Parents pass down bad driving habits
Learners pick up driving sins from mum and dad
The pandemic left many 17-year-olds relying on their parents for driving tuition but, when surveyed by Young Driver, 89 per cent of driving instructors say this has meant collecting a few bad habits along the way.
Despite this, 98 per cent of the 150 instructors questioned still felt extra experience behind the wheel with a parent is important, although 67 per cent did say that parents should only teach alongside professional tuition.
Young Driver, which is the UK’s largest pre-17 driving school, asked the instructors to name the worst habits their pupils had picked up.
The 10 worst habits picked up by learner drivers from their parents are:
1. Not following ‘mirror, signal, manoeuvre’ as a matter of course
2. Steering with one hand (palm) or crossing hands (neither will fail you your test as a one off, but it isn’t best practice to do them regularly as you have less control)
3. Not observing what is happening around them
4. Coasting
5. Speeding
6. Coming down through individual gears instead of block changing
7. Not creeping and peeping when exiting a junction
8. Riding the clutch
9. Impatience/ aggression
10. Believing myths or out of date driving styles (e.g. you no longer need to hold the steering wheel in the 10-2 position, you don’t have to stop at all junctions and roundabouts and overuse of indicators can be frowned upon).
Others mentioned by instructors included eating and drinking in the car, being too heavy on the gas, not checking blind spots, getting too close to the vehicle in front and having no regard or understanding of the Highway Code.
Sue Waterfield, head of marketing at Young Driver, said: “For many parents it may be decades since they passed their test, so trying to remember how to teach someone else to drive can be very difficult.
“Not only that, but advice has changed over the years, so some of what they do remember may no longer be advised.
“However, COVID has meant there’s been a severe shortage of driving instructors and so many parents have had to fill the gap.”