PM sent.

I'm still refining my driving even though I've been driving almost 40 years now. (And the creative chaos on the roads continues to add stupid people tricks to watch out for)

There is a BIG hint here about who else is sharing the road with you. And this should only be the beginning of a lifetime of dismay :-)

Our local laws require the mentioned 1 second and assume that drivers are attentive enough to react. You made a couple of very good points why going beyond this limit is a good idea.
This is not intended to be political in any way: I think your local laws on this topic are better than ours. More distance to the vehicle in front of you does not only mean more safety. It also has the tendency to improve the flow of the traffic considerably - think of the rubber band effect.

Lot's of good advice. I particularly liked your list Dagny. Maybe I'm just a sucker for fancy formatting of your post!

Back to the OP, I encourage to take the tips here to heart and keep practicing them because the habits you ingrain now will likely shape your driving for the rest of your life. Well, risk taking generally goes down with advancing age, but other aspects of your driving will likely stay the same so it's best to start off right.

I would minimize how many other friends you have in the car. I remember many a car ride in high school with the stereo bumping and lot's of friends in the car joking and screaming. That's a recipe for inattentive driving or worse, egging you on to do something stupid or reckless.

Night driving can be deceptive, too, until you're a more experienced driver. Additional skills like knowing how to use that little lever on your center rearview mirror, using turn signals properly, driving at the appropriate speed, are all a bit different from daytime driving. And remember, the speed limit is designed for daytime driving under ideal conditions. Just because the sign says 50mph doesn't mean it's always safe to drive at that speed at all hours of the day or night, rain or shine. It isn't.

Experience is more important than raw natural talent in driving (as in virtually any skill). Accordingly, your job is to stay alive long enough to acquire thousands of hours of driving experience.

My first suggestion is similar to Sue's main point, but slightly different. Leave early. If you leave early, you will be lessly likely to be in a hurry and can therefore drive slowly. If you miss a turn or go the wrong way, you will have spare time to safely get back on track and you will not have to pull a u-turn in the middle of a highway.

My second suggestion is tied to the first. When you get flustered, you are much more likely to make bad decisions. Accordingly, try to avoid getting flustered. Leave early so that you aren't in a hurry. Familiarize yourself with a map of the area so that even if you take a wrong turn, you will know where you are and how to get where you are going. Despite all your efforts, you will on occasion get flustered. Train yourself to recognize when you are getting anxious, and when you recognize that you are getting anxious, slow everything down.

My third suggestion, try to avoid having another young male in the vehicle with you. You are displaying excellent judgment by seeking advice. Nevertheless, my experience is that the judgment of young males is the inverse square of the number of males. If you get two males, your judgment is a quarter of what it is by yourself. When you get three males, you are down to a ninth.

My fourth suggestion, bring some kind of snack to eat if you get sleepy. I remember that as a new driver, I was much more prone to getting sleepy/hypnotized than I am now. I eventually learned that eating something (pretzels are my favorite) eliminated the problem. If you don't experience this danger, then don't bring the snack.

Another suggestion: Read Deep Survival, particularly the first few chapters and think conceptually about positive feedback loops in the midst of unsafe behavior. Some people dont speed or do reckless maneuvers because they are in a rush, they do it for a rush. Understanding that sometimes you will be compelled to do stupid stuff because of an low order desire will help you to avoid such behavior.

True, but you need the proper kind of experience to become a skilled, safe driver. There are plenty of drivers on the road with many years of driving under their belts who are still poor drivers in many aspects of driving. Some skills they may never have learned or not learned properly. Other aspects are just bad habits that got ingrained because they always got away with it, like rolling stops, or from doing what others do.

It's very easy to watch how other people drive and to copy them and think that's the proper way to drive. The biggest pet peeve I have watching people drive in Southern California is how close people follow each other, particularly on the freeway. One second rule? What's that? You routinely see a train of cars driving 80+mph with just a few feet separating them. That is so crazy, but "everyone" drives that way! I took a trip to Florida recently and I couldn't believe how slowly everyone drove on the freeway there. I thought that they were just all retired folks, but nope, they're young folks.

There are so many good tips here already, and so many I could give, but I'll just give you one, for now:


Use elephants to drive more safely. Here's how:


You should follow at least three seconds behind the vehicle ahead of you. Note something the vehicle ahead of you is just passing (a mark on the road, a lane marker, a shadow, etc.) and start counting "1 Elephant, 2 Elephant, 3 Elephant". Each elephant takes one second to count, and that will tell you if you are far enough back.

Three seconds gives you time to react and get on your own brakes if the driver ahead of you slams on theirs unexpectedly, or something falls off the truck ahead of you, etc. Closer than that and you will hit the other vehicle/object/whatever before you can stop, no matter how quick your reactions are. The gap is hard to maintain in heavy traffic, of course, because people will constantly jump into it, trying to get that little bit ahead. But it's worth the effort. It just may save you from a collision.


Learn to keep an eye on the traffic just in front of you, a little further down the road, and 12 seconds down the road on both your side and the other side. To learn how far that is, pick a landmark down the road and count elephants again. You'll develop a feel for how far ahead twelve seconds is, and be surprised by traffic a LOT less often.


Check your mirrors regularly, too, at least once every ten elephants, er, seconds. That way you have some idea of what's happening behind you, too.


Develop a routine of keeping a gap ahead of you and of looking at the cars both near you and down the road. And let the elephants keep you safe!

On my fishing trip this evening two more things came to my mind and as I didn´t find it posted here I´ll do now.
Long shadows in your driving direction indicate a serious thread. Act as if you were invisible to other drivers as you may well be just that. It´s an unsymmetric low vision scenario. The sun in your back conceals your approach to drivers in front of you while you can see them clearly. That makes sunset or sunrise more dangerous than rain or fog. That fact is not always taught properly.
When started riding motorcycle I attached a hand counter to my handle bars. Every time I made a mistake I hit the counter. That has two effects. For one thing you admit to yourself that you did something you should not do. And to a lesser degree you get a count of your mistakes. The count can go up even when the driving gets better. I got more critical and started counting things I did not even notice when I started counting. The counter is also a constant reminder that I make mistakes too. It helps putting the "inconvenience" of safety margins in the proper perspective.

I hope that Driver's Ed classes are still not teaching techniques from the 60's. With the widespread adoption of technology like airbags in the steering wheel and anti-lock brakes, what we learned in our youths aren't the best ways to drive anymore.

I was taught the hand-over-hand method of turning. My first car had no power steering and hand-over-hand does generate the necessary torque, but nowadays, cars all have power steering. I later switched to the push-pull (or pull-push) method in my early 20's for a number of reasons. One reason being that it keeps your forearms clear of the airbag in case you crash while executing a turn. I also find it smoother to execute. Supposedly, you're less likely to get your steering confused by your crossed arms if you suddenly have to make an emergency maneuver in the middle of executing a turn but I've never had the opportunity to test that theory yet.

"Feathering" your brakes or "threshold braking" are not really necessary if you have ABS and could actually lengthen your shortest possible stopping distance compared to simply braking hard and not freaking out when the ABS kicks in and makes noises or you feel that pulsing in the pedal.

Taller drivers or those with longer arms may disagree, but I think holding the wheel at 8 o'clock and 4 o'clock should be standard, not 10-and-2 or 9-and-3 like we were taught in Driver's Ed. I have read that research shows no reduction in control, it's less fatiguing for long drives, and again, it helps keep your forearms away from the airbag in case of a crash. Most new cars these days conveniently have those grips at the 8-and-4 position, too, so even auto engineers expect you to hold the wheel that way. You often have the horn buttons within reach of your thumbs if you're holding the wheel at 8-and-4.

I have short arms and it also lets me sit further back from the air bag. I see too many smaller folks sitting really close to the steering wheel all the time. Well, the first priority is to sit close enough to be able to maintain proper control of the car, but after that, you should position yourself further away from the air bag, if possible.

And did anyone ever learn how to use their mirrors properly in Driver's Ed? The "normal" method is to simply point your center and side mirrors straight back. You end up with that big blind spot to the left and right rear quarter. It's such a waste to have all three mirrors covering essentially the same real estate behind your car.

A rough guide to the way I later learned to position my mirrors is to point the center straight back. For the left side mirror, rest your head against the side window and then position the mirror to just see the edge of your car body. For the right mirror, lean your head to the centerline of the car and adjust the mirror to just see the right edge of your car body.

As a car comes up from behind you, when they're a safe distance away, they will appear in your center mirror. As they come closer, the car will disappear from your center mirror but then simultaenously appear in your side mirror. Your blind spot is much smaller when you position your mirrors this way and you generally only need a quick look directly to the side to check your blind spot for a lane change, not a three-quarters turn like we were taught in Driver's Ed. Set up this way, a quick glance in your mirrors should normally show all vehicles in your vicinity without you having to worry about what's in your blind spot.

Try it, if this technique is new to you. It's really neat the first time you follow a car from your center mirror into your side mirror and then into your peripheral vision as it pulls up alongside you. Made me wonder why they didn't teach us this neat technique in Driver's Ed??? Unfortunately, I find that many cars don't allow their mirrors to turn outward far enough so I don't think this is the standard way to position your mirrors but it seems like such a no-brainer to me.