Learning to drive is a rite of passage for American teenagers. I know for me there was nothing greater than turning 15, getting a permit, and hitting the road. Turning 16 was even better because it meant that I could drive somewhere without my parents in the car. There are many ways to learn the art of driving. Some people teach themselves while others go to schools or have someone else teach them. Each method is a journey on its own. Who taught you how to drive?
I was prepared to drive years before I got my permit. If you’re a resident of the Midwest, you’re probably aware that Wisconsin Dells calls itself the “Waterpark Capital of the World.” Wisconsinians love water almost as much as they love cheese, and Wisconsin Dells is a go-to destination for water-based adventure. In the 1990s, Wisconsin Dells was also a place for go-karts. There were large theme parks in Wisconsin Dells that were just clusters of several multi-level go-kart tracks for everyone from tiny kids to adults. Some of these parks remain today.
It was at these parks that I first started falling in love with driving. The Wisconsin Dells go-kart tracks of the 1990s and the early 2000s were intense. The tracks had steep drops, rickety wooden surfaces, and the karts were way faster than they should have been. Some of the go-kart parks in Wisconsin Dells had drops so steep that your little go-kart would catch air as you launched off of them. I think that’s what the kids call safety third.
I loved these go-karts so much that in 2000, my parents bought me a go-kart of my own. My little Manco Critter was one-wheel-drive and made all of 5 HP, but it was my own transportation and you bet I buried the throttle wherever I drove it. My Critter is the vehicle that introduced me to off-roading, drifting, off-road racing, and the concept of a time trial. I drove that go-kart so hard that I wore through drive tires from burnouts, bent a steering arm from a crash, and found myself driving so fast I beat older neighborhood kids who were straddling more powerful quads and dirt bikes.
That kart and I seemed unstoppable for a good five years. Then, one day in 2005, I was driving my kart through an abandoned farm when something metal got kicked up by the drive tire and sent straight into the kart’s block.
I took driver’s ed in high school when I was 15. The instructor was a brilliant guy who went above and beyond the bare minimum. He didn’t have to teach us how to drive defensively, but he did so, anyway, because he didn’t want to see any of his students end up on the news.
When I got my permit at 15, I took what I learned over all of those years and applied it to real cars. My mom had me drive her 60 miles in a 2003 GMC Envoy XL the day I got my permit. It was exhilarating. Weirdly, my mom was unintentionally a bad teacher. She was a self-taught driver with bad habits like always driving in the left lane, never using turn signals, and always driving well under the flow of traffic and well under the speed limit.
Illinois requires teenagers to rack up 50 hours of documented driving with a parent or guardian over 9 months before getting their license. When I rolled up to the DMV 9 months after getting my permit, I plopped down papers documenting over 470 hours of driving, over 160 hours of it were at night. Yep, I racked up an honest 20 days of driving. Why? My mom used me as her chauffeur, so I drove her somewhere literally every day.
I bet you can guess the shock on my face when the lady at the DMV didn’t even look at my stack of papers before tossing them into the trash. I could have lied about my experience and she wouldn’t have noticed. Some of my friends did lie about their hours and got their licenses, anyway.
I suppose this is a long way of saying that my driving skills are the result of myself and some really good instruction. How about you? Who taught you how to drive?
When I was 9 or 10 a local family fun center shut down and auctioned off their go-karts. I drained my junior savings account and for $250 was the proud owner of a kart that quickly (with the help of some older neighbor kids whose dad had a full shop for working on dune buggies) lost the body, side bumpers, and speed governor. 150 pounds or so lighter and that 5hp Honda motor really flew for the couple of months it took us to grenade the engine.
A few years later when I was 14 I came home to find an old Dodge Ram50 in the driveway and my bank account (by then a smidge over $500) once again drained, this time by my dad on my behalf. An uncle helped me rebuild the frozen rear drum brakes and then I was off by myself to learn how to work a clutch and attempt to navigate turns with 30″ all-terrains, no power steering, and a steering wheel about as thick as a sharpie to grab onto. I had the hang of things well before I was old enough to enroll in drivers ed, and the truck lasted me long enough to save up for a Ranger from my after-school job as a bicycle mechanic by the time I was 16.
While I was almost entirely self-taught, I would go on to teach my ex-wife, then her sister, then my current wife, then my daughter how to drive – all on 5-speed mid-90s Rangers.
My dad. I got so frustrated trying to navigate a crowded Walmart parking lot and was embarrassed when I kept stalling that he made me just practice going back and forth in first and reverse in our driveway for 10 minutes straight until I perfected it.
I think the idea of having to apply gas at the exact same time as you release the clutch is bullshit. Teach people to move using a slow clutch release only and it’s WAY easier to pick up. Same way they teach you to ride a motorcycle; perfect the clutch release and only then starting applying gas at the same time.
This – it took me time to figure out but by the time my daughter was 15 I’d developed a technique of getting her alone in a flat spot and making her get going left foot only – no gas until off the clutch. It probably put some wear and tear on in a hurry, but once she could handle the starting motion it was gravy from there.
Yeah, I think it’s a function of our inbuilt general fear about wear on the clutch of a car.
With bikes it’s not a problem b/c they’re wet, so you get the opposite fear – for me, the “friction zone” practice just felt wrong at first!
Driving school in a Ford Fairmount wagon.
Mom in a Chrysler Cordoba.
Dad in a Mercury Country Squire Wagon, a full-size Dodge Van (with Cragar SS wheels!), and eventually, the Triumph Spitfire I got as my first car.
Most of these stories are better than mine, but I’ll add that many driving instructors are amazing beyond the common reputation of their profession.
Looking back on it, learning to drive in the ’80s was an interesting time…the old, by the book approach was on its last legs, but there was a still a (real) sense that driving was both a skill and a privilege to be approached seriously.
Enter Mitch, my driver’s ed teacher. Sure, he was your classic driver’s ed instructor in a lot of ways (he favored short sleeve dress shirts with ties, mustaches, had nerves of steel, etc.), but the way he approached it generally was quite forward-thinking – he emphasized the defensive element, often in surprising ways.
Like seeing the “nervous nellies” – drivers who cause issues by hesitating or behaving erratically due to fear or confusion – as something out there that could generate problems for safe driving but isn’t usually addressed as a hazard.
He saw the road/traffic as a system, and believed that if we saw it that way, we’d be good, safe drivers by being prepared for it as it was, not as we wanted it to be.
I enjoyed driving his Dodge Dart then, but I what I really enjoy now is how the lessons of his class turned out to be, from a practical point of view, the most durable thing I learned in high school.
That and typing…I remember thinking “why the hell is this class required anyway?!”
My first memory is sitting in my father’s lap behind the wheel of his yellow 1970 Buick Skylark convertible and “steering” it for him in the parking lot at preschool. I legitimately thought I was steering that car but he actually had a finger on the wheel the whole time.
I found that out a few years later when he let me steer his 1982 Honda Accord and we started veering off the road. Still, it gave my dad joy watching me want to drive so bad that by the time I was 12 we were going to the driving range at the nearby high school and practicing in one of our 1984 Subaru GL’s.
One driving lesson sticks out the most, though. I was 14. We were getting ready for one of our usual trips to that driving range and as I start walking to the Subaru, he says “No… this car” – pointing to his brand new 1990 Miata. He had bought one as soon as that came out in late 1989. He had to pay sticker and buy it before it even arrived. People would stop us on the street to ask about it wherever we drove it.
I had only driven automatics at this point, but I was pretty obsessed. I still remember the gigantic grin on his face when I let off the clutch and we were driving on the first try without stalling. This is one of my favorite memories of my father, who passed away when I was 30 from colon cancer.
So, to answer the question, my father taught me to drive, but it was pretty easy for him since it’s all I wanted to do since I was verbal. He had learned to drive a manual only a couple of years prior to the Miata in his previous car, a 1984 Rabbit convertible. It was not a very forgiving clutch so the learning curve was way worse for him, which I think made him even more excited when I got it so quickly.
Oh yeah. Driving home from work today in my NA Miata. And I’ve been teaching my daughter to drive in it. That’s another story.
Great story – I hope Miatas/MX5s are around for decades to come so your daughter can do the same.
my earliest go at it was with my grandpa who would put us on his lap and let us steer as we drove out to the somewhat remote part of the state to the land he’d bought. (to this day, cell and internet of any kind is spotty or just unavailable)
when we got tall enough we would start working the pedals too, and also out there we had go karts we’d race or work on.
once I was legally old enough to officially get licensed, my parents put me in driving school, where apparently the instructors were thrilled I had that experience already, it was easy from there, passed the class and all I had to do was do another written test at the DMV and I was done.
I took driver’s ed in the summer through the high school when I was 15, but also my grandma helped give me some lessons. At the time, you didn’t need to have X number of hours, just passing driver’s ed was enough to get the full license.
We only had manual cars and the driver’s ed Buick sedan was an automatic, so grandma took me to the fairgrounds (big empty gravel parking lot where I couldn’t run into anything) and we practised shifting and stopping. She would suddenly scream ‘LOOK OUT THERE’S A KID IN THE ROAD’ and I would have to hit both the brakes and the clutch to avoid killing the car (1986 Plymouth Voyager with a 5-speed manual). She also instilled the lesson that when backing up, you can’t always rely on the center rear-view mirror, you might have cargo or be towing something that would block your view. So you have to be willing to work from the side mirrors and what you can spin around and see yourself directly. Good lessons, although the phantom children in the road is a pretty funny method looking back.
Well there was my dad, of course, using our ’72 Gran Torino. And then there was Reggie Price (Mr. Price to me), who was the Driver’s Education instructor in our high school. He made sure that we started the car moving before cranking the steering wheel in order to reduce tire wear. He was also big on reminding us that a stop sign require that we have a complete “cessetation of motion”.
My Uncle Bill taught me, when I was 14 years old, in his ’81 Jeep CJ-8 Scrambler. After I had the basics down, my dad took over in his VW Golf. Both were manuals. When I got to driver’s ed in high school, I had to learn how to drive an automatic, and hated it…
My first automatic was also in driver’s ed, I think it was a 1st gen Lumina or some similarly boring white 4door snatched from a rental fleet somewhere. Anyways, the first turn we came up to I “downshifted to 2nd” out of habit. My left foot went looking for a clutch and caught the edge of the brake pedal and we skidded through the intersection. Good times…
I still do that when driving autos! Fortunately, I just slightly catch the pedal, so it’s embarrassing more than anything.
I did that on the way to senior prom, borrowing my mom’s automatic Audi 5000. My date was not amused.
My uncle (best friend’s dad) taught me how to drive a manual in a Volkswagen CrossFox at a farm, shortly before I got my own car. As for just driving in general, I went to driver’s ed, which is a much less interesting story. Took my license exam in my dad’s Civic Hybrid.
My mom mostly taught me to drive. It wasn’t too bad but by 16 I had already soloed an airplane.. so driving was incredibly frightening. Turns out there are a lot more inputs and things to hit driving than flying.
Twisted Metal on the PS1, of course.
When I was 10 I drove two trucks, although I’m not sure in what order. I attempted driving my grandpa’s 1990 Mitsubishi Mighty Max. Unfortunately the stick shift was too much for me at the time, though my grandpa gave me a very good lesson. I also drove a mid 1980s Chevy truck…with my other grandfather’s casket in the back. I’ve told this story before, but when he passed someone decided his pickup truck (with bed topper, thank God) should be what carried him to his final resting place. For some reason someone also decided I should drive the truck through the cemetery to the grave site. I wish I could upload photos because there’s a picture of me in the driver’s seat and everything. The truck was an automatic and they just stuck me behind the wheel, no practice or anything…
But as far as actual driving education, my dad taught me. I learned in my 1972 Super Beetle that I got when I was 11, so I was learning on a car 21 years older than myself. He parked me on a hill once when I was 14 or 15 and told me we weren’t leaving until I did a successful hill start. I stalled it about five times but after that, never had any issues. By the time I actually took my permit test I could already drive stick. Honestly, after the Beetle’s 50hp, no power steering, no power brakes, everything else I drove was easy.
I should add that my dad is a terrible influence on my driving. You’d never expect it from him, based on his personality. But he drives like a fucking lunatic. I mean, he got me a brand new (2009) GTI for my 16th birthday. When I asked why he got me something so new, and fast, he said that he knew I’d drive anything fast, so he wanted me in something safe to drive fast.
The first time I hit triple digit speeds behind the wheel he was riding shotgun egging me on. The DAY I got my permit someone passed me (I was going the speed limit) on a two lane road and my dad pointed at the car and said “that prick! Clark, pass him back!” That said, he really is a phenomenal driver, on the road and on the track. He was patient and let me learn my car’s limits, and I learned so much from him that’s definitely kept me out of a couple accidents. The first time we got some real snow after I turned 16, we took the Beetle out to a parking lot and he had me recover a couple skids. And I proved him wrong: the Beetle would do donuts in the snow. That was a fun day!
90% Mom, 10% Dad, in a manual Jeep Cherokee in the High School parking lot. I never took drivers’ ed. I think Mom did a great job, though the license test guy didn’t like me letting the wheel slip through my hands coming out of a turn (he still passed me). But she taught me how to parallel park and how to set my mirrors up right and everything. I don’t have many more kind words to say about my childhood, but credit where credit is due.
I got my driver’s permit the day after I turned 14. As an adult I wonder why my state allowed (still allows?) middle school students to drive, but it seemed reasonable at the time. After getting my permit my mom let me drive any time we had to go anywhere. I don’t recall necessarily being taught to drive, mostly because I was obsessed with cars from a young age and had a good idea of how driving worked. It was more about building experience than teaching. It helps that I learned to drive in a smaller town that had minimal traffic and very little to crash into.
By the time I took a driver’s education course (which was a requirement to get a license at 16) I had driven for 1.5 years and around 15,000 miles. The class was basically a formality. One of the instructors let me teach other students a few times. This was a lot of fun since I had a driver’s ed brake I could randomly floor to mess with the less confident drivers in my class.
I’m not sure the way I learned to drive was ideal, but almost 30 years later I have never had a ticket or an at-fault accident (I was rear ended once at a stop light; otherwise, I am accident free). All is well that ends well, I guess.
My mum taught me to drive on the street but, in the end, I paid for a few lessons in my first year at university in order to pass the driving test and get my licence. I didn’t own a car for another four years after that so my probation year with restricted driving conditions was not really a problem…
My parents tried to teach me themselves while I had my learners, but it didn’t work out because I am a stubborn person. I blew through multiple Stop signs, wouldn’t listen and they eventually said, that unless I listened, I couldn’t drive (wise words). So I stubborned up and for 2 months didn’t get to drive at all.
Eventually I relented, and they signed me up for driving school, which was fine. I had 3 sessions and they said I was ready. I actually passed the test with no issue, and I can’t help but feel the test was very truncated. I remember driving around a block from the DMV, parallel parking and then that was it.
So overall, I think I definitely learned more from the driver educator, he was a kind older man, who explained why I would do the things I was doing. That seemed to instill a bit of reason in me, and I am glad that they did sign me up.
My own story is uninteresting, because I learned from my dad. But when it came time for my little sister to learn how to drive five years later, that responsibility fell to me. My dad just made her cry. I had built up a tolerance to my old man, from working on his construction crew during every school break, so he didn’t bother me. My sister had no such defenses to his … intensity.
My mom tried to teach her, but wonderful saintly woman that she was, she completely lacked the ability to break things down to steps, and so she would provide really helpful instructions like, “Turn. Turn! TURN!!!!”
So my sis had to wait for me to come home from college on break, and I showed her the ropes. My favorite day was when we got a snowstorm. I tossed her the keys to my 2wd S-10 pickup, with an open rear differential, shod in all season tires, and we headed out. I told her we once she could handle that piece of shit in the snow, she could handle anything in the snow. We had a ball that day.
My mom and my dad tag teamed teaching me. In DC you need a certain amount of night driving hours signed off on by a fully licensed driver. My dad signed off on them. DC doesn’t require driver’s ed but my parents put me in a class the summer after my junior year of high school. It was taught by cops and the classroom stuff was pretty useless. They more or less just showed us a bunch of grotesque images of mangled bodies from accidents and said THIS IS WHAT WILL HAPPEN TO YOU IF YOU DON’T TAKE DRIVING SERIOUSLY!
I don’t really think that’s an effective way of teaching and I still vividly remember every one of those images to this day, which kind of sucks if we’re being honest. However the class came with a couple of in car instruction sessions and those were actually pretty useful. I learned a lot from them and still use some of the techniques they taught me to this day.
The only other education I’ve received was my aunt teaching me how to drive stick in 2020. And I’m about to do some high performance driver education days at the local track to see if I can improve my performance driving. I just want to get competent enough at track driving that I can enjoy it as a hobby for the rest of my life and not wind up going viral on Tik Tok for being a dingus.
I’ve found track time is also great to get a sense of a car’s limits. And the shock definitely is that for most of us, they’re way higher than our own abilities.
Definitely made me appreciate more what goes into engineering and building cars, even “everyday” stuff.
My mom, in 1978, in a blue ’68 bug that she bought me for $150. Even parallel parking.
As a little tike my dad would put me on his lap and let me handle the steering as we cruised down the freeways (no seatbelt laws back then).
Around 8 or 9 I saved up enough allowance $$ to put down half on an old handmade gokart that a neighbor was selling, dad put down the other half, and basically told me, “this is the gas, this is the brake, and you already know what the steering wheel does.” I promptly crashed into the side of the garage but I picked it up pretty quick after that.
Around 12 or 13 I talked my mom into showing me how to drive a standard and puttered around my grandfather’s farm in 1st and 2nd gear. By 14 we got in an argument and I stole her keys and took off in the car, that was my first time driving by myself and promptly got me grounded.
I got my learner’s permit at 15 and mom and dad let me drive their cars from time to time in addition to taking Driver’s Ed in HS. I can’t remember the coach’s name that taught us but he had a twisted up finger from a saw accident and he would point it in your face and yell “DRIVE TO SURVIVE!!!” as we drove the simulators.
At 16 I got my license, and my dad’s old Conquest TSi, and since he was putting me in a turbocharged sportscar he said he had to teach me how to drive. I then learned about squaring the turns, trail braking, powering out of a turn, steering into a skid, and drifting though it wasn’t called that back then.
I promptly got my first 3 tickets before my photo license even arrived in the mail and ended up on suspension my first year. For the next 20 years I had to take defensive driving every year to clear up one ticket or another, I call that “continuing education” 😉
Driver’s Ed in high school (which Michigan sadly no longer offers). Pretty good class, taught by teachers earning some extra $$$. We had 3 students per car, with two in the back paying attention to what was going on with the student driver and rotating every so often.
I learned how to drive a manual by buying one; ordered a 6-speed Chevy Monza notchback 6 cyl., my very first new car. Went to the dealership with a friend of mine who already knew as backup. He explained what you had to do, and after a few failed attempts to get out of the lot, I got the hang of it and drove home. Had to master it as I needed to go to work the next day, so I figured that would be a good motivator (and I was right).
A 6 speed Monza?
Sorry, one character off – 5-speed. I need to proofread better.
I learned in a parking lot with my Dad’s Commodore and then drove it home, then once my parents were confident in that they stuck me in the same lot but in my Mum’s Impreza, same deal, get comfortable and drive home.
When I moved to the US it was apparent a lot of people aren’t really taught to drive, they’re taught how to pass a test and that’s it.
Well I lived in rural NC, so by age 7 or 8 I was driving a full-sized fourwheeler which required I wear heavy boots and stand in order to work the clutch. By 10 I was driving the mower up to my grandmas house a bit up the street so I could mow her lawn, or just to pull my cousin and sister in the little dump trailer behind it. And by 12 or so I was driving the truck up there. So really, it was more just learning the finer points of obeying the laws and other drivers than anything. For stick shifter specifically I had my dad do a 10 minute lesson, then kind of figured it out in the yard on my own and in a friends Miata.
I learned to drive by taking the driver’s ed course my high school offered as a summer school course, between my junior and senior years of high school.
I wasn’t allowed to get my driver’s license, though, until I was able to buy a car and pay for my own insurance, which was the summer after I graduated.
There was an unsuccessful attempt by my brother to teach me how to drive standard a few years later, but surprisingly yelling “clutch!” “shift!” without any other explanations didn’t really work. A few years after that, a friend gave me a simple explanation of how a manual transmission worked, what you had to do and why, and I picked it right up.