Defensive Driving Course Review

 

Defensive Driving course
We all believe we are above average drivers.

Defensive Driving Course Review

Defensive Driver Course Review. Thank you for participating in our Defensive Driving Course, We really hope you had a fun, rewarding day with us and took home a life time of skills and knowledge to start applying to each and every drive.
The biggest take away we would like you to have is that everything about how we want to make decisions, is based on our natural environment and is in conflict with what is required as a driver.
From how we want to look, what we want to see, it is all for our natural environment, walking and running.
the moment we put you behind the wheel, we introduce speed and unfortunately our brains cannot process speed.
So every activity we put you through was to reverse this and use it to our advantage, to stall the effect of speed, created controlled actions, not uncontrolled over actions and buy time. This reduces fatigue, increases your knowledge, which changes your driving behaviour. from reactive to proactive LEARN MORE
Practice is fine, first you must know what to practice. As we reinforced, if you don’t practice these skills with each and every drive, they won’t be there for when you really need them. Before you know it, it will become your new normal, reducing your driver fatigue, improving your perception and proactive driving skills and reducing the inherent risk in driving. This is why we have the Defensive Driver Course Review.
There is no such thing as a Dangerous Car, road or conditions, it is how the driver manages the environment that creates the risk, a lot has changed and been learnt since you taught yourself how to drive.  LEARN MORE
Now, how do you know these new skills and techniques work? At the beginning of the course, we told you we would halve your stopping distance, double your speed and give you the ability to brake and turn

Defensive Driving course
How you sit, where you look is everything, reducing fatigue by over 30%

and the same time. This we achieved in our first hour.

Below are some key points and we will keep you updated through out the year as tips, ideas and even accessories that will improve your every drive.

Defensive Driving Course Seating and balance – Postural Stability

Making yourself part of the car is integral not only being in control, but being relaxed. Steering technique alone can reduce driver fatigue by over 30%
Tension and adrenaline cause our peripheral “big picture vision to collapse, meaning we look and aim for the threat, not the opportunity.

Defensive Driving Course – peripheral vision and steering technique

Our eyes pick and chose what it thinks we should see, not what is really there. Yes, the boy look is real, biological and we all suffer from it. Women have more than twice the photo receptor cells in their eyes than us guys, That is one of the reasons we are always in trouble with the ladies.
Defensive Driving Course
The challenge is our natural process is designed for walking and running, not driving. It is like taking the operating system out of a PC and putting it into a MAC and wonder why it crashes.

So to master this we participated in a slalom course with a difference.

  • Driving using peripheral vision, practical exercises, on not looking where you are, but looking where you want to be, using not only the windscreen, but the drivers and passengers windows for information.
  • 1st exercise. Row of witches hats with one hat suspended in the distance.

We got you to drive,  weaving in and out of traffic cones whilst looking at an object in the distance not the cones

Aim– To gain confidence with use of peripheral vision and looking ahead whilst driving.

  • Vision through corners, using the side windows
  • Risk avoidance driving strategies “risk o metre”
  • Planning whilst driving

Vision and steering technique for cornering and maneuvering.  We then expanded on this to apply into a real world situation. Looking through corners, for the section of road you cannot see yet. Anticipating the decisions, steering commitment, speed, variables.

What we really did was slow down the information and buy time. This reduces mental fatigue, increases anticipation and gets your more involved in proactive driving.
To practice and reinforce your steering technique, watch these videos

Defensive Driving Course – Braking and avoid

As we stated above, we not only doubled your speed, but we halved your braking distance and built technique so you can brake, turn and avoid to not be part of someone else’s crash. For Pilots over 70% of there training is what to do when something goes wrong, yet, no one ever practices braking technique or emergency stops. Even when people are teaching learner drivers, they do not ever teach braking technique or emergency stops and it is not an evaluation criteria as part of the driving test. But it is a part of the Defensive Driver Course Review.

In addition to the above, we also gave you control. The car went from being unstable and unpredictable to being like a cat, always landing on its feet with grip, poise and more in reserve.

Defensive Driving Course
Tyre tread is a water pump and its condition is imperative in the wet

We also learnt about tyres, the most important part of the car. LEARN MORE

Our braking technique, what you need to apply every time you use the brakes is

  1. Brace, Support your body weight with your left leg on the footrest
  2. Brush, role your right foot, middle toe to big toe as you settle the car
  3. Bury, squeeze with your big toe, pushing hard into the pedal. the resistance behind the pedal is the tyre grip, the car is actively telling you how much grip it has with the road surface. if the resistance starts to fall away, or get vague, then you are exceeding the tyres dynamic grip, so just keep the foot pressure there and then after the feeling returns start chasing the pedal again.

The reason this works at providing grip as well as reducing stopping distance is that as the cars weight is now being moved progressively, you are stopping with four tyres, not just two. Additionally as the weight of the car comes onto the chassis and tyres, the tyres flatten out and increase their grip, which means you can do more with them.

Defensive Driving Course tyres and tyre management

Defensive Driving Course.
The most important part of the car and the least understood and commonly neglected.

Tyres, are the most important part of the car and the least understood or maintained. Tyre pressure is critical as it creates the shape of the tyre so when everything about driving is an equation of force vs grip, and tyre pressure creates the tyres shape and therefor performance, then tyre pressure is critical to your ability to be in control when everything is out of control

Our key outcomes from our braking activities were

  • Braking demonstration importance of following distance what affects following distance, type of vehicle, tyres and pressures, weight- passengers- luggage.
  • Braking distances with different speeds, how long does a car take to stop
  • Two second gap importance’s and variations
  • Different crisis, different paths to avoid
  • Recovering from brake induced loss of control

This is how we learn to drive to the conditions, as the grip the tyres generate is directly proportional to road surface and condition. The “weight” or “feel” the pedal generates is related to this grip. This tells us

  1. a) The level of grip the road surface offers
  2. b) How much brake pedal pressure we can use before we lose control.
  3. c) How this affects our traveling speed and distances in changing conditions and circumstance.

Defensive Driving Course Road Drive

Here is where we brought all the skills together in a real world environment. Balance, steering, looking through corners, slowing down the intake of information and at the same time, buying time. This reduces fatigue, increases your knowledge and changes the decision making process of you as a driver, you have now gone from Reactive Driving skills to Proactive. This is just part of the bi picture required to bring about the change in driver behaviour so you are now in control of what you create, instead of hanging on, getting fatigued and creating the very crash you are desperately trying to avoid  LEARN MORE

Learning this is just the beginning, if you don’t pick something to practice with each and every drive, it will not become  what we call Muscle Memory. Really what we achieved during the program was two fold, to change the decision making process, using our big picture peripheral vison, so we can see. Then we implemented technique, so we had controlled actions, not uncontrolled over actions.

Our decision making process, “embodied cognitive skills” will take constant reinforcement for it to become our new normal, without this practice, your driving will go back to its original version and we all saw the evidence of that once we introduced a bit of competition into the events.

This is a key challenge every driver faces and the key aspect that we focus on in all of our driving programs, so as we stated during our program this is the basics, we have simply put the tool kit in place, not it take practice with each and every drive for it to become our new natural way. the benefits are reduced stress, fatigue, more enjoyable drives

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Graduates of Total Driver have a 400% reduction in accidents over the first 3 years of obtaining their license, in comparison to the national average*.

The question we ask all supervisors:

“Will you bet your child’s life you have the skills to teach the art of driving?”