How your 10-year-old can get behind the wheel of a Mercedes, Porsche or Bentley ... and why you should do it
The Young Driver Exclusive Collection is aimed at 10-17 year-olds
They say young folk are falling out of love with driving but I’ll wager a significant number of children still have toy car collections, and some even, I bet, also have posters of supercars on their walls. If those same kids were told that they could actually get behind the wheel of a dream car well before they reached 17, let alone achieved the kind of career success that might allow them to afford such a thing, what would they say?
If you’re the parent of one of those young petrolheads, wonder no more, because that’s exactly what Young Driver, the UK’s leading driving school for 10 to 17-year-olds, is doing. On private land at 70 locations around the country, children can find out what it feels like to drive a blinging Bentley, V8-powered Mercedes or performance-focused Porsche.
To find out whether a 10-year-old really can handle such a task — and how a qualified instructor can sit beside them without burying their fingernails in the dashboard through stress — I took my daughter Eva along to have a go.
The main requirement for any child hoping to go for a spin, aside from being the right age, is height — can they reach the pedals. Although I am exceptionally tall, Eva is yet to go through the growth spurt I experienced around 13 years old, and as a result she’s slightly below the average height of a girl in her school year, and borderline for Young Driver’s height requirement of 142cm.
As a result, the first job was to see if the instructor felt comfortable that she could safely operate the car — a 2014 Mercedes SL500 AMG Sport that is powered by a twin-turbocharged 4.7-litre V8 engine and, when new, was capable of 0-62mph in 4.3 seconds and a top speed electronically limited to 155mph. Being able to press the brake pedal was clearly an important factor. As was being able to see over the dashboard. Fortunately, she got the thumbs up from Lawrence Beazley, the qualified driving instructor entrusted to be her guide for the experience.
Still, seeing a 10-year-old craning their neck to see over the wheel of a 430bhp sports car with a view to taking it for a spin is a faintly ridiculous sight, but this is not just wish fulfilment — it’s good for them, says Beazley.
“Getting them in a sports car… it’s an experience, really,” he said. “We’re not doing a driving lesson in them; the proper driving lessons happen in the Vauxhall Corsas. But the idea of a sports car is to show it’s quite fun to drive different cars, but also to get them to understand power, and safety.
“We know that with younger kids, their moral compass is a little bit stronger. As you get into your mid-teens and later, then you start experimenting. But if we can get some really good skills and safety things instilled at this age, you’ve got potentially much safer, better drivers in the future.”
Making it easier for Eva, whose experience of driving was limited to a session in one of Young Driver’s miniature Firefly Sports, aimed at under 10s, and a quick lesson in a Vauxhall Corsa before jumping in the SL500, the Mercedes has an automatic transmission, so using the clutch and changing gears wasn’t a consideration. That left her to think only about controlled use of the accelerator, brake and steering wheel, and to learn how to anticipate the road ahead.
Speeds were also kept very low. “We kept it to around 20 miles an hour today, and she’s a cautious driver, but she was really nice on the pedals,” was Beazley’s feedback after her 30-minute session on the private land at Kempton Park, Surrey. “It’s a long car to navigate and by the end she was getting the steering out of the corner pretty much bang on. What tends to happen is they oversteer and then can’t get it straightened out. So she did really, really nicely on that one.”
Eva seemed a little taken aback by the whole experience, and is the sort of person who errs on the side of caution rather than rushing in all guns blazing. But did she enjoy it?
“It was great,” she confirmed to my relief. “I definitely didn’t want to go really fast — if another car was coming and I went really, really fast it would only give me a split second warning and then I’d crash. It was very different to the Vauxhall, and the seat wouldn’t go up as high, but I preferred having two pedals; it’s easier in a way.”
Of course, slightly older, taller and more confident children do get a chance to experience the full potential of Young Driver’s sports cars. “We didn’t do it with Eva today,” Beazley told me, “but quite often I’ll get them to put the foot flat down on the floor briefly. Suddenly there’s a lot of power, so they get an understanding of the range on an accelerator, and what some cars can do. It’s a great experience, to get this idea of safety when driving something powerful, and to give them some skills in how to deal with it.”
Beazley has taught 4×4 off-roading, skid pan control and instructed people on how to get quick lap times from the fastest supercars on track. But the focus at Young Driver is very much on learnings for responsible road users.
“Track driving is a different set of skills and ways of approaching,” he explained. “When here, we’re very much concentrating on road cars and how you would drive on road, how do you integrate with other drivers and so on.
“It also gives the kids a real understanding about the level of concentration that drivers need. [With young drivers] the passengers can behave in a different way to adults. We’ll quite often ask the kids, ‘How many times do your parents say, could you please be quiet in the back, I’m trying to drive? Do you understand why now?’ And they go, ‘I’m never going to talk again.’ So there’s some really nice lessons on there that we can use.”
Eva’s a cautious driver but are some of the children wanting to get behind the wheel of a sports car a bit cocky?
“Yeah, of course,” said Beazley. “You’ve got some that have learnt to drive on a PlayStation. I’ll ask them what the pedals are and they’ll go, ‘Forward, drift and reverse.’ And on some PlayStation games, if you hold your foot on the brake it goes backwards after a while.
“You get some really interesting things. So it’s a case of calming them down and saying, ‘This isn’t a video game; where’s the reset button? There isn’t one, so we have to take a different approach.’”
Normally it’s just excitement, says Beazley, but by telling children that if they are calmer they will become better at it often gets a good response.
“Kids love learning,” he said. “They really do enjoy it. And if they come out of that car thinking they’ve learned something and there’s a new skill developing, then they feel happy afterwards.”
But with reports that young people find cars a turn-off, is the experience helping create a new generation of car enthusiasts, I wonder. Are they more excited about supercars or sports cars after driving one?
“At that age, they get excited about driving any car,” reckons Beazley. “The fact that they’re doing something so grown up as driving a car is already incredibly different. But yeah, some of them know their cars. You get some kids that are petrolheads; they’ve got all the Top Trump cards, and they’ll start asking me technical questions. I go, ‘Just drive it.’”
Eva experienced a 30-minute Young Driver “Exclusive Collection” session. It costs £69.99 and is available throughtout the year, including weekend, selected weekdays and school holidays. The cars operate on a rotational basis around many of the 70 Young Driver locations around the UK. The current range of vehicles available include a Bentley Flying Spur, Mercedes SL500 AMG and Porsche 911. For more details visit https://www.youngdriver.eu/exclusive_collection.
Readers of Driving.co.uk and The Sunday Times have been offered 20 per cent off any voucher with Young Driver using discount code YDST20. It applies to all lessons — Vauxhall Corsa, Exclusive (Porsche, Mercedes or Bentley), fire engine, classics and Firefly Sport.
What it’s like to have a regular Young Driver lesson
“I was quite nervous,” says Alex, from Surrey, after his first lesson in a Corsa. “I was worried that I might have failed, but it turns out I did a pretty good job. I knew it would be lots of fun driving a car like a Vauxhall Corsa, because I would need to get the hang of the pedal controls; accelerator, brakes and clutch.
“I could see over the dashboard clearly, but I needed to sit very upright to see where I was going sometimes. I was lucky that I was just about tall enough to see over it, as you need to know where you are going!
“At first, I was worried I might crash, absolutely. It was very nerve-racking, and sometimes I lost the controls a little bit. But when I got the hang of it, I started feeling more courageous than before. A few mistakes isn’t much, but after those mistakes, I learned a lot.
“The controls were completely new [to me], although I was able to tell the instructor the names of the pedals, and I knew what the steering wheel was for. That sometimes seems like all it is in a car while you’re driving but I realised there’s much more to cars than a little push on the pedals and a turn on the wheel. Much more than that.
“The hardest part of the lesson was probably the precise movements with the clutch, brake and accelerator controls, as you need to be gentle, and I am sometimes not the best at doing that. I was also having trouble with steering because there were times when I turned too quickly or too late.
“My instructor was very nice. He was a good helper when I was driving, and I really appreciate his kindness. I learnt many things because he didn’t rush me when I did not know what to do; he merely explained how to do it. I love things when people are kind and know how to explain it well.
“I would definitely recommend the course to children who already have a grasp of knowledge on cars and driving. When you know some things about cars beforehand, it’s more easy and fun than not knowing what to do and starting off fresh.”
Related articles
- If you enjoyed this feature about the Young Driver Exclusive Collection, and how to get your child behind the wheel of a sports car, you might also like to see how children as young as four can get their first driving lessons: two children give their verdicts on lessons in a Firefly Sport
- You might also be interetsed in a study that found one in five young drivers video call behind the wheel
- And did you know that young motorists are facing tougher night driving, alcohol and passenger restrictions?
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