What did(n't) you learn in driver's ed?

Certain phrases that my teacher drummed into us as we learned to drive in the summer of 1973 still come back to me regularly:
“Aim high in steering.” (Keeps you from wandering in a lane.)
“Mirror, signal, mirror, headcheck.” (I got a ride recently with someone who was unfamiliar with the concept of checking your blind spot before changing lanes. It was scary.)
“If you’re making a left turn, pull straight into the intersection. Don’t turn the wheels until you’re actually completing the turn. That way you won’t get pushed into oncoming traffic if someone hits you from behind.”
I’m sure there are more, but these are the ones that come to mind VERY frequently.

What I don’t remember learning in class:
“Turn your headlights on anytime you turn your wipers on.” (Learned that from a roommate.)
“Treat a non-working traffic light like a four-way stop.” (Learned that from the radio.)

What has stuck with you from when you first learned to drive? What did you learn later?

GT

I didn’t learn that the left-hand lanes are the “fast” lanes until I was almost thirty. I thought you could just pick whichever you wanted. :smack:

How to drive in really narrow streets. :eek:

I learned how to parallel park properly: Pull up next to the car in front of the space, about a foot away, until your tail is even with its tail. Turn the wheel all the way to the right (assuming parking on the right side), and back up until the middle of your car is even with the left rear corner of the car in front. Straighten the wheel and continue backing up until your nose is about a foot in front of the other car’s corner. Hard left, and pull back until you’re in the space. I follow this exact procedure, which I learned in 1971, every time I park, and never have any problems (unless it’s a very tight space). But I’ve often amazed passengers who acted as though parallel parking were some dark art.

No disrespect, but I learned to adjust the mirrors so you don’t have a blind spot and don’t have to do a headcheck: Put your head against the left window and adjust the left mirror so you can just see the left side of your car. Put your head at the car’s centerline and do the same on the right side. When you’re in the normal driving position, cars approaching from behind you will become visible in the sideview mirrors as they move out of the rearview. By the time they move out of the side view, they’re along side you and visible in your peripheral vision. No blind spot.

If you can see the sides of your car in your side mirrors when you’re in the normal driving position, you’ve created unnecessary and dangerous blind spots.

I’ve learned a lot since then, because my main hobby for the last six years has been High Performance Driver’s Ed: basically learning race driving techniques in your street car on racetracks around the country.

I could write a book about what I’ve learned in HPDE, but probably the most important thing, with application on the street, is that you will go where you’re looking. Hand-eye coordination works so well it’s almost magical. So if you’ve slid off the road, DO NOT look at that tree you’re afraid of hitting! Look at the space between the trees; look where you want to put the car.

My driver’s ed instructor didn’t teach me how to…

-reverse using mirrors only.

-adjust the right-side mirror properly (he thought the right-side mirror was for HIM)

-pass at highway speeds.

-clean your headlights every time you gas in the car. (This has been nearly a life-saver on more than one occasion for me.)

I didn’t learn anything in Driver’s Ed. I never took Driver’s Ed. Who wants a ride?

I never took driver’s ed. I just grabbed the book and read it. Then I had my mother take me driving about four times. I passed the first time I took both tests. Yay me.

Anywho, I actually learned that one after my driver’s test. It was one of my mistakes.

I learned a similar way to adjust mirrors in, of all places, a Dear Abby letter:

Sit in your normal driving position. Adjust the left mirror until you can see just the slightest bit of you car in it. Then move the mirror out about an inch-and-a-half. Do the same for the right side mirror.

I was skeptical until I tried it. It works like a charm. As a passing vehicle leaves your rearview mirror, it becomes visible in the side mirror. As it passes from the side mirror, you can see it out of the corner of your eye.

I didn’t learn that when turning from one multiple lane street onto another multiple lane street, stay in the same lane you started from. This probably had something to do with the absence of such streets in my home town. On my first trip to Cleveland, my dad straightened me out about this right quick, after I’d cut across about 3 lanes doing a left turn.

I also didn’t learn how to avoid running into other cars. It took several years of independent study before I figured that out.

I didn’t take Driver’s Ed, but I did take private lessons at age 29 from a man I’ll still recommend happily to anyone. I’m particularly fond of one bit of advice he gave me:
If it’s inevitable that you’re going to crash, aim for something soft.

CJ

Paralell parking stuck with me. Consistantly using mirrors, turn signals, and seat belts stuck with me.

Didn’t learn to choose a good line through a turn, especially left turns. Appears that maybe 5% of drivers know this. Not taught in Driver’s ed, or basic motorcycle safety course. (still need to do ERC) Didn’t learn myself untill I was mid-thirties…trying to figure out how a (very few) of the guys I rode with were NOT crossing the center line in left handers, when it seemed unavoidable to me. David Hough explains it pretty well in “Proficient Motorcycling”.

Around 95% of drivers (and at least 80% of motorcylists) start most of thier turns too early. Causes them to run inside at the middle of the turn, and run wide at the exit. They’ll clip the curb on a right hander, and still won’t be able to finish the turn without button hooking into the adjacent lane. They will cross the center line on nearly every left hand turn just following a winding road.

Most of the trouble shows up as running wide at the exit…and it’s not obvious to the driver that the cause was entering the turn too early. Since they run wide, they realize they need to turn “turn more” but often this is put into practice as “turn sooner” which only makes it worse.

The one thing that stands out that I didn’t learn was this: Let’s say you’re driving a car with a manual transmission and you come up on some stopped traffic. You start coming to a stop, and then the light changes green and the traffic starts moving again. You don’t come to a full stop, so how do you know how far to downshift? Learned that one through practice.

The only phrase I remember being drummed into us was that hands at 10 and 2 was wrong, hands at 9 and 3 was correct. That always pops into my head whenever I hear anyone say hands at 10 and 2.

The only thing I remember about drivers ed was… I was in a class with several people a year ahead of me. 2 of them were fine girls, one of those was in the SuperFine category. We were assigned 3 to a car, alpabetically. As luck would have it, me (W), fine girl (S), and SuperFine (Q) were to share the same car.

When the instructor (who was also my electronics and trig teacher, and I didn’t get along with) saw that I was gonna be in the same car as them, he put me in with 2 nerds.

What a bummer…

This just happened to me recently. I was in the left hand lane, since I was going to pass this car that was going 10 under, when the place I was going for suddenly closed. Keep in mind, I was on a two way street with no way to get into the right hand lane.

So, as luck would have it, this cop comes barreling out of nowhere and I have nowhere to go. No one will open up on my right, so I decide to do what I thought was best and go for the left hand shoulder.

The cop, apparently, didn’t like that decision. Instead of pulling over the speeder, he pulled me over.

What was I supposed to do? Speed like hell? Merge into the car on my right? Eject?

The three things my Dad told me as I was learning how to drive:

  1. Watch out for old guys who drive with their hats on (this was of more concern 30 years ago…)

  2. Everybody else on the road is freaking insane and will do the most suicidally lame things you can imagine, and some you can’t.

  3. How to parallel park a van (drive past the parking space until you’re completely past it, then keep going until you get to a diagonal parking space).

That’s changed because of airbags. 9 and 3 is the correct position if your car has airbags, to prevent Bad Things happening to your arms when the airbag deploys.

On the track this is known as “early apexing” and is one of the hardest things to unteach newbies to track driving. They see the turn coming up and think, “I have to turn, I have to turn,” then they turn too early, carrying too much speed, and run off the track on the outside of the turn, the equivalent of crossing over into the next lane. The proper technique (on the track and, in a less exaggerated fashion, on the street) is to keep going straight, brake late, and take a late apex, so that as you’re leaving the turn, you’re unwinding the steering wheel as you accellerate.

Don’t park facing oncoming traffic. $10 :frowning:

That other people can see the hood of the car.

I got yelled at in drivers’ ed because I wasn’t lining up the hood of the car with various objects when I stopped or parallel parked or whatever. I’m short. I couldn’t see the hood, so I would drive to where I guessed the front of the car was and stop (or really unsuccessfully parallel park). I eventually ended up just leaving a lot of space out there, to be sure. I couldn’t figure out how everyone else was so much more successful than I was at doing this stuff.

Years later, during a conversation, I found out that other people were actually lining up objects that they could see. I felt very cheated.
Practical stuff? using mirrors correctly. I still can’t parallel park well.

:scribbles notes furiously: