OK, our Pearland auto accident attorneys realize that if you drive every day, you tend to take driving for granted. You could practically do it in your sleep. (In fact, some people do. They tend to crash.)
But we reiterate from time to time that driving is actually a fairly complicated task, involving on average 20 complex decisions to make per mile driven. Our Pearland auto accident attorneys point out that this hidden complexity in an everyday task that virtually everyone does is why drunken drivers so often cause really nasty accidents when their impaired judgment leads to an error in decision-making (or to a gross failure to recognize the need for a complex decision).
And when you want to add another level of intricacy to the already demanding task of driving, you can drive a stick shift, or a manual transmission vehicle. My first car was a stick shift and a performance vehicle. I have to admit that it handled more precisely and responded more fluidly to my driving needs than my current automatic transmission. And having to use the manual transmission and a clutch pedal tended to keep my attention more firmly focused on the driving task than my current nondescript automatic transmission.
Learning to drive a manual transmission wasn’t easy. The school’s “simulators” in our Driver’s Ed course were all automatic transmissions. And my simulator didn’t work anyway. So I just put my hands on the fake steering wheel and pretended to drive. The ancient teacher with the megalithic beehive hairdo never noticed the difference.
At the time, I was that rare teenager who wasn’t particularly enthusiastic about driving at all. So naturally I ended up with a vehicle more complex than average to operate. My dad took me out to the local cemetery to teach me to drive the thing. The cemetery was one of those vast urban complexes with acres upon acres of winding roads and very little traffic (we understand that the departed tend to wisely leave their cars behind when they seek peace). I guess my dad figured that if I royally screwed up while I was trying to master the stick shift, we’d be in the right place.
As it turns out, teenagers these days are apparently even less enthusiastic about learning to drive than I was. Fully a third of them still haven’t applied for their drivers’ licenses by the age of 19. (Kudos to the lot of you, by the way. If we had better public transportation where I live, I would gladly ditch my vehicle and my license instantly.)
Well, apparently this trend of fewer drivers and fewer car owners worries both the Ford Motor Company and an insurance company. After all, our Pearland auto accident attorneys must ask, “who needs car insurance if they don’t have cars?”
So Ford and Hagerty Insurance have teamed up to lure reluctant young people to the wheel through a program that offers hands-on training in operating a stick shift with the added lure of classic and collectible cars. (Source: Jeff Yip, Houston Chronicle, 4/26/13) (Classic and collectible cars which our Pearland auto accident attorneys incidentally mention are completely differently from the indistinguishable, generic vehicles actually available on the market and which the hapless victims of the program will probably end up driving).
Our Pearland auto accident attorneys do laud the effort to provide thorough training in the fine art of operating complex manual transmission vehicles. Though fewer of these stick shift cars are built now, if you end up with one, you really need to learn how to drive it properly. A shifting or pedal error could quickly be fatal. And not every beginning manual transmission driver has a patient, good-humored dad and a large, convenient cemetery nearby.
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