10 reasons to choose Young Driver
Here are 10 reasons why you should choose Young Driver:
One: FUN!
Young Driver is great fun! Kids just love driving and the vast majority of our customers come back time and time again! Young Driver makes a great gift and is guaranteed to put a smile on their face while giving them valuable driving experience!
Two: SAFETY
Research shows that early driving experience cuts road accidents by 40%. With 1 in 5 young people crashing within 6 months of passing their tests, anything that reduces accidents among this group must be a good thing.
Motoring commentator, Quentin Willson, is a man who knows an awful lot about cars and driving. He supports Young Driver saying:
“I took my son to Young Driver and have never seen him concentrate so hard. Young Driver is a road safety revolution in the making.”
We use only dual control cars and specially selected driving instructors. All of our instructors have been CRB checked (criminal records bureau) and we are the only young driver initiative to have a child protection policy in place with training for all team leaders and data stored on a secure database.
Three: OUR TRAINING ZONES
We have specially designed every training area with professional driving instructors and qualified training and education experts. At each site you will find beginners’ zones and a full road system with traffic signs, junctions and parking zones. In this way we encourage responsible driving, not high speed thrills and spills.
Four: OUR TRAINERS
We have taken the country’s best driving instructors and trained them specifically to teach under 17s. We look for professional and friendly staff as we know this gives the best experience to young people.
Five: YOUR DRIVE DIARY
We follow the Driving Standards Agency curriculum, which means that what 11 – 17s learn at Young Driver is exactly the same as they will learn on the road at 17. We will break things down to make the learning experience more appropriate for different age groups, but young people will not be taught anything that is not centred on driving safely and properly. All young people are given a Drive Diary to record their progress and this is one of the most important parts of the programme – moving forward is the aim!
Their personalised Drive Diary charts individual progress and current level of driving and is completed by the instructor after each driving session.
And when young people take to the roads at 17, their driving instructor will be able to see their level of experience, thanks to the Young Driver Drive Diary!
Putting them leaps and bounds ahead of the normal 17 year old.
Six: DRIVE TIME
We know that you want your child to have the most driving time possible – that’s what you are paying for, after all! So you’ll be pleased to know that we won’t pad out your 30 minute or 60 minute lesson with presentations, talking or watching a video like some other places do! With Young Driver the clue is in the name: it is about getting young people driving! You will see the car stop now and again for a short time, this is when our instructor is explaining a manouevre or correcting a fault. Youngsters learn in different ways and at their own pace, but what they learn with us will all be learned from behind the wheel because we know that it is driving time they want!
Seven: BRAND NEW SEAT CARS
We only use brand new SEAT Ibiza cars, all fitted with dual controls. These cars are easy to drive and regularly top the charts as one of the best and most popular cars to learn in from both an instructor and learner perspective. Our sponsor, SEAT, ensures that we have the latest models so that we can demonstrate how to drive economically with state of the art features such as stop start.
For the technically minded, here’s the full spec:
- 5-speed manual transmission
- Dual controls
- Front and side air bags
- ABS brakes
- Electro-hydraulic power-assisted steering
- Height and reach adjustable steering wheel and driver’s seat
- 5-star Euro NCAP safety rating
- CO2 139(g/km) emissions
Eight: SUPPORT FROM SPONSORS
Thanks to generous sponsorship from Admiral insurance, SEAT and Pirelli we are able to deliver a high quality service while keeping our prices very competitive. The support of our sponsors is key to this and we are grateful to them for their foresight in sponsoring this programme back in 2009 when it was just an embryonic idea! Similarly, our venues support us through allowing Young Driver to operate on their car parks throughout the year.
People sometimes say ‘why is Young Driver more expensive than a driving lesson on the road?’. Here’s why: we have bought over 10,000 cones and 400 road signs in order to create our driver training zones and our instructor teams spend a lot of time setting out the road systems each day before guests arrive. We also provide hospitality areas and hosts and have more complex insurance arrangements than when driving on the road. We also supply Drive Diaries and have had to fund rigorous recruitment and training programmes to ensure that our service is delivered to the highest standards and comply with our Child Protection Policy. We are always trying to find ways to keep our costs as low as we can whilst always providing a professional service.
Nine: EXPERIENCE
Experience is key and we have delivered over 20,000 lessons to 11 – 17s at 8 UK sites since starting in 2009. We regularly email research questionnaires after lessons to understand how our customers – young people and parents/grandparents – found our service on the day and we also mystery shop our sites to get the best up to the minute feedback. We’re not saying we are perfect but we do take your satisfaction very seriously and act on your comments, suggestions and concerns as quickly as we can. In fact, our whole birthday party offer was originally suggested by a parent and we have since gone on to deliver over 200 birthday parties! At the time of writing our overall satisfaction score (as scored by you, our customers) is 93%. We are working hard to win the next 7%.
Ten: SMILE!
There are very few times in life where safety is fun and exciting but Young Driver is one of them! We know that you want them to be safe on the road in later years and that they want to have fun and be the envy of their friends by driving a real car. Young Driver delivers on both counts and that is why we do it! No matter how nervous or shy (or how confident), every young person who has attended has had great fun, learned about how to drive safely and left with a huge smile on their face! And that is why people choose Young Driver.