ANSWER: THREE YEARS OR MORE

How long did it take you to learn to ski, play hockey or any other sport that required skill and development time for your body to get into shape?

How long did it take you to learn Photoshop or earn your new job, or how to work the remote control or your iPad?

Both skills and knowledge learning take time.

Driving requires both physical skill development and cognitive skills practice.

Add to this DANGER! Financial danger, emotional stress, social shaming, physical injury risk, and possible death. Also, you can easily hurt others, including innocent children, with this driving thing.

TEN MINUTES

Turn the key, change the gears into D-drive and release the brakes. You are moving. Go to youtube and search for underage or illegal driving. The car’s great invention is the ability to move 1500 kg with ease – a child can do it. Is this driving? I prefer to call it moving great weight with great danger. Daily you can read the news where a car rolled over a person or crushed them against the garage wall. Easy to move a vehicle. More difficult to control it safely.

TWENTY HOURS

Your feet and your hands are the tools that control the car. Both have many fine muscles that control their movements. It takes a fair amount of time to learn to manage these fine muscles and accurately control your foot and hands. IT TAKES TIME. While learning, your control remains awkward. Some people get good at it in a few hours. Others need twenty hours to get smooth and relaxed.

THREE MONTHS

Throughout my lifetime, I have driven hundreds of cars and owned several dozen. Within a few hours, I am comfortable with a new car, but it takes me several months of everyday driving before knowing exactly where the new car is. WOW, MONTHS? REALLY? Yes, months. And I am a very highly trained driver. Learning precisely where every corner of the vehicle is, and how to control each tire precisely, takes time. Each car is different.

Why do so many say driving is easy? –with danger centimetres or split-seconds away– And 1.3 million deaths worldwide every year from car crashes? EASY! EASY TO GET INTO TROUBLE.

SIXTY HOURS

ICBC recommends a minimum of 60 hours of driving before booking a driving test. The pass rate is approximately 49% with some years as low as 46%. It is not an easy exam. See ICBC Published Pass Rates Here.

TWO YEARS

Graduated licensing adopted in most countries in the world generally restricts a new driver for two to three years. WHY? It’s because the crash and death rate of new drivers is crazy high, and this needed to STOP so laws came about to keep our young alive. Two to three years are high risk mainly because you do not have the experience. It’s a dangerous thing driving. It takes time and experience to move the car through all four seasons. It takes more time than people think to understand how to keep yourself safe.

every day in British Columbia – 960 collisions a day

THREE YEARS

Driving regularly for many years is a must before you start to get a good understanding of how to stay away from trouble. You cannot merely hold a license for three years. YOU NEED TO BE DRIVING REGULARLY.

TEN YEARS

If you keep learning and aware and pay attention to your mistakes and close calls, you will continue to learn and be surprised at how tricky driving is. Many surprises keep occurring on the roads. Sadly many drivers do not keep learning and do not increase their awareness over the years. Everything is constantly changing – so must you. 

A LIFETIME

Technology keeps adding in new car equipment—your vision changes as you age. Your body also changes. Lifestyle changes affect your stress levels. All of this influences your driving and how you manage the constant risk of driving. Driving is a lifelong process of continually adjusting and learning to each change. At some point, you will need to adapt to the changes by stopping driving. It is all part of a lifelong continual process of learning to drive.

“You cannot produce effective solutions without true facts.”