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Its £75 in cheshire... i wish i hadn't started this now especially as the mrs said it was only one day.... 😳 still never mind carry on
@ Cougar,
I feel I should defend my comment that you quoted;
I was the most experienced road user on my course. Had been driving longest, among these I spent 6 years as a professional driver, I have ridden motorcycles since I was 18 (now 43) and regularly commute on my bicycle including a 4 year solid stint up and down the A30 dual carriage way which I blame for being grey haired.
I was there for doing 80mph on a 70mph dual carriage way through rolling country side.
If anyone was to come out of the course and say they hadn't learnt anything would possibly indicate their lack of ability to be aware of what is going on in front of their face.
a slightly different tolerance of 5 per cent plus 10 km/h (6 mph) is applied
That's really interesting reading, assuming it's still the case with moder manufacturing. Presumably the 'tolerance' is down to manufacturing / reading inaccuracies? So at 70mph, your speedo is deigned to read 64mph, and with variation in tolerances the absolute fastest you can be going is 67mph, the slowest 61mph.
That's not a million miles from the anecdotal 5%-10% I pulled out of the air earlier. Cool.
Mine felt like it lasted a lifetime but my watch said 4 hrs. I have never had to sit through such a patronising collection of half truths and dodgy statistics in all my life. I was told on mine that the speed of impact is irrelevent, only the speed you were doing when you hit the breaks (really).
I can only assume given the number of courses being run that someone is making a shed load of money out of this.
If anyone was to come out of the course and say they hadn't learnt anything would possibly indicate their lack of ability to be aware of what is going on in front of their face.
Yeah, sure. But there's quite a gulf between saying you hadn't learnt anything and asserting that it was really good and worth it's weight in gold. Reading back and in light of what you've just said I can only assume that you were talking about being great generally rather than speaking specifically for yourself.
I don't doubt that I learned [i]something[/i] on mine. The sheer volume of people involved / affected when there's an RTA for example, I had never really considered.
But for me personally, I didn't get a huge amount out of it that I didn't already know. That's not being smug, just that my driving theory was pretty solid to start with. I wasn't there because I didn't know any better, I was there because I wasn't paying close enough attention to my speedo and thus didn't decelerate soon enough / far enough down to 30mph when leaving a 50mph zone.
That's not to say it's a bad course. For the other attendees, I wouldn't have trusted most of them to drive a golf club so I'd like to hope it was inordinately valuable to them. Which is where my comment came from; if you came out going "wow, that was ace, I learned tons!" then you must've been pretty shocking to start with. If you were just generalising then I've misunderstood, and I apologise for that if so.
I thought it was a good course, did one six or seven years ago - I wasn't a particularly reckless driver before but I think I was even more sensible as a result.
Thanks Cougar. I agree with everything you said. I was talking generally.
Trouble is, its often the people that need it most who are super cynical and regard it as a waste of time and money. I was attempting to counter the negative nelly's and trying to show it in a positive light. I genuinely think it is a good initiative. If you choose to take this route rather than just accept points, at least try and get some benefit out of it, you have to pay for it after all and all you need to do is sit on your arse and listen.
@Cougar, take your GPS in the car or use the sat nav. Then you can get an idea of the real under-read car by car. I confess I often drive at say an indicated 57 in a 50 by example as aside from over-reading speedo the GATSOs won't give you a ticket until you are over by a certain amount. Of course all dependent on road conditions, traffic etc etc.
All the ones that "my friend " has done were 4 hours. "my friend " has got 11 months before he can get caught again but I suspect that he has learned his lesson.