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Comment by chneu | Hacker News Reader

The average 17 year old can barely use a computer nowadays. Their phone? Sure. But an actual computer? Haha

Try to teach an urban 17 year old how to drive a car. It's gonna be hilarious.

I grew up in a very urban area and learned to drive in about 3 hours when I was 21.

In three hours what was learned was to be extremely dangerous in traffic, not how to drive. This is also true of any 16 or 17 year old with 20 hours of driving instruction.

Mastering the correct connections between situational awareness, unconscious motor responses to the various stimuli required to be a safe driver will take a significant number of hours behind the wheel, and you shouldn't endanger anyone else while you acquire that mastery.

Hopefully this was a long time ago and you have accumulated the hundreds of hours behind the wheel without incident. But you did not 'learn to drive' in three hours, you learned to operate a vehicle. The learning to drive part happened after that.

That may all be true, but it was certainly not a hilarious experience. I would say my driving was about on par with average at the time, most drivers aren’t really paying attention. The vast majority of people in my how city are not driving under your definition, instead operating a vehicle.

That is frightening. I barely survived, and I mean that in the strictest sense, barely surviving and years long recovery from being struck by an intoxicated driver in a station wagon while crossing the street at a well marked intersection while on a bike riding to school when i was 13. Te driver was operating a vehicle, on a suspended license for prior intoxicated driving while still under the influence from the prior "night's" drinking which had not ended until less than three hours before the collision. I spent several weeks in a 'vegetative state' in addition to over 21 broken bones including a crushed pelvis and a ruptured spleen. So, I have a bit of first hand awareness of how important is is for drivers to be fully aware and in control of a vehicle. If you found yourself at about par for operation after 3 hours of training, the annualized risk of collision and number of traffic fatalities per 100k people is probably quite extreme. Hopefully the traffic is dense and road speeds are kept low by the density of traffic and frequency of intersections, instead of my case where very low traffic density and long straight stretches of road permitted an impact speed of about 65kph. Accident reconstruction and the marks on the roadway show that I went about 20m downrange before hitting the pavement, the bike traveled about twice that distance. Slower would certainly have been a real help in both avoiding and mitigating the damages.

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