Learner’s Overload, Simon Hill
With a newly minted learner’s license in hand and ICBC’s “Tuning Up For Drivers” guide thoroughly reviewed, my son and I were ready to hit the street. Or actually an empty parking lot, because our family car has a five-speed manual transmission (or what a learner might call an “auto-traumatic”). And when you’re learning to drive stick you have to start with the very basics: how to get the car rolling and stopped again without stalling or drama.
The theory of clutch is easy, and after years of driving it becomes second nature. But learning it is undeniably challenging, especially if the clutch has a narrow friction point like our BMW has. Still, modern electronic fuel injection somewhat aids the process because provided you release the clutch slowly enough, the engine management computer will work to keep the idle speed up. So on flat ground you can often begin learning using just the clutch pedal, graduating to clutch-and-gas as you gain confidence.
After half an hour of practice, Ian had advanced to the point where he could launch without stalling at least half the time, and stop confidently enough for me to feel semi-comfortable in the co-driver’s seat. It was time to graduate to second gear, which meant moving to a real road. I drove us to a wide, quiet residential crescent and, after affixing our ICBC-supplied magnetic learner’s “L” sticker to the back of the car, Ian took the wheel, adjusted his seat and mirrors, checked appropriately for traffic and pulled out… into his first ordeal.
John-Paul Sartre wrote that “Hell is other people.” Presumably this is because he learned to drive in Vancouver. As Ian got going in first gear, a 4×4 Ram truck entered the crescent behind us and immediately latched onto our bumper. Never mind that the crescent is two lanes wide so passing would be easy, and never mind the prominent “L” sticker on our car, the Ram driver was determined to give us a mirror full of grille.
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It was at that point I decided I needed a clip-on auxiliary mirror to better monitor what’s going on behind us. I also found myself wishing that BC’s “L” sticker was much larger. Doesn’t anyone notice these things, or do they just like tailgating terrified teens? Mind you, as my colleague Steven points out, at least we have learner’s stickers in BC, unlike Ontario where they get… nothing.
Our next few lessons went much better. For an hour at a time, Ian and I would cruise flat residential streets, practicing starts, stops, and turns until eventually we were ready to try some urban highway driving near the university. (The take-home lesson from this being that after 15 minutes driving at 80 km/h, the teenage brain has a hard time adjusting back down to 50 km/h – I found myself wishing for a secondary brake pedal.) In between driving lessons, we watched instructional online videos from the U.S. and Britain — sadly there’s precious little Canadian content out there.
Following our sixth lesson, I asked Ian what he’d like to do next. “I’d like to be able to drive when I go to music class with mom,” he answered. This seemed do-able, as the favoured route is a quiet side road, but I didn’t count on two things: First, the parking lot we’d be exiting has a slight incline (the dreaded manual-transmission hill start), and second, there was construction on the main road, so our normally quiet side route was alive with impatient commuters (the take-home lesson being to not just choose your routes and timing carefully, but also get familiar with the local construction schedules).
After stalling twice on the incline Ian was tense and determined to succeed, so on the third attempt he gunned it… and promptly ran into what the army calls “task saturation.” This, I found out later from John Jacobsen at Driving Unlimited, is why they believe in starting all new drivers out in automatic cars, only graduating to standard shift lessons once the students have mastered the basics of driving. “We find it takes about 85 percent of a new driver’s concentration just to drive the car down the road. And if it takes 35 percent of their concentration to work the clutch and gears, they just can’t always provide enough attention to do both,” Jacobsen explains.
What can result is a momentary freeze-up, just like with an overworked computer: Ian launched out of the parking lot with a squawk of tires, the throttle buried in his attempt to avoid another stall. With the front wheels turned right to exit the parking lot, the car shot onto the road, arcing towards the cars parked by the curb. Meanwhile Ian’s synapses were so busy processing how to get off the throttle, that steering just wasn’t happening. Which is why an experienced co-driver is critical. And why the experts recommend at least a little practice reaching across and taking over the steering – you need to be able to do so promptly and effectively.
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Our day’s lesson was over. Ian was so rattled by the event – and by the impatient rat-running commuter in the Toyota RAV4 who subsequently tailgated him, horn blaring, all the way down the residential street as he tried to find a place to pull over — that he refused to do anything further that afternoon save a few parking-lot practice starts.
All of which is why I ended up organizing something I now wish I’d thought of earlier: some basic car-handling drills, set up using cardboard boxes (on a decommissioned section of the old Molson Indy track, no less). I also did something I never expected I’d do: I arranged some professional lessons for Ian in an automatic car, courtesy of the new Mercedes-Benz Driving Academy for New Drivers….
Next time on The Teen Driving Chronicles:
In the third and final installment of the teen driving chronicles, the experts show how it’s done, the kids get their say, and Simon and Steven find out if they get passing grades as co-drivers.
