Cheap Driving Lessons - Part 2

Last week, I started to look at the subject of "cheap driving lessons" and why they may not turn out to be the bargain they seem to be.

If you missed the first part of this series, you can read it at Cheap Driving Lessons - Part 1

This time, I'm going to look at the reasons why driving instructors offer cheap driving lessons.

Virtually all driving instructors in the UK are self-employed, either working on their own as independent driving instructors, or as franchisees for a driving school.

Hardly any driving instructors are actually employed by a driving school.

Even the driving instructors you see on the road in cars with BSM/The AA Driving School, Red Driving School etc written on them, are franchisees. Being a franchisee means that the instructor has to pay BSM/The AA Driving School/Red or whichever school, a fee every week or every month, for various services supplied by the driving school to the franchised driving instructor. This charge usually includes the use of the company name, finding customers for the instructor, the use of the car and so on. The costs of a franchise with a large driving school can be pretty high - in some cases up to £370 a WEEK!

Even if a driving instructor is working on their own as an independent, they have high costs too. They have to supply their own car, so they will either hire one or buy one themselves. Instead of a franchise fee they will be paying for the cost of their vehicle - unless they can afford to buy their car outright, they will be paying either hire charges or a loan repayment. They will also have the ongoing costs of vehicle maintenance. They will also have to source their customers themselves, so they may need to take out their own advertising on the internet, phone books, local newspapers etc.

Whether a driving instructor is a franchisee or an independent, like all self-employed people, they have additional costs to meet out of the money they make. Tax and national insurance, accountants fees, phone bills, stationery, car valeting, membership of professional trade organisations, their own professional development training and so on.

So, in short, driving instructors have a lot of expenses and overheads to meet!

If a driving instructor charges £20 for an hour long driving lesson, around 2/3 of that sum will be used to cover their overheads as outlined above. So out of that £20, he or she will have to pay out a rough average of £13 to cover overheads. Obviously, that means that they then have only around £7 left for themselves as actual income for that driving lesson.

There are currently over 44,000 fully qualified driving instructors in the UK and in excess of 20,000 more people at various stages in the qualification process. Driving instructor training companies make lots of money by frequent TV and newspaper advertising campaigns for their instructor training courses, filled with rose-tinted images and glowing assurances of how much money driving instructors can earn and so more and more people fancy having a go at what they are told is an easy, secure and lucrative career.

The truth is that there is now nowhere near enough work out there for the number of driving instructors there are already, and with more and more new instructors being churned out via the training companies and their advertising campaigns, the situation is getting worse and worse.

The credit crunch and recession has had the effect of reducing the demand for driving lessons, so a steadily increasing number of driving instructors are competing for a shrinking pool of potential customers.

That's where cheap driving lessons come in. Desperate driving instructors are struggling to get work and drop their lesson prices to make their services seem more attractive to those wanting to learn to drive.

As one instructor drops their prices, another sees what they're doing and fights back by undercutting the first price...then more join in, the effect spirals and the price goes further and further down until it reaches a level where it costs the instructor more to give the lesson than they get paid for it.

It might seem like a win-win situation if you're the customer - cheap driving lessons, that's got to be good hasn't it?...but a bargain at what price?

Cheap Driving Lessons - Part 1

With people worried about the credit crunch and the recession, it's perfectly natural and sensible to economise on what you spend. I do exactly the same myself.

When you go to a shop you usually know what you're getting. You know exactly what Coca Cola is and what to expect from the product inside the can or bottle. You can shop around and compare prices on a like for like basis. The can of Coke you buy from a big supermarket is going to be the same as the one you buy from the local corner shop or the petrol station as it's the same product - the only thing that is different is the price.

However, driving lessons aren't the same.

A driving lesson from one instructor will be totally different from one given by another instructor. Unlike cans of Coke, there's a variable "human" element involved.

Personality, teaching style, adaptability, professionalism, committment to customer service, reliability, punctuality...all of these are factors that wll be different in every single driving instructor, even though they are all ultimately teaching the same subject.

Over the past few months, I keep coming across people on the internet who want to learn to drive, but state that they want a driving instructor who is "good, cheap and will get me through my test in as few lessons as possible".

Unlike popular fizzy drinks, when it comes to driving instructors, the words "good" and "cheap" rarely go together.

Before I explain why I think that cheap driving lessons can be a very false economy, I'm going to put the reason why everyone should learn to drive PROPERLY into perspective...

Driving is a skill for life. A car is a dangerous weapon. When driving, you are in charge of several hundredweight of hard, unyielding metal with a powerful engine capable of travelling at an extremely fast speed.

A car can literally be lethal if not used properly...it can injure and kill, not only you, but other people too. Road accident statistics make horrifying reading;

• Every day in the UK, 23 young people, under the age of 25, are killed or seriously injured in vehicles. Most of these collisions are caused by bad driving. Not the vehicle, the road, or the conditions
• 1 in 5 drivers crash within their first year of driving
• It is estimated that as many as one in five of all serious road accidents involve drivers under the age of 21
• Around 3,000 young drivers are killed or seriously injured on Britain's roads each year
• Young drivers are more likely to be involved in high speed crashes, single vehicle crashes involving losing control, crashes in the dark and crashes when overtaking and negotiating bends

Given that driving is so potentially dangerous, it never ceases to amaze me that so many people are determined to skimp on professional training and rush into doing something that could well cost them their lives if they make a mistake...

"Getting through your driving test in as few lessons as possible" does NOT mean that you will be safe on the roads. You need to think beyond "getting through your driving test" and think about what "driving" actually means.

Before you put the keys into the ignition of your own car and head off down life's highway, you need experience of different road and traffic situations and to know how to anticipate and plan to avoid or deal with dangerous or confusing situations. You also need to be considerate and responsible towards other road users yourself...in other words, you must be properly and adequately trained to handle your car safely. Just knowing enough to "get through your driving test quickly" isn't going to help you, if you meet a situation you don't know how to handle.

Learning to drive properly isn't cheap..but neither are the cost of funerals...think about it...

Back to the cost of driving lessons. Why are some instructors more expensive than others? I've heard people suggest that a driving instructor who charges more than £20 per hour is "ripping people off" and they know "someone who does 5 lessons for £49".

I won't make this blog entry too long, so I'll stop at this point. In Part 2 of this series of "Cheap Driving Lessons" blog posts, I'll be explaining EXACTLY why "someone who does 5 lessons for £49" can end up costing you MUCH MORE MONEY than a driving instructor charging £20 or more per hour...