Bill Howard, BMW CCA
Oct. 5, 2007

FORT WORTH, Tex. – Want to be a teenager for a day? That’s what happened to BMW CCA Oktoberfest attendees who took part in the Teen Street Survival program. Since it was a Wednesday during the school year, teenagers outside academic classrooms were scarce. Instead, the program was opened to Oktoberfest attendees of all ages. (The program was repeated Saturday in Fort Worth, this time for all from the Fort Worth area.)

The BMW CCA Foundation’s Street Surival program, with sponsorship from Tire Rack, gives teens the driving skills they don’t get in high school driver education programs, if their schools even have them. “Most teens and a lot of adults have never had a chance to experience what full-on ABS [anti-lock braking] feels like,” says Bill Wade, the program manager who runs Street Survival for the Foundation. “They think there’s something wrong with the brakes and back off in a situation where they need maximum braking.”

That was one of the Street Survival lessons taught Wednesday in a half-dozen driving exercises. Participants accelerated hard through a lane of pylons (to 30 to 40 mph), then upon reaching a final set of cones, slammed on the brakes, and felt the car quickly come to a stop without brake squeal or loss of control. Try that in driver ed with the wrestling coach and two other kids aboard and you’ll likely be bounced from class. After a couple runs through a street braking exercise, students try the same thing while making a sharp turn to the left, under heavy or full ABS braking, learning that what would make a non-ABS car slide or spin can be a manageable avoidance maneuver. Some adults learned also carrying too much speed into the turn: No amount of ABS stops you from rolling over the nuns and orphans, as Wade jovially describes the orange pylons. The point being to keep it light.

Other tasks included:

-- A classroom talk – here outdoors under the giant, shading canopy of a Michelin transporter.

-- A decreasing radius slalom, teaching drivers hand position for extreme maneuvers and to look farther and farther down the road. Concentrate just on the next pylon and you’re more likely to clip it.

-- Blocked-lane maneuvers representing a stalled car on the expressway, an accident, or more nuns and orphans jaywalking. The driver heads for the middle of three cone-separated lanes. The instructor can shout “left,” “right,” or nothing at all, and the student has to respond. Then there’s a gap between cones, and another (instructor’s) choice of lanes. At some Street Survival programs, a flagger waves to the required lane.

-- A quick lane change, followed by a sweeping 180-degree turn, and a mini-autocross that teaches steering inputs. As with the slalom, students learn that hand-shuffling is replacing hand-over-hand turns because of the presence of airbags in cars.

-- Dry skidpad on a figure-eight course.

-- Wet circular skidpad. Here, even more than on the dry figure-eight, students learn about the coefficient of friction – presented in less technical terms to teens – where for a given car, you can only have a given combination of speed, cornering, and adhesion. Students learn that if you’re starting to drift wide on the skidpad, letting up on the gas shifts weight forward, gives the steered wheels more grip, and tightens your turn better than adding steering input.

Participants got to sit in the cab of an 18-wheeler, the purpose not to further appreciate country music, but to see the enormous blind spot behind: An M3 positioned more than 50 feet behind the truck couldn't be seen in either side mirror. (The exercise did confirm that truckers have a very nice view down into convertibles.) Wade also fired off an airbag to demonstrate what was described as a gentle air pillow years ago is a loud, explosive device that could whip your arms back into your face if your hands are at anywhere but 10 and 2 or 9 and 3 (doesn't matter which, both work, Wade says).

Many chapters already sponsor Street Survival programs. There is zero net cost to chapters. Street Survival and BMW CCA Foundation underwrite all expenses. Students typically pay around $50. For more information, see www.streetsurvival.org.