A tragic case and good grounds for making professional instruction a legal requirement.
www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-leeds-16288388
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Sad incident but may be an isolated one.
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Even when I was an ADI I was against compulsory professional tuition, anyone with commonsense can teach someone to drive.
Accidents involving learners in private cars are very rare, it becomes apparant to the supervising driver in a matter of minutes whether the pupil is going to be a danger and the lesson is instantly abandoned and wife/husband/son.daughter is packed off to a driving school.
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Didn't in this case though.
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Supervising driver should also have been charged with the same offence. He was responsible for allowing her to drive the car without knowing the basics. IE how to stop.
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Like Zeddo I cannot understand how the supervising driver escaped a charge. He failed to ensure she knew how to start/stop, let her start in an unsafe place (why not go to an industrial estate?) and failed to plan for if the car started to run away.
Last edited by: Bromptonaut on Wed 21 Dec 11 at 19:02
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He probably escaped a charge because he would have had no effective way of stopping the car if his wife hit the gas instead of the brake, which I assume to be the case. Were he an ADI in a dual controlled car it would have been a very different situation.
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All the more reason to think ahead and pick your location to allow some margin of safety if something did go wrong.
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My dad made me get up at 5:00am and we drove in the local car park at 5:30am when I started to learn to drive :D Not much chance of hitting anything there.
I also agree an isolated idiot but I also think the supervisor should have been charged.
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I've been driving regularly and safely for 22 years, but I wouldn't dream of teaching a new driver. Advising a qualified but inexperienced one, maybe, but for me, anything more basic is best left to the experts.
There's also the thought that bad habits - and we all have them, even me - get passed to a new generation of drivers when some professional instruction could bring learners up to modern standards. For example, I know drivers with teenage children who (the parent, not the child) change down gear by gear on motorway off-slips, which no ADI would teach. RR's position is interesting; I'd like to hear some more.
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The government view is:
It is unlikely that anyone except an approved driving instructor (ADI) has the experience, knowledge and training to teach you properly. Learning safe driving habits from the start will improve the safety of yourself and other road users.'
I wouldn't disagree
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Those who present themselves for the driving test without any professional instruction have a higher pass rate than those who have learnt with an ADI. That interesting fact came from the DSA themselves when I was still in the job.
Of course, the reason for that is that when dad starts teaching his offspring to drive he will get shot of them pretty damn quick if there is any danger of a scratch on his car, let alone a major prang. One in every so many will prove to have a natural talent so dad will take them right through to the driving test where they have a high chance of passing first time, whereas the poor old professional ADI is lumbered with all the planks who had dad browning his pants after five minutes.
It is a self-selecting process as to whether people have professional instruction or not, the test requirements are available to anyone from numerous DVD's and books, it's all basic common sense with no hidden secrets. The ADI scores in having the skill to teach those who are not natural drivers, but there is no reason to prevent those who have from learning with relatives or friends.
The accident in the OP is indeed a tragic incident, but also a very rare one. Hard cases make bad laws and there is no call for panic over an isolated incident. People have been killed on official driving lessons too.
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I guess the difficulty in prosecuting the instructor (charges were dropped) would be in proving that the driver had not been familiarised with the controls, particularly the brakes.
It is possible that she had been given reasonable instruction but simply panicked. Without dual controls there was nothing he could do.
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Hard to stop a car with a hand brake if under acceleration but don't know if he tried. Don't have enough of the facts to know why they didn't prosecute but CPS obviously thought case wouldn't stand up
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I could just drive, when it came to it. But not at all well. It took ages before I was any good. Even passing the driving test took a couple of lessons from someone to explain the sort of exaggerated and highly obvious care, speed reduction and so on that were needed to get through that formality. Then I continued to rush rapidly about, not lethally but far from coolly, until I did some minicabbing at least ten years later. Becoming a reasonably brisk, reasonably safe driver in modern road conditions is not the work of a year or two.
Of course when I started things were very different. The main differences were traffic volume and speed limits. You couldn't now get away with stuff that was routine back then.
I could certainly teach someone to drive from the ground up without causing deaths. But it would be so much like hard work that I wouldn't try unless I had to. There are too many drive-by-numbers mimsing carphounds already.
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>> I guess the difficulty in prosecuting the instructor (charges were dropped) would be in proving
>> that the driver had not been familiarised with the controls, particularly the brakes.
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The supervising driver is under no legal obligation to offer tuition, that is why he/she is termed a supervisor rather than an instructor.
The supervisors legal obligations are to intervene physically or verbally to ensure the safety of the vehicles occupants and other road users.
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Driving Instruction - movilogo
