I tried to run over my teacher!

The reason I’ve come to Finland, even for such a short visit, is because I had to finish the second phase of my driver’s license.

Now, the way I understand it, most countries just have a theory exam, practical exam, and then you get your card, assuming you pass.
In Finland, we get a lot of sleet, snow, ice, and darkness in the winter. (No, I know it’s hard to believe, but our summers are just as light as our winters are dark - snow isn’t all year round!)
Because of the climate, someone deemed it important to learn to drive in the winter as well.

As such, after we receive our driver’s license, we have to complete the second phase before the license expires - 2 years. Going against the good advice my driving teacher gave me, I decided to wait until the last minute to get it done.

Phase two consists of several extra theory lessons, an evaluating drive, winter driving, and driving on the slippery track. I performed the evaluating drive and winter drive on Tuesday and this is how it went:

I arrived in the morning at one driving school where I was introduced to my new teacher. We jumped into her borrowed car, a bright red Toyota Corolla which was plastered with the driving school’s stickers and a big spanking BEWARE OF NOOB-triangle in the back. It had an extra set of pedals as usual: a clutch, break, and gas pedal at the shotgun seat move at the same time as those in the driver’s seat.

We drove once around the neighbourhood. I tried to get used to the diesel car, and stiff annoying gearbox during this time, and the teacher focused on my fuel usage, speed, and so on. She didn’t open her mouth to talk about my driving at all - only asking me generic questions about myself, successfully calming me down a little. My fuel consuption was 5.4 L / 100 km. The car claimed to run on 5.0 L / 100 km, so I wasn’t driving too wastefully.

Then it was her turn to drive, so we switched around. I got to ride shotgun and was told to watch the fuel consuption as she demonstrated a few techniques to drive more economically:

1. Using a bigger gear than usual when cruising along - this varies from car to car, but some cars can even run on fifth gear at 50 km/h.


2. “Skipping / bouncing” gears to get to the high gear as fast as possible. A car uses the most fuel when it’s speeding up, so it is better to speed up fast than to draw it out, as then you use a lot of fuel for a shorter time. So, when going up to 50 km/h, shift from 1st to 2nd, and then jump up to 4th.


3. Lifting your foot from the gas and not braking or using the clutch too early. When you see a red light up ahead, lift your foot from the gas and keep driving closer for a distance. Then, switch to a smaller gear and gently touch the break. The idea is NOT to come to a complete stop. It takes more fuel to get moving from a complete standstill than a slow movement.


4. Don’t use the clutch so much! I do this sometimes. When I’m braking, I’m too eager to touch down the clutch too early. Using the clutch causes the fuel consumption to rise dramatically, and so it should only be used when needed.


5. When going downhill, lift your foot from the gas completely. The car’s momentum should keep it rolling, and you get a “free ride”, as my teacher put it. If you find your car going too fast, shift to a smaller gear, and the engine will brake for you and you won’t have to touch the brakes so much.


6. Finally, most obviously, and probably not deserving a number of its own: SAFETY ABOVE ALL! This is obvious. Don’t plough into a red light just to save fuel from not stopping. But apparently some people do this. Keep a larger distance from the car in front of you and you will be able to see what it does better, and therefore save fuel from not having to brake fast. Etc etc.

None of this, except point nr. 4, was very new to me. I simply forgot to apply some of it while driving. But as silly as some of the advice seemed, it was actually very useful to get a reminder at this point when I have already established my driving routines, but am still able to change them relatively easily.

I drove around the same path a second time. This time, I got nothing but red lights. But applying her rules, despite the red lights, I was able to drop the fuel consumption to 5.1 L/100 km. Cool!

Next up was the winter driving. Since it’s September, there’s no snow yet. So I got to try this modern technology in the form of a simulator. I sat in a car seat with three computer screens in front of me, simulating the windshield and the two front windows. There was a wheel, a gearbox, and headphones as well. Then I had to go through some exercises emphasising how to drive in the dark winter.

There were about five or six phases, and each phase had three exercises except for the last one. First, I listen to the explanation of what to do. I had asked for the simulator in Swedish, so I got to listen to the voice of someone so incredibly Swedish that it hurt to hear. I had to struggle not to laugh at some of the phrases he used. Unfortunately, I had such a horrible headache at this moment that I can remember none of them.
The second exercise was a ‘demonstration’, where the Swedish geezer told me “Now put the lights on”, “Now use your indicator”, and so on, but I didn’t actually do any driving.
Finally, I had to drive. This was quite hard, because you got no “feeling” from the car, except for the Vroom Vrooming coming from the headphones. It was actually extremely unrealistic and unpleasant. The graphics also looked like they would have been high tech about 8 years ago… and sometimes there was a glitch. I KNOW I use my indicators correctly - I use them exactly the way they taught me, and this machine kept telling me I was using them wrong, no matter what I did. Apparently my “placement” was wrong too, whatever that means.

The final phase consisted of driving and applying all these really “challenging” scenarios the previous scenarios had exposed me to: overtaking, getting overtaken, seeing a broken down car on the road, and nearly crashing into a deer while a van is coming in the other lane. There was also something I assumed was meant to be rain, but which looked like brown pixel-death plopping on the “window”. There was also one area with what I think was snow, as it was white and brown on the ground.

I was very disappointed with the experience.

Day 2, Wednesday, was much more interesting. I drove to the middle of nowhere and together with my fellow procrastinators, we were walked through some theory lessons and got to play on a slippery track with metal plates and some magic coctail of oil and goop. The theory lessons were mostly accompanied by stock footage of car crashes and what sounded suspiciously like what I imagine bad 70’s porn music sounds like.
There was also a so-called “safety house”, which was a more hands-on theory lesson experience. We got to try on a helmet which simulated the weight of a baby’s head, experience a car crash at 7 km/h and why a seatbelt is good, look at broken tires and guess what the cause was, and my favorite - experience a car flipped onto its roof.

The flipped over car was attached to some kind of rod in the front and back that flipped it over however much the teacher wanted. She had a remote control with a big red button on it that rotated the car around to different angles. I volunteered for this particular gadget, and along with 3 other brave souls, we experienced how fricking hard it is to open a door when the car is lying at 90 degrees in a ditch, and how to detach ourselves from the seatbelt and crawl out a window when it has flipped onto its roof.
Kind of fun… It was funny to watch from the outside when round 2 of car flipping madness was going on - the amount of girly squealing going on made it sound like someone had opened a can of slimy squirming worms in there.

Finally, the track. Like in phase 1 of the car driving license, we got to mess around on a metal-plated tarmac track with obstacles and oil. We got to deliberately spin out of control and try to regain it, dodge things, and on command we tried to run over our teacher at much too high speeds to succeed. Fun!

All in all, I think it was a valuable experience, even if it did cost some money. Perhaps I would have found the simulator more useful if I hadn’t actually already done a significant amount of driving on ice on the way to the ski resort of Tahko in Finland during the winter. I can say, that was much more educational and intense than what this silly simulator was.

I will get my new, more permanent driver’s license in a month. But since I won’t be in Finland then, I’ll have to leave my license with my parents. This means I won’t get to try to kill myself by driving in the Israeli traffic for a while yet. What a shame…