I am not really a science guy; I took Physics for Poets to get one of my final credits to graduate from college. One result of my ignorance on this subject was trying, after my son’s accident, to understand why cars so often skid. For quite a while , I looked for something or someone who would explain the physical sequence in terms a non-scientist could understand. I eventually found it in Tim Smith’s 2006 book Crash-Proof Your Kids (Fireside). Describing “what typically gets teens in trouble on curves,” Smith’s book (which I highly recommend) says:
[They] enter the curve from a straight stretch with a balanced car. What often happens is that they enter the curve at same speed as the straightaway, which is too fast. Then they get midway through the turn and feel the tires slip, so they hit the brakes. Pretty reasonable response, right? Actually, no. The reason the tires started to slip is that the driver is asking them to do two things at once — maintain traction and change direction — at a speed where it was impossible to accomplish both. What happened with the balance and traction of the car? When the wheel was turned left, the left side of the car dipped and the right side rose. Then, when the driver braked, it caused the center of mass to move forward and load up the front wheels, putting the majority of the downforce and traction on the left front tire. The rear tires, now with less weight. lost traction and started skidding across the road, while the car’s back end headed toward the shoulder. Experiencing this, many new drivers brake even harder, which puts even less weight on the rear tires and compounds the skid, and the car ends up spinning off the road. This happens all the time, and it’s preventable.
Except for the fact that my son overcorrected to the right, not the left, and then hit a guard rail, this paragraph seems to me to be an unfortunately precise description of his accident. Especially the preventable part.
What does this paragraph tell parents about supervising teen drivers? For one, that some aspects of driving are counterintuitive, and that to learn how to control a skidding car requires practice. This raises the obvious dilemma — how does one get a teen to practice skid control? High performance driving schools are one option, though the cost can be prohibitive for many parents. The empty high school parking lot on Sunday morning might be possible, though the drawbacks of doing so are plain. Also, teaching skid control is obviously a two-edged sword — do we want teen drivers to feel as though they will be able to handle the car if it skids? Does teaching skid control promote more dangerous driving? It might.
I am sure that many driving instructors would take the position that skid control practice in a vacant parking lot is an important skill to learn, and that the benefits of knowing how to respond — at least being trained in the counterintuitiveness of the response — outweighs the risks of encouraging dangerous driving behavior. But I would offer this more conservative perspective: the physics of skids, as Tim Smith so aptly describes it, illustrates three parts of my mantra that There Is No Such Thing As a Safe Teen Driver. As Smith notes, skids are a common occurrence in driving. Preventable, but common. Thus, when we put teen drivers on the road, we hope that they will be sensible enough to avoid the circumstances and places where skids are likely to occur, but there are two other possibilities — they have been taught how to respond to skids, which induces them to assume that they can handle a skid and thus can take more risks, or they have not been taught how to respond, in which case they are at considerable risk of veering of the road. The realities of skidding also illustrate the truism that it takes years of experience to create a safe driver, not the 20-50 hours that states require for teens to be licensed. Finally, the ever-lurking problem of skidding is most likely to arise — as it did in Reid’s case — when a teen drives on an unfamiliar road and goes into a turn that comes up suddenly, causing a quick pull to the right or left, which then starts the off-the-road sequence.
In summary, skidding is part of driving, skid control is an elusive and double-edged element of driver training for teens, and this phenomenon is yet another reason for parents to work with their teens, every time the teens get behind the wheel, to map out the route and consider whether there will be sudden curves that might result in a skid, and to avoid such spots if at all possible.
Parents’ final thought on this topic should be the recognition that there are no good answers, only degrees of risk.
