Get Real: Why over 90% of Americans Think They Are above Average Drivers and How to Know Precisely Who Is and Is Not a Good Driver

By Alex Lightman

In what is possibly the most talked Swedish study of Americans, researchers found that an astonishing 93% of Americans thought their driving skills were above average, compared to 69% of Swedes.

Given that American drivers get into millions of accidents and kill over 55,000 people annually, it’s worth asking why more than 9 out 10 should believe this, and whether there is an objective way to measure driving skills so that an unbiased source could provide everyone with a relative ranking compared to everyone else.

This would enable us to get the worst drivers off the road, and out of driving school buses and municipal buses, and cause a mass migration into classrooms for remedial education as needed.

I started talking with my friends and followers online and asked them about why so many people seemed to think they had superior driving skills, and got the following answers.

Yevgeni Kovelman thinks it’s easy to see if you are above average: “Just ask yourself 2 simple questions. Do you use turn signals and do you let people in front of you? If so then you're likely a pretty good driver.”

A number of my friends said that they had learned to drive on snowy roads, and didn’t end up in a ditch when the first snows fell. Peter Thoeny said, “Probably true. Shamelessly I declare to be a better driver than most: I learned by driving on snow covered mountain roads in Switzerland. I always keep 2+ sec distance to car in front, always use blinker, drive fast but try to give way to others, look 2 cars ahead. Once I scared an instructor and work colleague in a car safety course in Japan driving fast around cones on a soapy road, not touching any cone.”

A few of my friends thought they could say they were better than average because they could “parallel park on both sides of the road”.

Some of my friends thought they were worse than average because of the criticism from their passengers. John Hemstra said, “I used to think I was a great driver. Then I got married... Driving with your significant other will make you keenly aware of your errors, all of them.”

My favorite response was from Martin Horowitz, who said, “Unless you provide the criteria for measurement everyone will use their own, which means they choose criteria where they are above average and are right.”

Martin’s comment is closest to my own sense of this, and, combined with Eddy Waty pointing out the definition of “illusory superiority”, gave me an epiphany.

“Illusory superiority is a cognitive bias whereby individuals overestimate their own qualities and abilities, relative to others. This is evident in a variety of areas including intelligence, performance on tasks or tests, and the possession of desirable characteristics or personality traits.”

I coined the acronym ORDS for Objective Rating of Driver Safety. ORDS is an antidote for illusory superiority when it comes to driving.

My recommendation is that the US Dept. of Transportation requires all commercial vehicles have an intelligent GPS tracker, such as the ones from Cartrack on 600,000 vehicles in 23 countries, installed so that an Objective Record of Driving Safety can be automatically generated and updated across all driving activities. This system can measure harsh braking, cornering, acceleration and speeding, as well as being off-route or out of bounds, or inside an unsafe area.

The ORDS safety system I envision would be a five point system. 5.0 would be a perfect score, and it would go down from there with each infraction of above

A pre-technological policy-mandated version of what I call ORDS is already in place, the BASIC Score, which uses a feedback loop with increasing attention to detail and increasing penalties, and can be applied to individual drivers, fleets, and companies. Penalty points are tabulated using a formula.
 

Each violation has a severity score.  A violation affects a BASIC score for 2 years. The thresholds for increased oversight are:

- 50% for human carriers
- 60% for biohazard
- 65% for everyone else

My epiphany was to imagine that if everyone had an intelligent GPS tracker and the scores were published automatically attached to the registered owner of the vehicle so that they were searchable on Google related to both the name of the registered owner and to the license plate of the vehicle, we would suddenly see a boom in demand for driving schools and specialized driver training, as well as an overnight improvement in driving skills and reduction of accidents and auto-related fatalities.

We would also have a fair way to measure whether “self-driving cars” are safe or unsafe. It might turn out that some safe driving cars were safer from some auto manufacturers, and that there might even be “personality” differences in the different self-driving cars. I have heard that this was indeed the case, from Brett King, my friend and the co-author of my book, Augmented: Life in the Smart Lane. Brett tells audiences around the world about two self-driving race cars from Audi that are the same model with the same programming that, nonetheless, have different racing strategies, with one of the cars noticeably more aggressive as a driver than the other.

I think it’s a sign of an immature society and juvenile society to have something as important as objectively knowing whether we are good drivers or safe drivers, who are part of the $5 trillion a year transportation industry (which is the most significant driver of the $8 trillion a year energy industry because oil is used for 97% of transportation propulsion) and not be making use of a technology (GPS) that was created over 50 years ago.