The New Adult Driver

Overview

  • See our Pricing page for details about pricing and packages.
  • We pick students up at their location, do the lesson, and drop off – all in our state-certified and dual-brake equipped Driver’s Ed car. Read more about our Methods.
  • A beginning driver will normally require 8-10 lessons or more. Read our recommendations on How Many Lessons to take.
  • Student must have a Learner’s Permit to be eligible for lessons. See our FAQ for info about obtaining a Learner’s Permit.

Teaching New Adult Drivers

You may be older than our typical 15-16 year old beginning driver, but teaching you is mostly very similar! The mistake most people make? Trying to skip over the basics and get in over their head WAY too early. This leads to fear and discouragement and can greatly delay the learning process. It doesn’t always happen that way, but it’s very common. Everyone’s situation is different. Everyone’s priorities are different. It doesn’t really matter why you put off learning to drive. The only thing that is certain is that YOU can learn to drive, and WE can teach you!

Just like teen drivers, you’ve likely picked up bad habits from watching other drivers. Our job is to teach you how to drive in accordance with Florida law, and how to get around in traffic with the highest degree of both courtesy and confidence. We’ll teach you what they need to know to pass the Road Test. But, if you give us time to do it, and especially if you can get some practice between lessons, we’re going to spend a lot more of our time making sure that you are actually comfortable DRIVING and know how to be safe out in the real world.

Foundations

We teach at your level! We’ll cover everything from how to adjust the seats and mirrors to how to start the car as much as we need to. These are all the things most of us instinctively do when we get in our cars. But, they are among the easiest things to gloss over when teaching a new driver. And that’s just the beginning!

From there, we teach the fundamentals of how to drive the car either in an empty parking lot, or a quiet neighborhood. How to accelerate and brake smoothly. How to turn smoothly and correctly without ever compromising another driver’s space, or hitting a curb. How to use turn signals. How to properly stop at a stop sign.

We’ll take whatever time you need to LEARN these concepts and get comfortable with the car before we move on to driving on faster roads, or getting into lane changes, or anything more complex. Without a good foundation, everything you ever do behind the wheel is going to be more of a challenge. Most students will get by with just one lesson at this level. But, if you have absolutely no experience, it could take two lessons, or even three. Whatever it takes, we’re willing to do it.

Technical Stuff

Parking the car to the left. Parking the car to the right. Executing a three-point-turn. Negotiating tight parking lot turns. Straight backing. Backing out of a parking space or driveway. Even parallel parking, or backing into a parking space. Some of this is required for the Road Test and will definitely be covered. Some of it is optional, but we’ll spend time on it if we can!

Progression

Once you have learned the very basics and are able to smoothly and confidently drive around a typical residential neighborhood, after ensuring that you also understand how to make a QUICK stop when required, we will progress into driving faster. We’ll spend some time driving curves. We’ll teach proper basic lane changes. We’ll start introducing proper following distance and defensive driving techniques. Depending on how quickly you pick things up and how much practice you can get between lessons, we could spend 2 or 3 lessons doing this.

From basic traffic and lane changes, we’ll get into more moderate traffic and more challenging lane changes. Once you’ve mastered that, again if we’re given the time to do it, we like to do a full lesson dedicated to highway driving. We’ll do a bunch of merging on and off of highways, and work on managing traffic, reading signs, and more.

Extras

There’s more. There’s always more. If we’re lucky (yes, lucky) enough to do a lesson in the rain, we can learn about how to drive in the rain. On request, we can do a night lesson to cover the unique issues that come with driving after dark. We can spend MORE time in city traffic. MORE time on the highway. We can get out and drive some back roads. If you need help learning to assertively pull out into traffic safely, we can find a deserted place to practice that sort of thing. Whatever it is that you need, we can do! Once you’ve got your driver’s license, we’re even up for teaching you to drive a manual transmission.