One About Bad Criminals

When I taught driver education we only used cars with automatic transmissions, which seemed to make sense. Given all the things a kid needs to remember while learning to drive, adding a stick-shift to the mix could easily result in a trip through the front window of a 7-11. Teaching kids to drive a stick was left to their parents. This also made sense – why should a driving school pay to replace clutch after clutch when it can barely afford to keep safe tires on their ancient cars?

But I just read something that proves how little I know. In Florida a man was parked in his bright-yellow Corvette, waiting to pick up his wife from work. A pair of young men approached the car waving handguns in the air. No, they weren’t trying to Stand Their Ground and defend their parking spot, they wanted something else. So they forced the guy out of his pricey sports-car and made him lie down on the pavement.

This rarely happens to guys who drive a Yugo or a Ford Fiesta, but that’s another matter entirely.

So the car-jackers got into the Corvette. But they weren’t able to start it. The guy behind the wheel started shouting “How do you start the damn car!” and the owner down on the ground yelled back “Push in the clutch, push in the clutch!” I imagine the fear in his voice was similar to that of a driver ed teacher shouting “Hit the brake, no the brake!”

Eventually the robbers ran off without their easy-to-identify prize. So, I thought not teaching kids to drive a stick was just a matter of safety and cost-cutting. But I was wrong about the folks running driving schools. They’re no fools – they do it in a conscious effort to help reduce crime.

The article didn’t list the car-jackers’ names, but I can’t help wondering if they used to be students of mine.

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4 thoughts on “One About Bad Criminals”

  1. And now hybrid cars have an even different method of starting a car! It took some getting use to for my wife. BTW, I took Driver’s Ed in an old Army 55 Chevy that had stenciled warnings all over the dashboard. My school added a second clutch and brake pedal to the teacher’s side of the car. Most of the kids in the class had been driving tractors and trucks for their parents since they were able to walk (It was a farming community). My wife was the oldest in her family and so learned how to drive a manual transmission, but her younger sisters never did, since their brothers did the farm driving chores instead.

  2. what is wrong with this world when not even car jackers take the time to know their trade. Shoddy work! They deserve to have to go to jail and start over!

  3. Yes and without a pocket calculator most kids today probably can’t manually ad and subtract either. The hi-tech culture does have its down side.

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