First Driving lesson on Monday

NEW AND WANNABE DRIVERS (INTERACTIVE)
1

Well the time is nearing up and coming soon, after many weeks of cancelations both by me and the driving instructor (Mine being through work :imp: :imp: ) my first driving lesson is soon to get underway!

But I can’t help but feel a tad nervous as it’s all dawning that i’ll be behind the wheel for the first time…okay not a truck but I’m getting there at least :laughing: :laughing: :blush:

One thing that’s annoying me though is practicing for my theory tests, i’ve been taking mock tests but I only seem to be getting 39-41 out of 50 and I’m right in saying that the pass mark is 43 :imp: ? I’ve not even given the hazard perception a try yet because to be honest I haven’t had time to do practice tests of it. But it’s frustrating that I’ve been a few marks off each time! But to be fair I’ve only been revising little bits at a time so my head doesn’t get confused although it doesn’t seem too confusing :confused: Just the last few marks to get it right!

Any tips to give for monday would be helpful…apart from the don’t hit a lamp post and yes I’ll remember to think of the children as well :laughing: :unamused:

Cheers

Jonny :sunglasses:

2

jonnytruckfest:
Any tips to give for monday would be helpful…

Yep, proof read what you write and stop waffling ■■■■■■

You go on and on and on and … see you have me starting to do it now lol.

Don’t think about it, just wait till Monday, enjoy your FIRST driving lesson in a CAR and forget about waggons for now.

Just enjoy your experience and LISTEN to the instructor.

Please also forget about proof reading my advise, I’m ■■■■■■■ but good luck and enjoy it.

3

Time to send my license back :slight_smile:

Seriously Johnny, all the best. You’ve worked hard to save for the lessons and you will be fine once you get going.

Same rules apply really. Your instructor is there to guide you. Listen to what they say.

Mirrors before signal and manoeuvre. It’s called MSM for a reason :wink:

Take each lesson at the pace set. Don’t try and run before you walk. You will have plenty of pressure when you get to faster roads and complex junctions.

Your instructor will probably have some good tips on revising for theories too. Also will be easier to remember stuff for the theory once you are using it out on the road. I certainly found that when I took mine.

Just out of curiosity, is it a national school you are training with or a private tutor?

I had 24 x 1.5 hour lessons with a private instructor. He was very calm and composed and kept me advancing at a good pace. It was 12 quid an hour at the time. Bet you are probably lucky if you can get it for under 20 quid an hour nowadays :-/

4

good luck Johnny im sure you cant wait have fun are you taking one of the intensive courses or week by week ? as for theory read through as much as poss and it will sink in just pick up the book when you have a moment , good luck

jx

5

Thanks for the info folks, and at the time being it’s just going to be week by week as I can’t afford to go all out on a £700 course at the moment.

The driving school i’ve gone with is LDC as they seem to have a VERY good reputation for good pass rates/good instructors etc. I’ve already got a good vibe from my driving instructor with how polite (And understanding with the 2 cancellations i’ve had to make due to work :imp: ) But I can’t be doing too bad on the theory bit i’ve i’m just a few marks off the pass rate with the little and often method so its just a little more studying on my part and the help of a little driving tuition will help towards that I suppose…

My first 5 lessons are costing me £60 so not too bad I suppose. But what it’ll cost me after that I have no idea :laughing:

No doubt i’ll tell of how it went on Monday…(Keep indoors just to be safe :laughing: )

Cheers

Jonny :sunglasses:

6

My driving lessons were £15 ph and that was at a discounted rate through a family friend at BSM.

Good luck Jonny, sure you’ll be fine.

7

Best of luck. You will have great fun. I remember on my first lesson the driving instructor descrided my driving as like a bat out of hell :laughing: Well i had been tearing about in fields in a battered ■■■■■■ since i was 13.

One thing to remember if you stall dont worry it happens to every one. And any arse hole getting fed up behind you is best ignored. Cant believe how some drivers act towards learners, its prickish to say the least.

With regard to the theory just keep practising and your marks will get better. I found that i very quickly learnt the questions and could remember them with only reading the first bit, so much so i manage to do a truck one (100 questions) in 10 mins scoring 99 but im a bit wierd :laughing:

Once again best of luck and remember to enjoy it.

Phil

8

I’ll remember that porky and I’m not to bothered if I annoy anyone, I normally take pleasure out of doing so so I’m not too fussed, but if/when I do stall it I’ll try not to look too embarassed :laughing:

Can’t wait for tomorrow, seems like forever away! Should be a laugh to say the least :grimacing:

Cheers

Jonny :sunglasses:

9

The things that come to my mind are:* listen to the instructor

  • if you are not building up a rapport with the instructor and are struggling to learn from him or her, consider changing instructor - but give it a few lessons to be certain it is time to change
  • don’t put yourself under pressure to take a test after so many lessons or before a certain date - taking your test when you are ready will save you time and money, but, most importantly, will make you a better driver
  • don’t be upset by those days when it doesn’t come together and you make mistakes - they happen(ed) to us all
  • don’t drive like a maniac when you pass - young male drivers are particularly prone to accidents early in their driving careers because they over-estimate their own abilities
  • remember to enjoy it!

I believe the best thing you can do is to aim to be the best driver you can be. The aim at this first stage isn’t to scrape through your car test, but to be a competent car driver by the time you take and pass your car test.

Once you’ve passed, it’s well worth working on advanced car skills. If there are local RoADAR or IAM groups, consider taking advantage of what they offer once you’ve passed and have built up a bit of car experience.

Sadly, there is a lot of bad driving on the roads today. I wonder how much of it is because you can do some pretty stupid things in modern cars and get away with it. Systems such as ABS, traction control and ESC along with modern tyres and suspension often allow you to get out of outrageous situations where a crash was otherwise certain. If you crash a modern car, the standards of impact protection along with pretensioners and airbags mean that you often walk away with minimal injuries.

My first car after I passed my test in 1993 was a A-reg Vauxhall Nova 1.2. There was nothing electronic on the car, other than the radio and the electronic ignition (it wasn’t old enough to have points). That car had a manual choke carburettor, a four speed gearbox and brakes that were servo-assisted but still weren’t that effective. There was no power steering, central locking and definitely no ABS - it didn’t exist on cars in the early 80s. On a 1983 model year Nova , the near side door mirror and rear seat belts were both options - fortunately my Nova had both fitted by the time I got it.

If you got out of shape in the Nova, there was no electronic wizardry in the car to try to save you. The handling was way short of modern standards; it had standard profile tyres with nothing like the grip of modern tyres. If you crashed it - which I fortunately did not - it was going to hurt.

Don’t expect to be a fantastic driver straight away. Some learn faster than others, but the most important thing is to learn from your mistakes, both before and after you pass your test. If you get a bit out of shape or make an error of judgment, analyse what you did wrong and make sure you’ve learned the lesson. If you feel or hear ABS or traction control kick in, you probably made a mistake, even if it was just going too fast in iffy conditions. It may be someone else’s fault if you have to pull up sharply at a roundabout, but there may still have been defective observation or anticipation on your part.

You’ll soon find out for real how you have to multi-task when driving, and just how fast things can happen around you! It is an eye-opener being in the driving seat for the first time.

Don’t emulate the idiots on the road. Driving like a wally doesn’t make you look cool or give you street cred, it puts yourself and others at risk.

You sound like a sensible guy with some goals in mind. I hope you enjoy the process of learning to drive a car and that you soon have what I suspect will be the first of several blue pass certificates in your hand.

10

Well that’s my first lesson done with!..No one died so I suppose that’s the main thing :laughing:

To start things off I’d like to say that my instructor was very calm and pleasant and IMO is a very good teacher to say the least! Obviously we started off with going to a quiet place so we could start with the moving off etc getting used to the car, he then started asking what I knew about the things in/on the car and at the time my head went blank although he was pleasantly surprised with how much I knew, even when I mentioned using hand signals etc he said I was one of the first students in a long time to mention so I can’t be all that bad on the theory side.

When he asked about the theory side for how much I’ve done, i did mention about me doing mock tests with having done not so much reading but still managing to score 39/40 out of 50 he told me in a sense that’s great as there isn’t much work to do on that bit just to read up on the highway code somewhat! With the actual driving itself :blush: Well porky to say that I would stall it I did :blush: :laughing: but that was more with nerves than anything (And forgetting to take the handbrake off too so we did a couple bunny hops :blush: :laughing: ) But that was the first and only time I stalled it so I’m proud of that one :grimacing: I’m still somewhat getting used to the bite point so the car isn’t jumpy as much when setting off but Paul said that’s normal when you first start driving.

I’m proud to say I didn’t mount or kiss any kerbs! Then again the mirrors helped with that one :grimacing: Although I do seem to pay too much attention to the mirrors sometimes so I have to work on that :blush: We started on junctions too on the first lesson to get used to/the idea of them next lesson although I don’t like the indicators on the corsa that he uses because they aren’t the normal ‘Turn right push left stalk up…turn…stalk comes down’ its a case of ‘click stalk up…turn…signal cuts out’ :laughing: It takes some getting used to but I think I’ll get there! But it wasn’t all bad in fact I was rather proud that I managed to maneuver around parked cars on either side of a not so wide road and didn’t flinch with other traffic around me…although when changing into second I accidently went into 4th instead :blush: But I fixed that immediately so Paul was impressed I did that without panicking!

But for a first lesson he said I did fine, but the next lesson will define whether I’ve gotten ahead of myself or whether I’m taking things fine :smiley: Although for a first lesson I think I did rather well to blow my own trumpet a little bit :smiley: .Next lesson is next Monday and already I can’t wait :blush: I think…I’ve got that driving bug now :blush:

Cheers

Jonny :sunglasses:

11

glad yu enjoyed it Johnny theres nothing like the freedom being able to drive gives you and sound like you had a good first lesson , djw `s post for you should be a mantra for all new car drivers very good advise for you , please stay sensible as you are and dont get sucked into the young idiots (not all young!!) that i see parked up in car parks about 9 oclock at night leaving half their tyres on the tarmac showing off , brainless and they really dont look cool at all :unamused:

jx

12

I did enjoy it, (Maybe a little too much :blush: ) I took Djw’s words on board and in fact they helped count towards my lesson today! And the whole boy racer thing has never appealed to me, the only ‘boy racer’ in me is to have a decent sound system in a car and that’s about it :laughing: But the bug is certainly there :open_mouth: I knew that I would enjoy it but never as much as I did!

Also, with my license eventually being the key to my job in the future (More or less!) I have no intentions of messing that up what so ever :sunglasses: I musn’t have done that bad though if I’m moving straight onto basic junctions etc next lesson so hopefully that will go as well as today did :smiley: Although I must say the 1 hour lesson felt like 10 minutes but that could be because I was enjoying it a little too much :blush:

It did make my dad laugh a bit when I told him about stalling the car first time because I forgot to take the handbrake off :laughing: :blush: Just glad nobody was around to see it! :grimacing: :blush:

Cheers

Jonny :sunglasses:

13

Glad to hear it went well, i once got 4th instead of 2nd in my instructors 1 L petrol on a hill. Safe to say the car didnt like it.

All the best with your learning.

Phil

14

Looks like you did ok. Well done. Brings back memories of my first few lessons. I just wanted to get on and didn’t want the lessons to end.

It’s normal to stall on first few lessons. In fact you can stall on the test provided you handle it correctly and safely.

Keep at it and enjoy.

Dean

15

You’ll have to excuse me if my reply seems all over the place I’ve just come back after my first of 4, 12 hour shifts (Safe to say I hate 9 while 9 shifts with a passion :smiling_imp: :smiling_imp: )

When I stalled the car I was far from worried in fact I couldn’t help but laugh :blush: I suppose that’s my way of dealing with it! Probably didn’t help having the handbrake on though :blush: Probably won’t ever live that one down :grimacing: Although my instructor was impressed at how calm and quick I reacted when I got 4th instead of 2nd! Although I don’t want to get ahead of myself but I definitely take after my dad with the driving although I can only improve :smiley:

Although the lessons don’t seem to last long enough :blush: Although it doesn’t help when all you’ve ever wanted to do since a young age is drive! But they do say the funnest part about driving is learning how to :smiley: And I know you don’t know everything as soon as you’ve passed the test in fact it’s just the beginning but it’s a nice feeling having a driving instructor who is calm and has similar interests to you also. I suppose that finding out in 10 minutes whether you’re going to like someone or not :smiley:

Hopefully I’ll match my dad at passing first time :smiley:

Cheers

Jonny :sunglasses: