hello!
I would like some advice from some autistic people.
I'm 21 and I have been considering learning to drive but I am anxious about pretty much every part of driving.
If you are autistic and can drive could you tell me about your experiences?
hello!
I would like some advice from some autistic people.
I'm 21 and I have been considering learning to drive but I am anxious about pretty much every part of driving.
If you are autistic and can drive could you tell me about your experiences?
I started with motorcycles in the seventies. Put in three years of falling off and riding like a loon, until I decided to take my test so I could carry a pillion legally.
6 years later, my Evil Stepmother for reasons I never quite understood, bought me 13 driving lessons which I managed to convert into a driving licence through "cheating" on my first attempt at a test. (the road had been scraped by one of those machines and it was slightly damp, so I drove the whole thing really slowly to give myself more thinking time, and when the examiner asked why I was going so slowly claimed I was "allowing for the road conditions"...) I also made damn sure he could see me checking all my mirrors regularly by moving my head not just my eyes.
I found the initial hours pretty terrifying and initially hated my instructor, in fact on one day, he was being so annoyingly demanding that I got out of the car and made HIM drive it back to the test centre, so he toned it down a bit after that. At the end of the day the instructor is only there to balance the weight of the car and issue information and instructions YOU have to drive the car, and if you are doing it right you haven't got the capacity to worry about him "looking at you". IF that is a real problem for you, I guess you can always ask him to put his seat back a bit, so he isn't always in your peripheral vision.
On a side note, I only ever found one flying instructor that I liked too, come to think about it. Well, 2 actually but the second one tried to kill me, by pulling the circuit breaker on my flaps when I wasn't looking then as I was trying to figure out why my flaps were inop, requested I convert the landing to a flapless approach, which was O.K., but what was NOT O.K. was when he pushed the C.B. back in on the climb out when I was about 100 feet over the bungalow off the end of our runway causing my flaps to suddenly deploy at the worst possible time! Fortunately I am a quick thinker when my life is in jeopardy and I realised that when the flaps had initially failed to deploy I had not returned the switch to "up", so we both got to survive the experience. I often wonder if he ever did it again... But that's flying, which is considerably more difficult to learn than driving, and far less forgiving of mistakes.
I hated car driving for many years, much preferring the motorcycles until I got to drive in my job. (58,000 miles in one year!) and I came to realise that I had an edge over pretty much everyone else on the road, which I still appear to have to this day. I found that I was simply more "competent", with faster reactions, and better anticipation of road conditions than most of my fellow road users, which to be honest, makes the experience far less unpleasant. I put that down to the previous motorcycling experience. I'm usually the "designated driver" on long trips, despite my penchant for going as fast as the conditions will allow, with a variety of people, which suits me fine, because I really don't enjoy many other peoples driving. If things get gnarly in a vehicle, you want a driver who will keep thinking and find the best way to avoid or minimise the danger, without freezing in fear, and I do have those qualities.
I also saw snow and ice as an interesting challenge, and when given the opportunity would go practice sliding about in an empty car park, because I did not want to be forced to learn those skills on the road surrounded by other road users, when the weather turns unexpectedly. (and also it's quite a bit of fun when you get the hang of it). What you do in the first few milliseconds of a skid affects the outcome hugely, and you are far more likely to get it right if you've practiced a bit beforehand. A policeman once told me during a traffic stop, that if you MUST speed down a dual carriage way, (particularly at night or poor visibilty) if the conditions allow it, drive straight down the centre line between the carriage-ways, so that if anything runs out in front of you from either side, you get more time to react. (Now that's the sort of policing I appreciate) An ex fireman friend also taught me that if you have to swerve to avoid an obstacle, dab the brakes first to shift the weight onto the front wheels, giving you extra traction and reducing (not eliminating) the chances of a skid developing then take them off as the turn develops. I suspect that works much better on a fully loaded fire engine than the family car, but the principle is sound enough, and I realised I'd been doing it for years due to the carpark skidding practice sessions. A guilt inspiring incident for me was that when a customer was following me one day, in the snow as I made a hard right turn onto the main road, he followed me at my pace, but halfway through the turn ended up sliding into a parked car, when I had had no trouble. I felt guilt because just as I made the turn I remembered that normies don't ever practice these things and that I should have made allowances, and just as I glanced behind to see if he was making the turn OK, I saw him bin his nice car into the side of the parked car..
As Dirty Harry would say, "A mans gotta know his limitations". That certainly applies to driving, and you do well to find your limitations under controlled conditions adn when you choose.
In the forty or so years I've been driving I've only had two "my fault" accidents both in the first ten years, I've also had four people run into the back of me when I've been stopped at the lights or for a junction (the one that ruined my back was when some inattentive git drove into me whilst I was on a huge ex-police bike waiting for the lights to change colour) but that's other drivers for you...
This is a bit of a "boasty" post, but it's less about me stroking my ego, and more about me trying to say that Autism does not disqualify you from driving, and I believe does not seem to make it particularly difficult to be above average at doing it. I suspect that the well known Autistic trait of wanting to really "master your subject" gives us a considerable advantage over normie drivers, once we get past our test and really start to learn how to drive..
Although the "impulse control" issues that affects those of us on the ADD end of the spectrum have given me a fair bit of trouble in the early years, I found a useful "workaround" which completely eliminates that particular hazard for me, but which unfortunately I cannot share for legal reasons, although it's been keeping me safe and out of trouble for about 30 years now..
When my Daughter failed her test for the third time, I took her out for a few lessons, realised that she had good aptitude but was overly hesitant. It was a simple matter to teach her a couple of tricks for navigating islands, like "use the car on your right as a shield, and providing you go when he does, if there's an accident, he will absorb most of the impact".
And the golden rule I learned from my one big accident, "If you spot the motorway exit that you want a little bit to late to make the manoever at a comfortable pace, Just let it go past, rather than ending up ripping the front wheel off your 7000 mile old company car like I did in the late eighties... Then when she was displaying, full confidence and it was just her nerves and hesitancy that was letting her down, whenever we had got to a patch of road where it was not too demanding and I judged it safe I just annoyed the crap out of her with my unique brand of stupidity, so she simply forgot to be nervous about the driving and simply got on with it whilst complaining about my antics.. After a few hours of that tomfoolery she realised that she could actually drive without having to concentrate savagely 100% of the time, and then went and passed her test with no further problems.
Which reminds me, It's about time I took her out for an assessment now she has had a few of years of further practice.
