Ready or not, the day has arrived for your teenager to learn to drive. It’s essential to approach this with patience and understanding. Remember, you’ve been driving for a long time! Drawing from my experience of coaching hundreds of new drivers, here are some essential driving tips for beginners to help avoid common mistakes new drivers make.

Not Looking in the Right Places

The cornerstone of my training is emphasizing the significance of the eyes to all my students. I teach them that “where the eyes lead, the hands follow.” Drivers should maintain a broad, scanning field of vision well ahead of their current position along their intended path rather than fixating on specific points and potential obstacles. If you look at it, you’ll hit it, so be sure to avoid staring at the place you don’t want to go. Instead, look “positive” to the place you want to go, and your eyes will tell your hands how to get there. This is one of the most important driving tips for beginners.

Treating Stop Signs Like Traffic Lights

More than 75% of our beginner students exhibit this behavior: when they arrive at the end of a line of two or three cars at a stop sign, they tend to mimic the actions of the vehicle directly ahead and follow them through the stop sign, neglecting their own obligation to stop when they reach the sign themselves. They act like it’s a green light and just cruise right through. While using the movements of other vehicles as cues when driving can be helpful, it’s crucial to instill in your driver the importance of executing full, complete stops at stop signs.

Improper Pedal Usage

Novice drivers often approach the pedals as if they were binary switches, either fully “on” or fully “off.” However, one of the essential driving tips for beginners is to treat the pedals more like a dial with subtle adjustments of pressure. Instead of treating them as on/off switches, drivers should learn to modulate their pedal pressure gradually, adding or removing pressure as needed to smoothly drive the car. We often talk about it like the volume on their music; they can turn it up or turn it down, and this seems to help them understand the concept.

Improper Steering Technique

New drivers often exhibit a habit of constantly moving their hands around the wheel while steering the car. This can lead to uncertainty about steering input and difficulty getting back to “straight.” Establishing and maintaining consistent hand placement at 9 o’clock and 3 o’clock throughout the range of steering helps improve control and clarity in steering. If we encounter a turn that requires a larger amount of steering input, we want to use a hand-over-hand technique to safely steer through the corner. Additionally, novice drivers often struggle with failing to turn the wheel as much as necessary to navigate tight corners effectively. They tend to be afraid to turn the wheel fast enough in slow-speed corners, so we often say, “slow car, fast hands.” Another helpful tip to overcome this is for them to practice fully turning the wheel in both directions, gaining a better understanding of the available steering range. Knowing that the wheel goes around more than 360 degrees is mission-critical!