Hey guys, long time reader but i only recently joined. i'm not sure if this has already being mentioned but i'm sure safety of the car and driver training is very important, however the role of the parents are often forgetten in all this debating.
I'm pretty sure most of us are taught by our father/mother on how to drive in the family car and in nsw the rta only requires you to do a mininum of 60 hours of driving to sit for ur p's, and then i've known a few people who actually faked the hours so they could get their licence sooner.
Anyway back to my point i think parents should take a more active role in teaching their kids how to drive rather than help them make up the hours on sunday morning when its perfectly sunny and the roads are quiet, for example when i was learning how to drive my dad didn't care about how many hours i did but rather how comfortable he was with me behind the wheel. i was basically driving for 6+ hours a week for about a year(got my L's at 16).
The most important thing is that he made me drive in all different kinds of road conditions. I'm only using this as an example but on many occasions when it was raining heavly, he would make me go driving with him, i thought at the time he was just being lazy and needed some one to drive but now i realised that he made me drive to experience different conditions that i would face on my own and because he was next to me , he was able to give me tips on what he would do in that situation and possibly how to avoid it. I have to admit that alot of the things that he said didn't make any sense to me when i was 16 but now (22) it makes a whole lot of sense.
So the point of all this is that parents are as important as defence driver training and all the other stuff that gets mentioned all the time.
end of rant..........back to dreaming of my r34
