Published: Wednesday, 10th February, 2010 5:00pm

DriveZone is putting safety first in class

Advertorial

The DriveZone simulator.

DriveZone International was founded in September, 2008, and opened its doors to the public in April, 2009. At DriveZone we teach people to drive in a driving simulator. We also give lessons to nervous drivers to help them relax and to build confidence in busy traffic.

Throughout the world, in Europe, USA, Japan, Australia and parts of Asia, driving simulators have been used for decades as part of the school curriculum, as an aid to teach young people to drive in total safety.

Training teenagers in safe driving practices is a difficult problem. Teenagers are primarily motivated to obtain their licences and the freedom to drive, and are not cognisant of the dangers in the driving environment. Accident rates for teenagers are about five times higher than for mature drivers.

Research suggests that the risk of teenagers crashing as a result of inexperience overshadows the effect of immaturity in the first year of driving, while immaturity becomes more important when teen drivers get some experience and build confidence in driving.

While teen driving behaviour may look like intentional risk taking, in reality it is the result of the inability to assess risk. Young novice drivers take risks because of their immaturity and get into hazardous situations, and then fail to avoid crashes because of their inexperience.

In general there seems to be some difficulty in justifying the effectiveness of the driver education system. Driver education may help beginners acquire driving skills, but the standard driver education course does not appear to produce safer drivers.

Motor vehicle crashes are significantly higher among young drivers during the first years they have their licences, and crash risks decline with increased experience. However, the more newly licensed teenagers drive, the greater their risk exposure.

This produces an interesting dilemma about how to provide young drivers with driving experience without significantly increasing their crash risk. Driving simulation is the solution to this dilemma, since exposure to hazardous diving conditions can be simulated in a controlled and repetitive way without risk.

The University of Iowa carried out a study of 500 18-year-olds who learned to drive on simulators: their accidents over their first four years of driving, 2003-2007 were studied and compared with the official teen accident figures for California and the Canadian state of Nova Scotia. The result was that the teenagers who learned on the simulators had only one third of the accidents of the general teen population. This is just one study out of thousands done worldwide, proving that simulators are extremely effective means of driver training.

DriveZone has successfully carried out courses at St. Patrick's College, Cavan and Collegiate College, Monaghan, using its custom built mobile unit, which contains three simulators. It enables us to travel to second level schools and third level colleges to teach this important life skill with the minimum of disruption to both pupils and teachers.

During mid-term between Monday, February 15 and Saturday 20 inclusive, DriveZone will carry out free trials and demos for second level students at its Stradone premises. Please phone to make a booking 049-4323738, 087-2681635, 087-2569559.