Street Survival

Tire rack's program teachers young drivers how to handle emergency situations.

- Kelly Pleskot

There’s no getting around it: Teenagers are pretty bad drivers when they first hit the road.

Most high schools don’t offer drivers-ed courses anymore, and some states don’t even have formal driver education requirements. In other states, new drivers older than a certain age don’t have to undergo training. Even those who receive all the necessary training in the classroom and behind the wheel may come out learning little beyond the basic rules of the road, and inexperience usually means those neophyte drivers are not prepared for real-life emergency situations.

That’s where the Tire Rack Street Survival school comes in, teaching students how to handle these scenarios and giving them the opportunity to put their knowledge into practice—in a controlled environment, of course.

“It’s not that we’re teaching them how to drive,” Bill Wade, the program’s national director, told me before I took the course. “We’re teaching them how to drive better.” He estimates that more than half the students already have a driver’s license.

Tire Rack holds programs all over the country, and I checked out a local course in Fontana, California, to find out how they’re preparing students and to see if I could learn a thing or two myself. (Photos in this story are from a TRSS event at Tire Rack’s facility in South Bend, Indiana.)

After we checked our tire pressures, the day started out in a familiar classroom setting, which brought me back to when I was 15 years old. This time, though, I wasn’t studying questions that would help me pass the written driver’s exam. I was learning information that would help me better react to problems on the road.