops rotating, you save it. It's magic.
Which brings me back to missing the deer. Remember the letters CPR. Correct. Pause. Recover.
Correcting is the easy part. You're sliding sideways, you turn into it. Great. Now what? Well, you now have a whole lot of energy stored in the springs the car is leaning on, and when that energy releases, the car will snap back the other way. You have to anticipate this happening, but it takes a little time...a pause. Correct...pause...RECOVER. Get that wheel back where it needs to be proactively.
This all applies whether the pavement is dry, wet, snowy or icy. The only thing that really changes is how long it takes to occur. The slipperier things are, the slower load transfer occurs, but it does, eventually. So always, always look where you want the car to go.
Another thing we're ingrained to do is when we want the car to turn, we turn the wheel, right? So what do most people do when we get in a situation where we're turning the wheel, but the car isn't turning enough? That's called understeer. What do most people do? We turn the wheel more! This flat-out does not work. It also causes us to panic and stare at the guardrail or tree. Your brain is screaming "it's not working! Turn more! Oh no!" BLAM. The reason it doesn't work is, the front tires don't have enough traction, otherwise the car would be turning the way you want it to. You have to get them more traction to get them to work. The only way to do that, in addition to managing fore/aft weight balance, is to reduce the steering angle. That's right, take steering out of it and the front tires will hook and turn the car. But man oh man does that take discipline.
In an oversteer situation, where the rear of the car is sliding, turning the car more than we want to, the response is to (remember!) Look where you want the car to go, and turn the wheel in that direction. This is known as countersteering. But a very important thing to remember, and which instinct will cause to feel very unnatural, is you may need to let go of the brakes (if you're using them), or even add a little gas. Counterintuitive, to be sure, but what this does is shift load back to the rear tires, giving them traction, and helping stop their slide.
Lastly...WEAR YOUR SEATBELT. The old "I want to be thrown from the crash" is about as relevant as the Flat Earth Society. Remember...you can't control the car if you're not actually at the controls! Many times the first impact isn't the last. There's still some things you can do to control where the car is going, but not if you got bumped out of position. Trust me, you don't want to be just a passenger when half a second before, you were the driver.
See this wreck? Does that look serious enough to kill the driver? I've seen a lot of wrecks in my time, and I'd have to say "no".
But the sad reality is, the driver did die, because he wasn't wearing his seatbelt. So I'll say it again: WEAR YOUR SEATBELTS.
There you go, $800 1-day professional school in a nutshell, minus the actual muscle memory. Spend $60 on a street survival school, or on an autocross school, whatever, but get the experience, it really is an eye-opener and a lifesaver.
One more thing about Street Survival: Tell your friends and family! It only costs $60, and most insurance companies will give you a discount for having taken the program. That $60 will pay for itself in the first year of premium savings.
Please check out www.streetsurvival.org and spread the word.
Here's some quick & dirty before-and-after video from just the emergency lane-change portion from the last time I instructed Street Survival:
Here's some from some other regions:
