Teen drivers are new drivers, so they’re still building good judgment. That’s why safety lessons focus on making smart choices, not just how to steer and brake.
A learner’s permit is the first step toward getting a driver’s license. It usually means you can practice driving, but you have to be supervised by a licensed adult.
Physics is what determines how a car behaves—like how fast you can stop and how much grip you have. No matter what you do, speed and road conditions still control what happens.
Road rage is when someone gets angry while driving and starts acting aggressively. It’s dangerous because it can quickly turn a tense moment into a crash.
The Chevy Chevelle is a classic muscle car. It’s the kind of car that can feel exciting to drive, which is why it can be linked to speeding or showing off.
A Dodge Challenger is a muscle car—basically a fast, powerful American car. People sometimes use it as an example because it can make it easier to drive too aggressively if you’re not careful.
The Ford Mustang is a sporty two-door car made by Ford. It’s known for being fun to drive and for having a long history of performance versions. People bring it up a lot when talking about classic muscle cars.
The Chevrolet Camaro is a sporty two-door car made by Chevrolet. It’s designed to be fast and exciting, with different performance versions depending on the year. It often comes up in conversations about muscle cars.
Distracted driving means you’re not fully paying attention to the road. Even small distractions—like using your phone or changing the radio—can make you miss what’s happening and crash.
They’re describing a real-world crash outcome—hitting something like a telephone pole. The message is that distraction can lead to losing control fast.
Speeding is when you drive faster than what the road situation allows. When you go faster, you have less time to react and you need more distance to stop, so accidents become more dangerous.
Newer cars are built to protect people better in crashes. They often have stronger safety structures and better seatbelts/airbags, which can reduce injuries.
Airbags are those inflatable cushions that pop out during a crash. They help protect you, but they work best when you’re wearing your seat belt so your body is in the right place.
A major frontal collision is a serious crash where the front of the car hits something hard. In this kind of crash, wearing your seat belt is especially important because people can move forward dangerously.
A Cadillac Escalade is a big SUV. Because it’s so large, it can be harder for other drivers to judge what it’s doing, especially in busy intersections.
Concept
green light vs intersection conflicts
A green light means you’re allowed to go, but it doesn’t mean everyone else will follow the rules. You still need to look around before moving into the intersection.
Using headlights in fog and low light is critical for being seen and for improving your own ability to detect hazards. The speaker points out a specific risk: vehicles appear suddenly when they finally become visible, especially if headlights are off.
The segment discusses a common low-visibility mistake: driving at dusk without headlights. Even if a driver feels they can see, other road users may not be able to see the vehicle, increasing the chance of intersection and lane-change conflicts.
Defensive driving means you drive like other people might do something wrong. You stay alert, give yourself space, and react early so you can avoid crashes.
This is knowing how wide your car is when you’re parking or driving near things. If you misjudge it, you can hit the side mirror on a mailbox, curb, or another car.
Modern cars can sometimes brake by themselves if they think you’re about to hit something. It helps prevent crashes, especially when you’re not reacting fast enough.
They mention Nissan because Nissan cars can have safety systems that help brake automatically. The lesson applies to many modern cars, not just one brand.
The “rear bumper” is the back-most part of a vehicle, and being “too close to their rear bumper” often describes tailgating. Tailgating reduces following distance, which makes it harder to stop safely if the lead car brakes suddenly.
Give yourself extra time so you’re not rushing. Less stress usually means calmer driving.
LIVE
Hey folks, Lenny Lawson here, the Car Goo Roo, thanks for tuning in, turning it on.
I hope that I can turn on some light bulbs in your mind, and especially in the mind
of your teen drivers, your teenagers, kids that are, I don't know, 14, 15, 16, maybe
even up into 17.
Yeah, these people that think they know everything.
They are now smarter than their parents, or so they think.
And so I took it upon myself for our teen driver experience that we did last night,
to create a guidebook for teen drivers, or people who are becoming teen drivers.
On the way, they may not have their driver's license yet, they may just have their learner's
permit.
And when I say that term, I remember something my dad always said about graduation from high
school, or graduation from college.
What you're really getting is a learner's permit.
Because you never stop learning, you know, when you go into a new job.
Maybe a lot of the stuff you learned in college or high school doesn't matter.
And, you know, it may be it taught you critical thinking, and how to study, and how to complete
a project.
I mean, I think there's a tremendous value in education.
Don't get me wrong, but I would have to say that the vast majority of what I've learned
in life, and in my business life, and in my car life, for that matter, has been after
I graduated from college.
So we had our teen driver event, and I came up with the guidebook, and I want to read
to you my introduction to these young people.
And here goes.
The Guru's Message to Young Drivers.
You are at a crossroads in your life right now.
Up to this point, most of your decisions have been shared.
Some yours, some your parents.
But getting your driver's license changes that in a big way.
This is where life begins to shift.
I call it limited independence.
But don't let the word limited fool you.
What really increases is your responsibility and your accountability for your actions.
Because now your hands are on the wheel in more ways than one.
Understand this.
There are only three things in life that you truly have direct control over.
Your knowledge, your skills, and your habits.
A lot of people will say, well, what about my actions?
Well, your habits dictate your actions.
But that's it.
Those three things determine how you handle every situation you face in life.
They shape your awareness, your decisions, your reactions, your outcomes.
So today we're going to help you build on the first two, knowledge and skills.
But the third one, your habits, that's on you.
When you're behind the wheel of a car, what happens next is in your control.
Your parents can't help you.
The rules of the road won't protect you every time.
In the end, only two things determine what happens out there.
Your decisions and the laws of physics.
And that brings me to this.
There are two kinds of pain in life.
The pain of commitment and the pain of regret.
The pain of commitment is when you choose to do the hard things, to learn, to practice,
to stay focused, to do things right.
It cost you time, it cost you effort, but it leads to something worthwhile.
The pain of regret is very different.
That's when you had the chance to do the right thing and you didn't.
You rushed, you ignored what you know to be true.
You took a shortcut and later you realized that you can't undo it.
So choose commitment and avoid regret.
And finally, understanding that your choices carry consequences.
Real consequences is a big part of growing up.
And today, this session is about helping you make better choices.
Because when you leave here and get behind the wheel,
it's your decisions that will determine what happens next.
I'll be back in just one minute.
OK, I am back.
You know, one of the things that I thought really captivated the young folks last night
was when we talked about the most common causes of accidents and how to avoid road rage.
You know, even at their young age, they've seen it.
They've seen misbehavior on the highways.
You know, and it takes all kinds of forms.
It's young kids just showing off their hot little hatches, you know, their their lifted trucks.
And we did the same thing.
I mean, we were doing it in Dodge Challengers and Chevy Chevelles, Mustangs,
Camaros and, of course, it's easy to look at the young people and say, aren't they crazy?
But they're just like we were to a large extent.
You know, what's different, though, is the influence of the Internet.
You know, it's a pretty big category.
But what they see, what they do online and also how often they're on it,
you know, and and doing it at the wrong times, one of my pet peeves is just going to a restaurant
and looking over and seeing a table with a family there and every single one of them are on their phones
and they're not interacting with each other.
I mean, that's how pervasive this is.
You go into a doctor's waiting room and nobody's talking to each other.
Aren't any magazines?
Why have magazines?
Everybody's got cell phones.
So they've eliminated magazines and eliminated conversation.
And for some people, that's OK.
I don't want I don't need any new friends.
I don't need to talk to anybody in the doctor's office.
Yeah, but that's just that's just one sign of what the phone has done.
And now in cars, it's one of the main causes of accidents, distracted driving.
Now, it's not just phones.
I mean, it's eating its, you know, adjusting controls.
I've almost wrecked before changing the radio station.
You know, you look down to change the radio station.
All of a sudden you look up and you're headed for a telephone pole.
I mean, I'm sure that's happened to you as well.
So it's not like we're innocent because we're, you know, older.
We did it, too.
But we've learned, right?
We're smarter now.
So we need to pass that information on to the young ones.
Also speeding, you know, driving too fast for the conditions.
This was something my dad used to get on me all the time for.
Son, you're driving too fast.
It's raining, you know, or it's there's snow on the ground.
Slow down. You know, I've heard it so many times.
But see the difference between then and now is cars are so subtly fast.
You know, you just don't get the sense of speed like you did in the 60s and the 70s.
At least I don't.
You can be going 85 miles an hour.
And that's the average speed on the interstate, I'm sure now.
Back when I was in school, I think they had the 55 mile per hour speed limit.
And if you were going 65, you were just flying.
So speed, you know, the thing about speed is that things happen
so much more quickly.
If you're going down the road and you're doing 80 miles an hour
and somebody pulls in front of you, the smallest adjustment on the steering wheel
can create a terrible accident, can lead to, you know, rollover accidents,
which are more often than not deadly.
So speed is a big deal.
The good thing about cars today or one of the good things is that they withstand crashes better,
but they're still not flawless.
I was watching a video of, and we showed it last night,
of four people in a car.
The two people on the driver's side, let me explain first that the car had full
complement of airbags.
It had the head curtain airbags, front and back seat.
It had the front airbags, the knee airbags.
It had them all.
But the passengers on the left-hand side of the car, the driver and the person
right behind him or the dummy, didn't have a seat belt on.
The people on the right-hand side had seat belts on,
and it showed what happened to each of them in the crash, in the same car at the same time.
And the ones without seat belts would not have survived.
It was a major frontal collision.
The one in the back seat behind the driver ended up in the front seat,
even if there are airbags, because there's no airbag between the driver
and the person in the back seat.
So there was nothing to restrain that person.
Now, you flip over to the right-hand side of the car.
Both of them were restrained by the seat belt, which allowed the airbags to be more effective.
And they just had minor injuries according to the computer data.
That was impressive.
That got their attention, because it shows how seat belts and airbags are meant to work together.
Just the fact that you have airbags in the car doesn't mean,
well, we don't have to wear seat belts anymore.
We'll just wait till the buzzer goes off.
It's amazing to me how many people do that.
Okay, what else?
Tailgating, following too closely.
You're supposed to be able to count to three before you reach the position
where the car in front of you just left.
Does that make sense?
Another thing that I learned was that you should be one car length away from the car in front of you
for every 10 miles per hour of speed.
So if you're going 70, you should be seven car lengths behind the car in front of you.
What does that allow you to do?
To react.
You've got reaction time there.
There's enough space, if he slams on his brakes,
that you'll have the opportunity to recognize that, slam on yours and not rear end him.
The only problem is the car behind you, you can't even see their headlights,
because they're following so closely.
There's no way that they can react.
This is a major cause of accidents and pile ups on interstate.
Most of those types of accidents are combination accidents where there's multiple cars involved.
And, you know, I guess you have to be the one to break the trend
and get in the slow lane and go the speed limit.
How's that for a novel thing to do?
Okay, running red lights, you know, this is something that I see every single day.
People running red lights, they're normally in a ram truck,
or a big black Escalade with a young female driving.
Well, maybe not so much them, usually the ram trucks.
So you never trust a green light.
That's the message.
If you're the first one in line and it turns green, you don't mash on the accelerator.
You look first, look to your left.
That's where the trouble's coming from, from your left.
And, you know, people just, they see that yellow light,
and instead of applying the brakes, they apply the gas.
And by the time they get to, or close to the middle of the intersection, it's already red.
Your light is turned green and you're getting ready to have your front end knocked off your vehicle,
or a broadside hit.
So intersections are just very, very dangerous.
And again, just don't trust a green light.
Driving under the influence, another major cause, alcohol and drugs,
poor weather conditions, fog, you know, that's one that also gets abused.
I mean, all of a sudden, I'll see somebody appear out of the fog
and they don't have their headlights on, and they're going too fast.
Oh, I can see, you know, they might be able to see, but I can't see them.
That's the problem.
People think about what they can see.
It's, I guess that's how people justify going down at dusk,
you know, driving down the road and they don't have their lights on.
They can see just fine.
But I can't see them, and that's what people have to think about.
Don't you call that defensive driving?
I do.
And then a couple more, driver inexperience, poor judgment,
you know, judging the width of your vehicle.
Well, these vehicles are very wide.
It took a long time for us to get used to in my household,
my wife driving a Chevy Tahoe, back when we were a Chevy dealer.
I think we had to replace, like, two mirrors,
because she would smack mirrors either with another vehicle or with a mailbox.
I hope she's not listening to this.
And then, of course, I did it too.
I did it once.
I made a mistake of hitting a mirror on a mailbox.
This guy kind of got too close.
I just, I couldn't get over any further and I hit the mailbox with my mirror.
And instead of immediately taking it to the dealership
and looking it over, I went where I was headed anyway,
got to the dealership, and by then the liquid that's in the mirror to help defrost it
had oozed out of the mirror and onto the paint.
And when we tried to get that stuff off the paint, it wouldn't come off.
We had to paint the door.
So not only did I have to buy a, like, a $400 mirror at that time,
that same mirror now with all the electronics and cameras and stuff would be
over $1,000.
We did, we quoted one for a Lincoln MKX the other day and it was $1,250 for one mirror.
I'd hate to see how much the headlight would cost for that thing.
But yeah, if you don't get that ooze off your paint, it could eat through it.
And then you have the glass, you know, that scratches the paint as well.
So poor judgment.
You know, if you see a car coming and it looks really wide
and you're both approaching a narrow bridge, just go ahead and stop.
It's not a competition.
You're not jousting, you're just driving.
You want to get home with both mirrors intact.
Okay, and then failure to yield the right away.
And a lot of these accidents, oh, they're yielding all right,
but they think the car in front of them has already pulled out.
They see it start to move and then they look to see if any cars are coming,
assuming that the car moved.
No, that car didn't move.
What moved it was when you hit it from behind.
And the good thing about modern vehicles like our Nissan's and our Ford's,
they have automatic stopping, emergency braking that, you know,
you don't see that they stopped, but the camera and the computer on the car sees it
and applies the brakes and you end up not hitting the car in front of you.
But that system is not foolproof.
It should be, I guess, but they're just not.
You know, they're made by humans and sometimes they just don't work.
So how do we address these problems?
Well, you keep your phone out of reach while you're driving,
then you can't check the text.
You know, maybe you can answer the phone on your infotainment system.
You should never hold it.
In Tennessee, if they see you holding it, you're going to get pulled over and get a ticket.
Again, maintain a safe following distance.
Count to three.
And if you get to two before you pass over where the car in front of you was,
then you're too close.
Or just use the one car length for every 10 miles an hour.
And then that'll keep you at the right distance.
I'll pay the speed limits, adjust for weather, stay very,
very alert at intersections.
Don't trust a green light.
Never drive impaired.
Expect mistakes from other drivers.
You know, if you're really in tight traffic and you're going pretty fast,
65, 70 miles an hour, and you've got an 18-wheeler,
or you've got a car up in front of you, you're getting ready to pass them,
what should you be looking at?
Do you know?
Should you be looking just straight down the road?
One of the things I look at, and the experts agree, is look at their front wheel.
Because that's the one that's going to cross the dotted line first.
Just keep your eye on that.
I mean, you can see with your peripheral vision down the road,
I mean, you want to look down the road, but keep glancing at that front wheel.
That's what I do.
And one more safety trick I learned many years ago,
is that when you're driving down the road,
and a car is getting ready to pull onto that road,
you can see them pulling up.
What should you be looking at?
You know, should you keep looking down the road and trust your vision
to be able to pick up movement?
No, you should look at their front wheel.
Again, because you will see the rotation of that wheel
before you'll see any movement.
You'll see it just barely move.
And that has saved me a bunch of times of people pulling out in front of me.
You know, you can blast them with the horn and get their attention,
or just slow down, because lots of times they have no clue that you're there.
They can't see you.
Maybe because of the way the sun is hitting their eyes,
or they've got some other obstacle in their way.
Maybe deep-tended windows are blocking you,
and they just can't get a good picture.
They don't even know you're there.
Pull out in front of you.
So you just have to be prepared for that.
And that doesn't matter whether you're a teenager,
or an old geezer like me.
I'll be back in just one minute.
Okay, I am back.
Let's talk about road rage incidences.
What should you do?
If you've got somebody that, somehow,
you don't know how, or you do know how,
they're mad.
They're ticked off at you because of some move you made.
They think that they're on a NASCAR race car track,
and you're just trying to get to soccer practice,
or get to work.
And you have enraged them because of,
maybe you pulled out in front of them.
Maybe you got too close to their rear bumper.
And they start acting crazy,
slamming on their brakes, and swerving in and out,
and blocking you, and doing all this kind of stuff.
What should you do?
Well, I know what I want to do.
I wish I had a missile launcher on the front of my vehicle,
and it was legal to blow them off the road.
No, I don't.
I have thought about that, though.
But no, you do not engage with aggressive drivers.
You back off.
You lose.
If it's a competition, and it's on the road,
and it involves road rage, it's okay to lose.
Just back off.
Pull over.
Let them go on down the road.
Let them deal with their issues.
Avoid eye contact or gestures.
Give aggressive drivers plenty of space.
Do not respond by honking or yelling,
or giving them the finger.
Stay calm and focused on your driving.
If you feel threatened, go to a very public place,
and call 911.
Make sure that the police are there waiting
before you pull over and stop,
because the person truly could be crazy.
And another thing I guess you can do
before you even leave on your trip is just plan ahead
and allow extra travel time to reduce stress
so that you don't get wound too tight.
I know that's a lot to ask.
I mean, I'm driving to Hilton Head for our family vacation,
and these traffic jams that they have on I-26 and 95,
they're exasperating.
I mean, you're just cruising along,
and all of a sudden, it's a three-mile pile-up.
And then finally, an hour later,
you get to the front of it, and there's nothing there.
Nothing.
If there was an accident, it's cleared off.
And so I've always thought that people,
it's just reaction time, that people are reacting
to something that happens.
Then what do they do?
Pull out their cell phone, check the latest news,
update their Facebook page, check the weather at the beach.
I truly believe that it's the cell phone
that causes those massive traffic jams.
It's the only possible explanation
that I have been able to come up with,
unless it's just the Lord testing my patience.
But it's not just my patience, it's everybody else.
I don't think that's what it is.
But you know, lessons are learned in a lot of different ways.
And my wife, she'll look at me and say,
just calm down, just, it's okay, we'll get there.
And then I do.
I need her.
She keeps me calm because she knows after 48 years
that I don't like to wait and I don't like lines.
And I'm really impatient with terrible service.
And that's about it.
Those are my only faults.
And oh, how I wish that were the case.
Well, thanks for listening to this edition of My Car Guru.
If you need me, send me a text 423-552-2020.
And I'll see you on the next edition of My Car Guru.
About this episode
Lenny Lawson delivers a “letter” to new teen drivers focused on limited independence: more responsibility, and only three things you control—knowledge, skills, and habits. He then breaks down the most common crash causes: distracted driving (especially phones), speeding for conditions, tailgating, running red lights, DUI, poor weather visibility, and inexperience/judgment errors. He emphasizes seat belts working with airbags, safe following distances, and defensive cues like watching a merging car’s front wheel. Road rage advice is simple: don’t engage—back off, create space, pull over if threatened, and call 911.
