I don’t know about you, but I live in fear of the day my children pass their driving test. It’s a rite of passage and, in a bizarre paradox, my wife and I will encourage them to learn to drive. Even so, that is essentially the day the apron ties will be cut.
Part of the reason this causes me so much concern is that I was an awful motorist when I first took to the roads. Thankfully my driving skills improved greatly but in the few months I started driving I was an absolute nightmare on the roads.
Here are a few of the stunts I pulled off in those early days:
- Driving at night, I drove straight through a crossroads at 60 miles an hour on the basis that “I couldn’t see any other headlights so it was safe”, much to the disbelief of my passengers
- Pulling out to overtake a car with four passengers in my small Volkswagen Polo. I’d never driven with so many people in the car and I didn’t appreciate the car wouldn’t accelerate because of the weight. Thankfully someone in the back seat told me to change down a gear.
- Pulling out to overtake a car only to find myself hurtling head-on towards a tractor with a massive plough attachment on the back. Thankfully the tractor slowed down as I came perilously close to having to throw the car into the verge to avoid a head on collision.
So appalling was my driving that I was pulled over by the police a few days after passing my test. One officer was so unimpressed with what he’d seen he suggested I go and take some more lessons.
The trend these days is for young drivers to consider telematics. It’s a very simple concept; a device is fitted in the car and it monitors the way it is driven (distance, acceleration rates, braking and so on). The insurance premium is set according to the data it records.
One of the leading providers of this service is insurance specialist More Than. By agreeing to have your motoring monitored this way, you receive a More Than telematics Driving Score and your premium is adjusted accordingly. I imagine this will be standard practice by the time my girls are driving. Such an approach might help them avoid all the mistakes their father did in his early days as a motorist.
This commissioned post was produced in collaboration with More Than. For more information on my approach to collaborative posts, please follow this link.
Picture sourced from WikiMedia. Reproduced under Creative Commons agreement. For more information about Creative Commons and links to the various agreements see my Disclosure page.
