SWERVE: Changing the Way People Drive

Driver’s Ed. For most of us the words conjure up a boring classroom, a clattering car, and an old guy with his shirt un-tucked. We remember Mom next to us in the passenger seat, her right foot reflexively going for the brake while she shouts “Slow down!” Learning to drive is a rite of passage in a culture with few markers pointing the way toward adulthood; it’s one of the ways we know we’ve stopped being children.

For teens, driving equals independence. Few moments match the sheer thrill of that first solo trip, when the realization hits you that you really can go anywhere you want. For parents, this moment equals freedom from the long years of carpools and overcrowded schedules. We all have a vested interest in seeing young people learn to drive; what has been missing for too long is a focus on seeing them learn to drive well.

The numbers tell the story. Our youngest drivers get into collisions nine times more frequently than their elders. We lose more than 4,000 teens to crashes every year—a catastrophe we would never accept if it were imposed on us by terrorists or disease. We’ve come to see it as normal that teens will wreck cars; we assume they just have poor judgment, or we chalk it up to their lack of experience. But as Cy Young winner Vernon Law said, "Experience is the worst teacher: it gives the test before presenting the lesson."

SWERVE Driver Training has taken up the challenge of presenting the lesson first. Founded in 2002 by a group that included Ross Bentley, one of the world’s leading experts in performance driving, SWERVE built its curriculum from scratch. They set aside the methods and materials that have been in use since the Eisenhower presidency and started over. What does it look like to drive very, very well? That was the first question: what exactly are the good habits that combine to produce great driving? Great drivers, it turns out, all share a set of practices and behaviors that can be identified, described, and trained, one by one. That set of practices and behaviors became the basis of SWERVE’s student curriculum.

One such practice is the way great drivers use their vision, constantly looking as far as possible ahead of themselves. Average drivers keep their eyes down, which means they often get surprised by unfolding traffic developments. They don’t see that a truck way up the road is about to turn into traffic, and they’re more likely to make the kinds of sudden moves that surprise other drivers and help cause crashes.

Teaching great driving habits turns out to be difficult precisely because driving is one of those complex activities that we do mostly without thought. To experience this, just pay attention to how naturally your right foot moves from gas to brake and back again, all without any conscious effort.

The challenge of teaching young people to drive is about making what feels “automatic” accessible; it’s about finding the methods and language to isolate each small skill and turn that skill into a solid habit. That is exactly what SWERVE is doing. They began with the basic elements of a student curriculum and then developed an instructor training program to show people how to deliver those elements. This instructor training is easily the most intensive and comprehensive in the nation. It takes extraordinary self-possession, communication skills, and dedication to bring a nervous fifteen-year-old safely into the world of expressways and city streets. SWERVE instructors see their work with teens as passing on an important life skill—something just as necessary to future happiness as their ability to read and write.

The final piece of the puzzle has to do with parents, many of whom are anxious about fulfilling the state requirement to spend fifty hours practicing with their teens. SWERVE’s approach is to invite the parents to sit in on the first classroom session, where they’re shown the basics about how to practice. Parents leave that class with a program that maps out the timing of specific skills their son or daughter will be learning; they know exactly what to focus on and how to know when it’s safe to move to the next level. Is it working? The company’s rapid growth in the last few years is the best evidence that it is. All over Seattle and the Eastside, SWERVE classrooms and cars are full of students learning exactly what it takes to become great drivers.