"It's One Of The Most Hazardous Mistakes": If You're Doing One Of These 6 Things On The Road, Driving Instructors Are Urging You To Stop

Driving teachers meet us when we are most panicked and anxious behind the wheel. It’s their job to help new and nervous drivers stay calm and alert, and although the students will change over time, the mistakes teachers often encounter will not.

“After you do this job for six months, you start to know what the students are going to do before they even do it,” said Mike Thomas, a driving instructor for 27 years and co-founder of AllGood Driving School in Northern California.

HuffPost asked veteran instructors about the most common errors they see year after year ― and how to break those bad habits. Here’s what they shared:

1. They don’t pay attention in traffic.

New drivers do not scan their environment enough for hazards.

“Driving a car physically is not that difficult. Driving it safely is all brain work,” said Steve Frank, co-owner of Pinellas Driving School in Florida and a driving instructor for almost seven years. “It’s all thinking, planning, anticipating.”

Thomas gave the example of an inattentive driver that just drives forward through a green light while looking straight ahead, which would result in a point deduction on a driving exam.

Instead, “right before you enter the intersection, you are supposed to glance in all directions. So I would look to my left quickly, look at my right, check for pedestrians as well,” Thomas said.

This lack of focus is one of the most hazardous mistakes all drivers need to unlearn. Even seasoned drivers can make the mistake of zoning out or looking down at their phones. Distracted driving is dangerous, having led to the deaths of 3,308 people in 2022, according to the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration .

“Some people get behind the wheel, and they do not understand the magnitude of focus” driving requires, said Ken Pupo, a driving instructor with 21 years of experience at Philadelphia Professional Driving School . “Their mind is in Hawaii , and you can’t do that when you drive. There’s no downtime.”

2. They don’t look over their shoulder before changing lanes.

Thomas said not looking over one’s shoulder before a lane change “is one of the most common things resulting in automatic failure on the test” in California.

And unlike other mistakes that you unlearn with practice, this is an error that adults get worse at, “because they just start to take it for granted, they start to think that they’re good at using their mirrors or that their car does the job for them,” Thomas added.

“Sensors are great, but we try and teach the kids that they’re assistants, not substitutes,” Frank said. “And so even though you have a car with a blind spot sensor in it, you need to turn your head and check.”

Ideally, you glance over your shoulder diagonally out the back-side window and at the “20-foot spot right next to your trunk” where your mirrors cannot see, Thomas said, noting that he often takes students outside of a car so they can understand how big the spot is.

3. They roll through stop signs.

“The first thing we’ve got to do is fix all the bad things that the parent has taught the child,” Frank said. And one of those mistakes is rolling through stop signs.

The proper way to stop is at the sign or the stop bar painted on the road and “not past it,” Frank said, adding, “And then if you can’t see, you inch the car forward slowly, until you can determine that it’s safe to go or not.”

4. They tailgate.

When you tailgate or aggressively drive right behind another car, it’s not just bad manners — it can be dangerous and cause a collision if the car in front suddenly stops. Speeding is the reason for nearly a third of all fatalities on the road, according to the NHTSA .

Tailgating is a bad habit that drivers of all experience levels make.

“Some people are just chronic tailgaters. They’re just aggressive and rude and mean,” Thomas said. “But I think everyone at some point has either done it or has also been a victim of it.”

To avoid tailgating, “you should be keeping a three-second following distance” between you and the car in front of you, Thomas said. In other words, if the car in front of you passes an object or line on the road, you should be able to count to three seconds before you pass it as well.

If tailgating persists, the safest thing to do is pull over or change lanes until the tailgater passes, Thomas said. But if that’s not an option, slow down and increase the distance between you and the car in front of you.

“The more space you have in front of you, the less likely you are to make a sudden stop, which means the less likely the tailgater is to hit you,” he said.

5. They signal too late or too early.

Frank said another common mistake new drivers make is improper signaling.

“They turn their signal on at the corner where they’re planning on turning, or they don’t signal at all,” he said. “Every once in a while, you get the kid who knows they’re supposed to signal early, and they might drive three-quarters of a block with a signal on — too soon, you’ve got to balance that.“

In Florida, Frank explained, you should signal at least 100 feet before you turn: “Don’t make [other drivers] guess where you may actually be turning.”

That said, improper signaling happens with drivers of all experiences.

“People just get lazy and don’t signal, or they think that if they signal, someone’s going to steal their spot,” Thomas said.

Take parallel parking as one common example. Ideally, you need to signal early and put your brakes on so that the cars behind you don’t block you from backing into the spot, Thomas said.

6. They don’t know where to look.

Too often, new drivers only look over the car’s hood instead of looking out for what’s next.

“When they start out, they are resistant to the idea of looking ahead, looking up, because they think they’re going to get lost,” Pupo said. More experienced drivers can also make the mistake of looking down at the ground in front of them instead of far enough ahead, he added.

If there’s a car in front, “look above the car’s roof in front of you,” Pupo suggested as one better way of looking while driving. “And that gives you a better view than looking at the license plate or the ground.“

Part of being a better driver is seeing the bigger picture, so you can make better driving decisions.

“One of the sentences that I’ve said to people over the years is, ‘There is no car, and there’s no ground. It’s just you, the wheel, and where you want to be,’” Pupo said.

How You Can Help Drivers Get Better

Strong, defensive drivers are not born — they’re built with practice and experiences across different environments. Even after you pass your driver’s test, the work is not over. Each time you drive, you need to stay alert. Here’s how you can give the new or nervous driver in your life the right kind of tips, as well as how to find a good driving instructor:

If you’re an adult who is giving tips to a student driver...

Be specific with your language.

Thomas said he will tell students “more gas” or “more brake” when he wants them to speed up or slow down.

He also said that parents teaching their kids how to drive “should say, ‘Brake.’ They should not say, ‘Slow down,’ because the student might confuse that with just taking their foot off the gas instead of actually braking.”

Talk about how you drive while you’re doing it.

With the rise of distracting phones, Thomas said that fewer students are paying attention to how others drive, which makes learning how to drive harder.

Thomas said that adults of prospective drivers should narrate how they are driving, so that young students get helpful exposure to what common maneuvers should feel like.

He gave the example of a parent saying, “‘OK, I’m taking my foot off the gas right now, and I’m starting to brake right now. Can you feel that?’ So that the student starts realizing, ‘Oh, this is where they’re starting to brake.’”

If you’re looking for a good driving instructor...

Use references.

You can use Google or Yelp as a starting point, but Thomas said it is “most important” to use references from other people you trust because those insights are more objective than from the driving school itself.

Ask questions about how they learn and teach.

“Is the lesson 100% private?” This is one such question you should ask, as Thomas suggested, because some schools have one student drive another home so that there is no wasted travel time in between students.

You also want to ask about what vehicles the instructors drive and what kind of insurance they have. Look for schools with higher insurance limits in case of an accident.

Frank said you should ask how instructors are trained, with questions like, “Is the driver state-certified?” To be a certified instructor in Florida, for example, an applicant must go through a 32-hour training program and take a refresher course every five years.

Becoming a good driver is going to take time, but it’s going to take even more time without a skilled instructor. Take that extra hour to find a good teacher, and if you are that informal teacher, give the new driver in your life some much-needed hands-on experience. This article originally appeared on HuffPost.