#1 Driver Error

Recently, I've been working with an eighteen year old student. Here in Illinois she is considered an adult and therefore no longer needs to take formal instruction to qualify for a driver's license.

Nevertheless, she hired me to instruct her as she had already failed the state's road test twice and wanted to figure out what she was doing wrong.

I asked her why she had not passed the road tests, and she explained that a car approaching from the right had nearly smashed into her and the examiner as she was attempting a left turn to leave the test station parking lot.

"Did you see that car coming?"

"No, I looked that way once. Nothing was there so I moved out, and then all of the sudden it came around the corner and nearly nailed us!"

"Oh. Why did you fail the second time?"

"I forgot to check my blind spot before making a lane change."

So we immediately went to work on observing intersections, using proper head and eye movements when taking turns, and of course lane changing drills so she would get in the habit of looking into those blind spots.

We also went over the road test events so she could execute all maneuvers with confidence when the time came. I worked with her once a week for four weeks. During those sessions she never had any problem in physically maneuvering the car.

However, she had a tendency to "zone out" after conquering whatever we had set out to accomplish for the day. Whenever the stress or novelty of the situation disappeared, the mental errors would manifest themselves in various ways. She would try to pull away from the curb without checking her left mirror or blind spot. She would have run through several stop signs had I not intervened.

"What's the problem? Tired?"

"No I'm just spacing out. I do that alot. How do I fix that?"

I did not have a ready answer for her outside of telling her to just stay focused. How do you give advice on how to pay constant attention to dangerous circumstances? You think that it would come naturally. You'd think the survival instinct would kick in and that she'd just do it.

Evidently not. Spacing out is the #1 One Driver Error these days. Everybody seems to be doing it.

Why can't people concentrate anymore?