A fleet operator doesn’t necessarily know what they will get with a driver training package. You might receive the hard sell from the provider, but as you’re not the one doing the training, you can only go by what the staff say after the course.
With that in mind, BusinessCar signed up to an advanced driver coaching assessment with corporate training specialist IAM Drive and Survive to find out what really happens on the front line of driver training sessions.
My training advisor for the day was Tom Lammin, who has more than two decades’ experience of coaching individuals, instructors, examiners, and everyone in between.
The three-and-a-half-hour course kicks off with a briefing and short presentation, which highlights some pitfalls for corporate drivers, many of which are obvious – but only when they’ve been pointed out to you. Information such as roundabouts, traffic lights and pedestrian crossings being the most common areas – in that order – for rear-end shunts (I could only think of a T-junction when asked), for the simple reason that “they are the areas where we stop with a degree of unexpectedness,” says Tom.
The next step is a quick inspection of the car, which involves checking the brake lights and the tread depth of the tyres. I knew how to do the latter with the aid of tread depth gauge, but Tom shows me another method for “when you’ve lost your tread gauge or if it’s buried under a boot full of samples”.
This involves using the tyre wear indicator: the letters TWI are displayed on the sidewall and correspond to a bump in the middle of the tyre, which is set at the minimum legal tread depth of 1.6mm. Run your hand along the rubber and if you can feel the bump beneath the tread, you’re okay. If it’s level, you’re not.
We hit the road and head for the nearest dual-carriageway. Tom frequently pipes up and points things out, such as when you’re overtaking a lorry and you can no longer see the driver’s face in his rear-view mirror, you’re in his blind spot and it’s time to speed up; and when the number plate of the car in front is just about going out of focus, that’s your ideal distance from it. It seems like common sense, but these are things you wouldn’t necessarily consider unless someone highlights them.
The next stint is rural A- and B-roads, which, among other things, involve vanishing or limit points. This is a method of tracking the sharpness of a corner by observing the point in the bend where the road ahead disappears from view and the speed at which that is happening. The advice is to read the road as far ahead as possible.
“It’s a good idea to pick your information early”, says Tom. “If the amount of bend you can see is decreasing, take speed out; if it’s increasing, you can put speed in.
“The reason people don’t locate the limit point is because we’re not supposed to. Usain Bolt can run 100 metres in 10 seconds and it takes him about 20 metres to stop without pulling a muscle. That’s how far ahead most people look because that’s what we’re designed to do.”
Tom also advises to use as much of the road as possible by moving to the middle on a clear left-hand bend, which gives you more time and better visibility.
He continues: “Virtually all your hazards are on the left-hand side of the road. Cyclists, pedestrians, horses, junctions – only oncoming traffic is from the right. So the advice is to pull out into the middle of the road on a left-hand bend, but judge it per bend. As a rule, you see stuff earlier and you create space.”
When the driving has finished Tom recaps the course as a whole and leaves me with a few pointers about what I could improve. I have a habit of slowing down through the gears rather than using the brakes, which is fine for economy purposes but it doesn’t let the person behind know I’m stopping. It also means I leave my hand on the gear lever for longer than I need to.
They’re things I become conscious of on my next journey, but I don’t feel as though I’ve been preached at or dictated to. The course is a series of observations and suggestions more than anything else, which is likely to go down a lot better with business drivers than just picking holes in bad habits.
The role of the fleet operator
An endemic problem with corporate driving training is the failure of companies to communicate to their staff what the courses are and why they’re doing them.
“There’s a lot that should be done that isn’t – and not by us,” explains Simon Elstow, IAM Drive and Survive head of training. “We send joining instructions and we talk to individuals on the phone beforehand, but so many drivers have no idea what they’re doing or why.
“The most important thing all companies need to do that a lot don’t, is that the CEO has to say ‘we are going to do this training, this is the contact and we care about you’. And some companies just don’t work like that. Sometimes the CEO just says merry Christmas to everyone once a year and that’s it.”
He adds that the most proactive companies, such as BP and Shell, actually make driver training a part of the employee appraisal process, while others address it in company meetings and ask for feedback, and these are inevitably the firms that see the best results.
