What’s One Piece Of Car Advice You’d Give To Younger Drivers?

One of the unfortunate things about driving is that you’re kind of an idiot when you start out. It’s a skill that takes time to learn, and in the U.S., we decided the best time to learn that new skill is right when your brain is drowning in hormones and almost incapable of making good decisions. And that’s just the act of driving itself. You also know nothing about which cars are actually worth buying, the process of buying a car, how to maintain one, what you’ll do in an emergency situation and so many other things you need time and a little life experience to fully understand. 

That combination of youth and inexperience in a country where everyone is expected to drive everywhere all the time also happens to be a recipe for making a lot of mistakes. They aren’t always life-changing mistakes, but they can be. Far too many people I went to school with ended up dying in crashes, and plenty who didn’t die but came close. Heck, if things had gone a little differently back when I was 16, the moderate head trauma I suffered when I tried riding across the parking lot on the trunk of a friend’s car could have easily been fatal. Thankfully (or unfortunately, depending on your opinion of my writing), I survived with minimal long-term issues, but let me tell you, I sure wish I hadn’t attempted that particular stunt.

Looking back, there are so many things I wish I could tell my younger self or teach younger drivers, but if I had to narrow it down to one single thing, it would probably just be to wear your seatbelt every single time you get into a car, no matter what. Your main goal as a young driver should be to live long enough to become an old driver, and the best way to make that happen is that little ole seatbelt. 

It’s also hard to exaggerate just how important seatbelts are for safety. A driver recently survived a 300-foot fall in a Ford F-150 that wasn’t exactly brand new, and while a lot of that came down to the way the truck was engineered, all the work those engineers put into making that crash survivable would have been irrelevant if the driver hadn’t been wearing their seatbelt. Think you won’t crash because you’re a safe driver, and it’s just a short trip? Wear that seatbelt anyway. I guarantee that F-150 driver didn’t get in their truck thinking they were going to crash, but you can bet your ass they’re thankful they wore their seatbelt anyway. 

What about you, though? If you could give one piece of advice to younger drivers, what would it be? It doesn’t have to be nearly as serious as “wear your seatbelt so you don’t die,” either. Maybe it’s a tip about buying a car or something you learned that made parallel parking easier. We may not be able to force younger drivers to listen to us, but at the very least, we can fill the comments section with all sorts of advice we wish we had taken back when we were still green behind the ears.