Illegal number plates and driving tests

The DSA are tightening up their stance on illegal number plates according to their latest press release:

DSA Illegal Number Plates Statement

The fact that they are going to start reporting them is good, but on some of the forums I've noticed a distinct "who cares" attitude to this problem - even from DSA examiners themselves.

There's a few problems with illegal number plates:

1. Speed cameras sometimes have trouble picking them out, which means that the 4x4 that just blasted past you in the wrong lane on the roundabout will not get his cummuppance.
2. When reported to the police, these plates are often mis-quoted and regularly come back as being not registered to a car. Hit and run accidents with illegal number plates are often not traceable for this reason.
3. They're just plain tacky.
4. They show that the person is happy breaking one law - why not a few more? Is the car actually insured for the test?

So please guys - don't just report them - refuse to take tests in them.

Also - if they're illegal - could the people who make these plates up not be prosecuted? I genuinely don't know the answer to this one, but I'm reasonably sure that someone will email me the answer! Thanks.

The Right to Drive?

The new driver act has kicked in - and we've all had the phone call from the distraught 18 year old who feels hard done by when they have their licence removed from them.

"But I only got 2 - I was doing 32 in a 30, and the second one was for being on me fone - I thought you had to get six points before you were banned?!"

Hmmm - just in case anyone has not understood the stupidity of the above - let me explain:

Many driving offences carry a different penalty point weighting. It just so happens that a speeding camera fine is usually 3 points, as is talking on your mobile phone. So with those two stupid actions - 6 points and if you passed your test less than 2 years ago - you're back to square 1 - take your test again.

Also - "32 in a 30" - do you think we're thick? You wouldn't trigger a camera until you were going 33, or more likely 35 or above.

Grrrr!

I love these phone calls - I'm always polite, and I will always accept someone if they have learnt with me, or if they understand what they have done, and why they shouldn't have, but the ones who are just angry that "everyone's gettin at me - shutup, shutup, oh whateva" can go hang.

Unfortunately, though I personally think this is a great idea - I understand that it has had a very limited effect on road safety.

In fact - it may even have made things worse. People who have been banned start driving illegally. They have got used to driving and had begun to take it for granted, so when it is taken away they decide to continue, not understanding the dangers and life wrecking stupidity of what they are doing.

And this leads me to the main problem with all of this - what can the police do? What do the police do? Surely impounding every car that is driven on the road without insurance, tax, or MOT would go some way toward solving the problem. Then link any release fee directly to the cost of the policing, the impound and the paperwork of the operation (2 coppers - 2 hours, 1 administrator - 1 hour, 1 recovery truck - 3 hours, 1 compound - 3 days, maybe around £500, with an extra £100 per day until someone who is insured for the car itself turns up to collect it!).

Criminals would no longer have cars. This may help the fight against normal crime too just a little!

Cost of Training Courses

CPD hasn't arrived yet, but most of us with a couple of braincells are already involved with training ourselves almost as much as we do training our customers.

There's one thing that seems to run through all of these courses - it doesn't matter which course it is - there's a company set up to administer the course, and of course they have to cover their costs, but some of these costs are pretty high.

Cost of course - £420 for 2 days - no problem. Excellent 1 to 1 training with loads of useful information.

Cost of registration - £100 - just to put my details on a computer and a phone call to confirm things? Profit to administering organisation - probably £80

Cost to be a trainer for the courses - £250 - this covers a few booklets, cost value of which I would put at no more than £25 for printing, and probably could've been designed over 2 days with an expert, 1 day with a graphic designer - total design cost - no more than £1000. Considering that there's probably between 500 and 2000 of these courses taken per year that means at most an extra £2. Profit to organisation - £220

Maybe I should stop being a trainer, design a course - sell the idea to government for their backing, then make it compulsory and rake in £300 profit from every trainer who signs up to promote my course for me!

Whoopee.

Trying to make more sense of this blog!

I'm in the middle of sorting out all the tags so that you can search for stuff better - hope it helps.

Guaranteed Pass Courses

One of my associates runs a website which is designed to turn up high on the search engines for this phrase, and he gets over 100 hits a day with people looking for this kind of course!

I know that we all want some kind of guarantee when we buy anything these days, but what do they really think that we can guarantee?

After looking at this for a few minutes, I've found a lot of sites offering free retests, and a couple who will repay your test fee if you fail, but I really feel that people want a guarantee that they will pass!

There's one guy out there who offers a "guaranteed pass" rate on his site - it's nearly £2000! I reckon the principle there is that he should be able to get anyone through with that many lessons, and if not they'll give up. I reckon he'll regret that sometime! 100 lessons isn't unknown, and I've seen a few customers who would take him to court if he didn't keep giving lessons after that!

Yep - people really do want "a driving license or your money back"!

What kind of society do we live in?

The Average Price of Driving Lessons Going Up

As economists will tell you - when you get a glut of supply, prices will drop.

They will also tell you that when prices drop enough, suppliers will stop producing, as they cannot afford to continue, which ironically pushes the price back up!

At the moment, there is a glut of driving instructors across the country, but more and more instructors are giving up the job and returning to "normal" paid jobs. The insecurity and low pay has taken it's toll on them. Irresponsible customers who cancel late and pay irregularly are often cited as the final deciding factor - just a few phone calls during the week can half the weekly profit.

And when the excuse from the pup is "well I can't afford it anymore" then we have to wonder if we want to keep servicing these kind of people.

More and more of the bigger companies are advertising "first 5 lessons for £49" or similar - an excellent advertising ploy, drawing lots of people in to start lessons which are not economically viable for the driving instructors who are pushed into offering them by their franchises. Unfortunately the people who can afford driving lessons at less than £10 an hour simply can't afford them at £20 an hour, or they decide they want to try another special offer from the next franchise, so you lose money on 5 hours work, and get nothing from it.

So we are going to lose instructors.

More instructors will move into specialist training like Fleet and FLH.

Learners will need to take more lessons to fulfil their year long learning obligations.

Ergo - prices will rise.

Considering that at the moment, it costs on average around a grand to learn (45 hours at £20 an hour, plus a bit to be insured on your dad's insurance, test fees, dvds etc), how much do we think the public will pay.

I reckon that if I couldn't drive, it would be worth well over £3000 to me.

Roll on the £50 driving lesson. I might even move back to teaching learners for that money!

Urban 4x4 Drivers & the "False sense of security" factor

I know that urban 4x4s divide people into 2 VERY distinct groups - those who love em, and those who think they should be banned.

Well I can't stand them. They are an outward sign that the person who has bought them is greedy, selfish and has an inferiority complex. The problem with all of these things is that the symptoms they produce are pretty bad for other people on the road.

They are the car of the bully and the bullied.

The bully feels their own inferiority and feels the need to impose himself on the road, the traffic situation and other people. The bullied feels that everyone else is doing that to them, so they get in their 4x4 and try to fight back - the effects of both are exactly the same.

I often meet people, mainly ladies (sometimes their husbands) who justify their 4x4's from a safety point of view. Unfortunately this is a foolish argument.

The safety of a 4x4 is a myth.

Anyone outside the 4x4 when it impacts is much more likely to be killed or seriously disabled. This can be easily seen when you stand a 7 year old in front of the bonnet of (for example) a mini and a range rover. If you then imagine that both cars are travelling at 20 mph you can see vividly the problems. The mini will bump them over - possibly breaking a leg on the bumper, or hurting their head on the (impact designed) bonnet. The Range Rover (even without the addition of bull bars) will probably break their hip then run them over.

And the fact is - the height of the 4x4 moves everyone outside the vehicle out of the line of sight of the driver - especially young children to the rear of the car.

Other drivers are just as much at risk - if hit by a 4x4 it will ride up on top of the "normal" car crushing the inhabitants. The steel ladder chassis will crush anything it hits.

The really strange fact is that statistically you are actually 1% more likely to be killed or permanently disabled if you are INSIDE the 4x4 in a collision. This is because of the instability of 4x4's (hit a motorway barrier in a normal car - you bounce off, in a 4x4 - you go over the top and wind up in the middle of the other carraigeway on your roof!), and the fact that though they feel like normal cars, they don't drive like them. A 4x4 can often get amazing grip in the worst of conditions due to their design, but in these conditions there is no improvement in braking over a normal car.

The salesmen will tell you how amazing the brakes are, and will go into great detail about how technologically advanced they are, which is true - they have to be. The problem comes when you actually expect your Rangie Sport to react like a BMW - it can't. Impossible. 3 tonnes of agricultural machinery will not stop in the same way. It also won't warn you of the fact. In the BMW you'll notice the slight wheel slip on the bad road surface - it'll make you nervous and you'll slow down. In the 4x4 you won't notice it until you hit the brakes and suddenly find the ABS kicks in earlier because it simply doesn't have enough grip to hold the car. Though having ABS on a car will help it slow more quickly in real life conditions - having a lighter car going slower will stop you in half the distance!

The "False Sense of Security" Factor:

This is the worst bit. We've all been in one - how nice does it feel to be so high above the hoi-polloi, in such a beautifully engineered machine - the sense of superiority, the solidity, the view so far ahead. The way it gets grip even on wet and slippery country lanes, keeps pulling hard through heavy rain.

And that is the downfall - it feels like it's handling perfectly, just like a car - a good one at that, but it won't stop, and when it hits something we're all in trouble.

There needs to be a new licence category for vehicles which weigh over 1.5 tonnes.

People need to understand the huge differences these vehicles introduce to the way you should drive them.