Editorial: A Case for Advanced Driver Training

In response to Jack Baruth’s editorial, Mike Stone writes:

I have been making the same 60-mile round trip commute for many years, my route consisting of rural 2 lane roads and expressways. During the course of every winter, regular as clockwork, I see 5 to 10 vehicles that have run off the road in icy, snowy or wet conditions. Some of these are clearly a result of excessive speed but on two occasions, I have been behind a vehicle that was travelling at or below a safe speed when it simply lost control. What could cause such a thing? A clue lies in a well-documented statistic that 93% of all traffic accidents are the result of human error.

Although cars have been with us for more than 100 years, driving a motor vehicle is an inherently foreign environment because the human brain was not designed to travel faster than running speed. Our “fight or flight” mechanisms become overloaded in panic situations when behind the wheel because we are not equipped to handle the rapidity of events. The result is often a situation where the brain is unable to process the inputs and send the appropriate messages to the body quickly enough and we “freeze” or we make an instinctive, possibly inappropriate, response.

The “brain freeze” condition is well known in military organizations where long periods of boredom can be punctuated by short spells of terror. The counter is to instil a series of automated responses (conditioned reflexes) so that individuals are able to respond appropriately to a given threat. The New York Police Department has 36,000 officers and in 2006, the force encountered 60 instances where officers had to fire their weapons in response to a threat. 1 This means that each officer has a 1 in 600 chance that he/she will be involved in a shooting incident in a given year. Despite this low probability, officers undergo regular firearms and threat response training in order to reinforce their conditioned reflexes and override brain freezing. Airline pilots carry out the same type of conditioned reflex training to meet emergencies that most will likely never encounter in their entire careers.

Driving a motor vehicle has some similar characteristics to the high-risk professions noted above—long periods of boredom and mundane tasks occasionally punctuated by short periods of unexpected stress. Yet the training that most drivers receive tends to concentrate on the mundane, mechanical aspects of operating a vehicle and we develop conditioned reflexes that may be completely inappropriate in emergencies.

In 2006, there were 250.8 million passenger vehicles 2 in the U.S. and 5.2 million 3 were involved in a collision of some description. This means that each vehicle had a 1 in 48 chance of being in a collision—12 times more likely than a NY police officer had of firing his/her weapon! Viewed from this perspective, it seems almost reckless that the average driver can only count on brain freeze and possibly inappropriate conditioned reflexes to deal with unexpected or stressful situations.

Advanced driver training is designed in part to instil revisions to our conditioned reflexes under certain conditions so that we are better able to handle emergencies and to refine our typical driving behaviours. A note of clarification here, advanced driver training in this context is limited to defensive driving and winter driving courses. I specifically exclude autocross, high-performance and track courses because the skills learned have almost no application to everyday driving.

Advanced driving courses teach situational avoidance and embed the continual, almost subconscious use of “what if” scenarios while driving. A driver has the opportunity to “feel” the dynamics of a vehicle in a controlled environment. How does a vehicle behave just before it loses adhesion with the road and how is adhesion restored? What does it feel like when two wheels on the same side leave the road or lose their grip? It is infinitely better to answer these questions in the safety of a course environment than on a public road. Once these situations have been experienced, the driving input corrections readily become conditioned reflexes and much of the potential for panic is removed if/when they occur in real world driving.

There is a suggestion that driver training can lead to overconfidence and more aggressive driving. This abstract is difficult to prove or disprove although a countervailing argument would be that a naturally aggressive driver who attends a course might simply become a more knowledgeable aggressive driver.

If airline pilots invest hundreds of hours training to handle a statistically unlikely situation, it is plain common sense for the average driver to invest a relatively short time preparing for a distinct possibility.