

Connected Car platform Automatic releases teen driving coaching program - adamaltman
http://techcrunch.com/2014/10/27/automatic-launches-license-a-coaching-program-for-teen-drivers-and-their-parents/

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superuser2
If you want drivers to be safe (read: boring), your goal is to make sure their
skills are as poor as possible.

After learning to drive, I started to do the kinds of things that insurance
companies/parents didn't want me to (sailing along straight, empty freeways at
night, hard acceleration, hard braking, slight drifting on snow, but mostly
very fast turns) because I felt 100% in control of the car the whole time. And
I was. It's part of the hacker thing. You've given me a machine; I want to
find out what I can make it do. And G-force is fun.

I don't touch the things that you really don't touch (distraction,
intoxication, trains) but the rest of it, absolutely, because I can. I built
up to things slowly - what happens if I wait just a _little_ longer to take my
foot off the accelerator before making a right? And then I figured out what
was _just_ past the threshold of comfort, and backed down. Never with
pedestrians around, and never with passengers, but enough that I felt like if
it were really a bad idea, it would have caused problems by now. I lost
control exactly once, playing with snow alone on a deserted street well under
the speed limit, and was still nowhere close to hitting anything.

When I see "maniacs" weaving through traffic or bikes not stopping at
intersections, my response is usually to maintain course, because I know what
they're thinking. They're thinking "I know exactly where I am, I know what
space I occupy, I know what space I _will_ occupy, and I know that I have a
reasonable margin such that we're not going to collide." I'll often think that
their appetite for risk is irresponsibly high, but I have a certain respect
for their certainty and I do my best to make sure they're right, and usually
that means maintaining speed.

Drivers who are obviously distracted, on the other hand, freak me out. If
someone is slow reacting to a green light, for instance, I will hate them
intensely but I'll also stay the hell away, because they're probably still
texting.

Engineering is actually at odds with safety here: a car that handled better
would only have made me more comfortable. If you want people like me to always
brake/accelerate/turn slowly, then you actually want us to feel _less_ in
control and _less_ skilled.

Surveillance would probably work also, but I just found that marketing copy
interesting. You don't want skilled drivers, you want drivers who are scared
shitless and correspondingly conservative.

I find some support for my theory in the fact that the road up to Pike's Peak
in Colorado is, statistically, one of the safest roadways in the United
States. There are tons of hairpin turns with no guardrails where missing it by
a few feet would mean a 3,000+ foot fall. But people respect that, and are
consequently extremely careful and attentive.

------
pathikrit
I bought the OBDLink to use with [Dash]([http://dash.by](http://dash.by)) and
it annoyingly forgets to auto connect to my bluetooth. Now, want to switch to
Automatic since they also have a web ui...

