Driver’s Ed: Are You a Good Driver?

Sep 2, 2008 by Craig Burton

Sure you are! If you’re a young guy, chances you’re the best driver on the road. I know I was. From the time I got my licence at sixteen (we didn’t have graduated licensing back then) I was great. After all I had a licence that said so, right? In my mind I was the best driver on the road, mercilessly passing any vehicle I deemed myself unworthy to travel behind, which was most of them. Years later I had taken my car to the dealership to get a new clutch put in (the slave cylinder had leaked all over it). Not being used to a fresh clutch, I took the car back to have a mechanic test drive it with me to make sure it was functioning properly.

A tall, grey-haired, and expressionless man came out in his white lab coat and got in the drivers seat of my car. I had owned this car for three years already and had been driving a manual transmission for ten years; I thought I was fairly competent in this department. Within seconds of leaving the dealership we were screaming across the Burrard street bridge with the mechanic running seamlessly though the gears, I had no idea what his feet were doing but the engine sang and the car danced through the entrance and exit ramps like it was possessed. We calmly pulled back into the service area where he told me in a very dead pan voice that everything seemed to be working fine.
On the short jerky drive home it felt like I was driving with my knees and elbows compared to the smooth control of the master mechanic at the dealership. I tried to replicate the way he kept the engine at the perfect RPM through every gear, and every corner without the car pitching forward or protesting in any way.

A few years later I joined the BMW car club of BC and signed up for their Collision Avoidance day out at the old Boundary Bay airport in Delta. I showed up eager to impress the instructors with my natural car control skills and dazzle the rest of the group, who were surely inferior drivers to me. The day consisted of the twelve of us in our own cars, mostly BMW’s but a few Volkswagens, and big Land Rover that lurched and rolled like a fat man on a rollercoaster.

I roared through the exercises, each one a simulation on how to avoid a crash, energetically throwing my car around the pylons set up as obstacles. At the end of the day each of the exercises were put together to form an autocross course. Once again I hurled my little car around the cones, even spinning it once when I got into a corner just a little too fast. I was thrilled, I went home exhausted and happy at all I had learned.

The next morning reality dawned on me: my embarrassing display of automotive abuse was flooding in. Oh, how I must have looked, wildly grinning ear to ear as I beat the car around the course, not once focused on being smooth, consistent or treating my car with respect. I was starting to call myself “the butcher of BMW”. After a dozen years of being the best driver on the road I had finally reached the stage in the learning cycle known as “conscious incompetence.” I realized how very little I knew about driving a car.

Craig Burton is a licensed driving instructor, and is learning more about driving everyday.