Were you terrified while learning to drive? What happened? Please share your experience..

In My Humble Opinion
1

Brief background info - I’m 36, from the UK, and I’ve never really had the urge to drive, mainly due to a lack of interest. Although recently, I’ve found myself intrigued by the learning process and probably for the first time in my life, I’m seriously thinking about lessons.

I have no worries about learning the actual motor skills (pardon the pun) of driving, as I know I’ll get the hang of it rather quickly - that part is fine. My worry is that I’ll do something completely idiotic on a roundabout, travel the wrong way down a one way road, or have a meltdown on a complex junction and bring the entire world to a complete standstill.

I know everyone probably goes through similar thoughts at some stage, and the process of learning will sort me out… but for those people who learned to drive later in life, or perhaps had zero belief they would ever cope on the roads… when did you feel like you gained that confidence?

Did everything click at a certain point during the course of your lessons? Did you pass your test and still not fully believe you knew what you were doing? Are you going through all of this right now?

Any experiences and thoughts welcome…

2

I learned to drive at age 18 in new york city, 1964. Nothing on the road bothers me. I don’t recall having worries about doing the wrong thing. I’ve also driven in England and Western Europe with no issues.

Keep calm and carry on.

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3

I was scared when I first started driving lessons. While on a “roundabout”, which I think is probably what in the United States is called a traffic circle, I couldn’t work up the nerve to exit. My instructor had a dual set of controls and took over, fortunately. Anyway, after two summers of driving lessons with the most patient instructor on Earth, I passed my driving test on the first try.

I strongly recommend learning from a driving school with dual control vehicles.

4

Taught by my paw in a '36 Ford pickup, on rough mountain roads. Some scary bits on the really steep places, with cliffs falling away on one side.

Today, you start in a big, flat parking lot, and learn the basics in wonderful safety. Once you get the hang of stop, go, and steering, then going out on (quiet!) residential streets is a comfortable next step.

I had a bad driving training teacher in high school, who told us to “Look left, go right.” I thought that was nuts, so I’d look left, look right, look left again, and go right. He kept trying to tell me not to. One day a pedestrian stepped into the intersection from the right; if I had “looked left, gone right,” I’d have squashed him. My teacher was a doofus.

Look all about you. You’ll be fine.

5

Just keep in mind that your instructor has taught lots of people far more nervous than you, and they have their own brake pedal that they can stomp on before you do something stupid. They’re used to inexperienced and nervous drivers and know how to handle the situation.

Don’t hog the passing lane.

6

Oh, and here’s a piece of advice from flight school: “Whatever else happens, fly the plane.” Or “drive the car.”

And (same source): “Don’t let your plane (car) take you anywhere your brain hasn’t checked out first.”

7

I wasn’t terrified but frustrated at times. Like backing out of a parking space:

“Look behind you. Watch your front corner. LOOK BEHIND! WATCH YOUR FRONT!!” Etc.

8

Read the “Rules Of The Road” manual, practiced for 10 minutes in an empty parking lot (never took driver’s ed or driving instruction/courses). Took the test, passed. I was 25. Learned everything I needed to over the years by casual observation. If you forget a small detail you can always look it up. Not much to it.

Pretty much, just relax and drive the car. Just always drive defensively (not to slow, not too fast, alert).

Best of luck!

9

Think of it like this - driving can’t be that difficult, millions of people do it. Driving ‘well’ is a different story - you get that with experience and confidence. Just get a good instructor and practice a lot. Avoid boy racers though, they’re bloody lethal :smiley:

10

1966, age 15+, ancient VW bug. My Dad took me out to parking lots and then extended street drives. No biggie. Dad was patient, good natured, unflappable. I was unsure of myself, to say the least, but never nervous, much less terrified.

11

If you have gone decades without a car I am curious why you want to start throwing money down a pit. Are there places that you can’t get to without your own personal transport? You are 36 so taking a car to a drive-in with a date for sex isn’t as appealing as it was when you were 16. If you don’t need your own car to get to work, then you are making more per hour than the people you work with that do need a car to get to work.

Since you want to spend the money on personal transport, I will share my thoughts on your OP.

Most driver’s (in the US) start out with a temp license at the age of 16. At that age mortality is not an issue, you live forever when you are 16. Navigating a one ton vehicle while being 16 doesn’t scare the driver as much as it should. At 36 you are already anticipating the possible flaws or problems on the roadways you will traverse. You have learned more respect for yourself and others than any 16 year old has. I would rather share the road with you.

I don’t understand the terrified while learning to drive part. The learning to drive part is easy. You might want to be terrified about how easy it is to kill someone if you screw up for a moment. Hell, you don’t even have to be at fault to hurt or kill someone with your one ton transport.

Another terrifiying part of driving is your forced interaction with other drivers. Don’t piss anyone else off or they might follow you, try to run you off the road, try to get you to pull over so they can beat you or shoot you. I am from the US, so YMMV.

My point is, if you need to drive then do so. If you don’t, why waste the money. You have every right to get a license, a car payment, an insurance payment, a responsibility to find a place to park the vehicle, a mechanic to maintan the vehicle and something to wash every week.

So that has been my experience. Anymore questions?

12

I picked up driving instinctively as I spent a lot of time driving around in cars as a kid (southern California). It did not scare me, but it probably should have.

I have driven unflappably all over the US, in England (wrong side!), and in Europe. The only thing that scared me out of the car was Italy. Germans drive fast but they respect the rules (this was back in the '70s, may be different now). Italians didn’t have a lot of rules and didn’t respect the ones they did have.

The thing to remember is that most people who have wrecks end up saying “I never saw that car” so, two things: Be visible, and look carefully. Also, avoid situations where you have to slam on your brakes, and avoid situations where you would cause other people to slam on their brakes.

I never felt uncomfortable. There were a couple of times in my early days of driving when I made some stupid mistakes, but I learned from them. For instance, the spider probably won’t kill you, but paying attention to the spider instead of your driving might. (Or it could be a bee, you know what I’m saying.)

13

interesting response. I get where you’re coming from - I don’t NEED to drive, but I am curious to learn as over the last few years I’ve become fascinated with learning, the biology behind it etc, so driving would be another form of ‘learning how to learn’.

I may never drive officially if I get a licence, but it’ll be something intriguing to accomplish anyway - plus if I do want to drive, then I can if need be.

I agree with you though that owning a car carries baggage, especially financially.

My GF is offering to teach me the basics, how to start, stop, park, not stall etc in an empty supermarket car park, away from other people and the roads; then if I enjoy being behind the wheel, I may go out with her onto the roads with a provisional licence. Who knows… I may hate it.

14

Depending on how you define “terrified” I think it applies to most people; I was scared when I first took driving lessons, and I think I was right to be. To speak in film cliches: it’s not the fear, it’s how you respond to it.

Also, and I know I’ll probably get flamed from both sides for saying this, but driving in the UK is probably harder than the US: the roads are often narrower, more bendy and there are some more complex intersections.

But it will pass with time. As others have said, it’s also a nice idea to practice in a parking lot just to get a feel for the car.

15

Don’t worry about it. The reality is that you can commit some quite serious errors and still have a very low probability of an accident, let alone an injury. Wrong way down a one-way city street? Big deal. 99.99% of the time, nothing happens, because there is plenty of time to stop and correct the error. The rest of the time you just have a low-speed collision. Worried about hitting another car while parallel parking? Big deal–that’s what bumpers are for. And so on.

That’s not to say one should be reckless; the point is that the roads are forgiving enough for you to learn how to behave better. Odds are that on day 1, you’ll still be a better driver than millions on the road that somehow still manage not to get into accidents.

16

I learned to drive not until my thirties. A new career forced me to. I had never been around cars much, my parents didn’t have a car etc. Back at 18, when most of my peers got the license, I had other interests. In hindsight, I probably felt I would suck at driving, so steered clear of that (heh). And I did.

Where I live, an automatic transmission wouldn’t cut it. You only get to drive a manual-transmission car if you did your licence with one, and I knew most of the cars I would need to drive would be manuals (I was right).

Learning to use the clutch and the gears correctly (you need the gas too here), while simultaneously observing and reacting to traffic, was incredibly difficult to me. Lots and lots needs to be done to drive in real city traffic, and much of it needs to become automatic to concentrate one’s focus on one’s surroundings. If things don’t turn automatic quite soon, as in my case, driving goes to hell.

To make matters worse, I had no way of reinforcing my skills between the sparsely-spaced driving lessons, so I pretty much felt like the man who climbs a mountain every day, and rolls back down every night. Taking, and failing, the driving test repeatedly was a harrowing experience, and very expensive, too.

It’s been years, and now driving is bearable, if never enjoyable. For a long time, I sucked at driving, although I’ve never been in an accident.

Other people I know who have taken to driving in their 30’s (or 60’s, like my parents) are invariably so-so drivers. It is a skill I really feel benefits from being learned at a young age. But one can learn at any age, and everyone’s different.

Having a girlfriend and her car to show and enforce the basics before, during and after the driver ed is a huge asset, I think. It would’ve changed everything for me, even if it had probably cost me the relationship. :slight_smile:

17

Thanks for sharing. I can imagine how frustrating it can be having your lessons spread out, and not being able to cement what you previously learned quickly. That’s why if I decide to go ahead, I’d like to book those week long intensive courses… get it all done and out of the way.

Learning such a skill in your 30’s isn’t any different than in your 20’s or teens, so I disagree there - I have no worries about feeling autonomous with the vehicle itself, just the lack of common sense on the road I’ll no doubt exhibit… :slight_smile:

Interesting viewpoint at the end there. As someone pointed out to me the other day - the world is full of idiots, and many of them somehow manage to stay alive.

18

I learned at 18 myself. The thing is, I’d played Grand Theft Auto and racing games on the PC before.

So i was struck by how much easier it felt to drive in real life than it did in the video games. The steering wheel is a much better control than the arrow keys, and if you don’t use full throttle and stay to reasonable speeds, it is much easier to stay on the road.

19

I learned at 16, in a '47 Studebaker column shift, no power anything. Once I learned to let out the clutch without killing the engine, I was fine. First time alone, I got a job in a town ten miles away, my dad said “Take the Studie”.

20

I also learned to drive in my thirties, after an earlier attempt in my teens where I failed to secure a licence in two road tests and decided I was happier taking public transit.

The learning process was about medium-rocky. I took some lessons from a driving school in the area and also went out for many practice drives with my brother, who’d been encouraging me to pick up driving as a life skill. Had a few scary or frustrating moments, took a little while to get the hang of maintaining good speed, still can’t parallel park properly–well, just enough to squeak through the road tests.

And speaking of government road tests, I did go through a stop sign on one. That did NOT go well. :smiley:

I’ve been a driver and car owner for 5 years now… still on my first vehicle, a 2007 Pontiac Vibe that I bought used. Though it’s a drag paying for insurance and other car costs, I do like the freedom it gives me. I can choose to drive into work because the weather is too lousy to stand at a bus stop, or because I want to take a bunch of lunches into the work fridge at once. I can drive lots of places that public transit wouldn’t take me–including epic road trips to writing workshops in the states, or driving up to rental cottages.

But I still take the bus to work a few days a week, and I’m taking the train to Ottawa for a convention next weekend instead of driving the whole way.