Why choose Total Driver for aprofessional experience in driving lessons
Value: There is more to learning to drive, than driving around for an hour. It is about a professional experience in driving lessons for learner and provisional drivers
Practice is fine, first you must know what to practice.
How do you know what you are getting with a driving school, what is their background, experience, what really happens on a driving lesson and how do you know where your teen is really at with their driving? There should be more to a driving lesson than just driving around for an hour!
This is the primary difference in the Total Driver program. Our experience includes working with the most prestigious vehicle manufacturers, BMW, Mercedes Benz, Lexus and others, research from NASA, the US NAVY and is validated though PHD works on driver training and driver performance. It is all based on research. We know what driver training actually is.
With the Total Driver program, it is the full journey in learning to drive, from the introduction of vehicle awareness and maintenance understanding, to high speed motorways, merging, hinterland and rural driving. At each step, you know what is happening, their progress, where and what practice is required.
The focus is to prepare them as a driver, techniques that become part of their new process. Stalling the effect of speed and buying time, so they can see.
It is no different to how to prepare an athlete, a sportsperson, only this is the highest risk activity they will ever undertake. Practice is fine, first you must know what to practice.
By the end of their program, they are prepared, making getting their remaining hours easy.
- No stress
- No yelling
- Just enjoyable family road trips, adventures and outings where you are confident in their driving.
Driver training, or “Driver Development” as I prefer to call it, is about retraining the brains natural process, so we can stall the effect of speed, essentially buying time.
Once we teach them how to buy time, they can see.
Once they can see, then they make completely different decisions. This is what driver training actually is, a series of techniques, knowledge, and skills, that puts the driver in control of what they create, changing their driver
This is achieved by addressing four key pillars of driver development
- Skills via a refined technique, that matches
- Cognitive development, Hand and eye
co-ordination with Postural stability and finally Driver Technique - Emotional development. Having the right mindset is essential, unfortunately, in life, perfect days are not that common. Learning to manage these emotions is essential to making good decisions as a driver, that reduces our risk.
- Environmental: Good Driving is all about good decision making, this means creating a balance between environmental, and by that I just don’t mean roads and weather, it is also about peer response, mechanical empathy and surrounding influences., A basic understanding of the relationship between car and environment, forces, physics and dynamics and how this affects our
decision making abilities. - This is all affected by postural stability
Why is all of this so important?
Well, simply put, No one ever gets the luxury of booking an accident. No one ever tells you any of this information, and this is only the headlines, the tip of the iceberg.
See if you just consider your eyes and vision for a moment, there are three types of vision that we all drive and function with.
- Peripheral
- Tunnel
- Depth.
Now all of this works perfectly in our natural environment, but when you start driving, you introduce speed and our brains cannot process speed. This is where it gets both interesting and scary.
The first thing our brain does is react to the apprehension, it closes our peripheral vision down to Tunnel vision, suddenly we have a compromised window of information, that means every decision we make is now compromised, based on all the information that we did not and could not see.
As the crisis heightens, we lose our tunnel vision as our planning collapses to only our comfort / safe area. For most people that is only three – five metres ahead.
This is why drivers hit the only thing there is to hit. Not because they were bad drivers, but due to a lack of postural stability, a compromised window of information and a shot of adrenalin when they least needed it, our entire threats and hazard process worked against us.
They literally created our own accident.
“Driver training gives you a technique that reverses the natural threats, hazard, perception process. “
This is only one facet of driving technique and driver development. So whilst the Graduated Licensing Scheme (GLS) mandates you do 100 hours of driving with your teen, who prepares you, to prepare them?
Remember my intro at the start of the book.
- How many times when you go for a drive, do you criticize the other drivers you share the road with?
- How often do you watch the news, read the papers, see the internet and find yourself shocked at just how often people crash cars, the trauma, the pain for those left behind and think “There has to be a better way.”
We support you, as we prepare them
The Total Driver program forms a three way partnership between parents, students and your driver development coach. (Driving instructor in industry terms)
Each step of the program is designed to create the change in driver behaviour by re writing the brains natural process of managing threats and hazard information.
Then we include you with live assessments, so you are informed, there is no such thing as a student graduating the Total Driver program who is not proficent, capable, competent and confident as a driver.
You will know where they are at, benchmarked to our key parameters we are aiming for
Practice is fine, first you must know what to practice.
Our mentoring program breaks down the process at each and every step, giving you the information in bite size chunks on how to take them for their practice drivers.
Pictures, videos, even how to find the streets and manage the environment with specific activities to rebuild the cognitive process.
Your job is parenting and you do that extraordinarily well. Our job is to guide you all through the journey in learning to drive.