Due to the pandemic, many driving schools had to close their doors, leaving teenagers’ driving instructions to their parents. But when Covid restrictions began to lift and young drivers returned to driving schools, instructions noticed they picked up more bad habits than usual.
After surveying 150 of its driving instructors, Young Driver, a UK-based driving school, discovered 89 percent of the instructors saw that students picked up bad habits from their parents during lockdown.
Although 98 percent of instructions still felt extra experience behind the wheel with a parent is important, 67 percent believed that instruction should be coupled with professional training.
The top-10 worst habits the Young Driver instructors reported are:
- Not following “mirror, signal, maneuver”a as a matter of course
- Steering with one hand or crossing hands
- Not observing what is happening around them
- Coasting
- Speeding
- Coming down through individual gears instead of block changing
- Not creeping and peeping when exiting a junction
- Riding the clutch
- Impatience/aggression
- Believing myths or out of date styles (i.e., you no longer need to hold the steering wheel at 10 and 2)
Honorable mentions include 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 ignoring highway regulations.
How many of these bad driving habits are you guilty of? Let us know in the comments.
I find it odd that the use of phones was not listed.
This is one of the worst issues we have here in South Carolina.
Coasting before making a turn is SO irritating. Around here every turn has a turn lane preceding it, and they are long enough to slow down in, but people take their foot off the gas WAY before the turn lane slowing everyone down.