I personally know someone who totaled 4 cars before turning 18. He literally treated the gas as an on/off switch.

So people that bad at driving are out there.

Truth be told, drivers here in the US are TOTALLY untrained for the most part. My oldest is currently in driver's Ed and it is a joke, in regards to actually how to drive a car. I have spent a lot of time training him as I have a long history taking racing and advanced driving courses. I've held SCCA and FIA racing licenses and I have taken some courses that are usually reserved for police officers The only problem is I do not feel that I'm a very good teacher for him. But he has picked up some things, even if he isn't up for threshold or trail braking.

Yeah, people like this are why my (absolutely spotless record, not even a parking ticket) insurance is so high. They drive rates up for everyone around them, simply due to the fact that you can get hit by them through no fault of your own.

I dated a girl whose brother had four accidents on his record at the time. He was 17 years old, so just barely old enough to have his license, (in my area you can get your permit at 15, and license at 16). After his second totaled car, their parents told him he was buying his third car with his own money. For them, the first totaled car was a fluke; The second was a pattern. So he got a job at 16, bought a junker with his earnings, and totaled it six months later.

The worst part is that two of his accidents happened in the exact same circumstances. Slick roads from an ice storm. He takes one particular corner too fast, hits a patch of ice, and ends up totaled. He totaled two cars on the exact same icy corner, because he didn’t learn from the first accident.

Wouldn't they have revoked your license by this point?

Is this a European joke I'm too American to understand? /s

Well they do give them a strong incentive to stop driving.

doing 80 on icy roads and sliding around everywhere [...] bragging about it as if it made him Mario Andretti.

This, at best, makes him kinda okay at Mario Kart.

But even that game forces you to give up if you crash too many times.

bragging about that is like bragging about negligently discharging a gun in a crowd of people and miraculously, nobody gets hit.

At this rate I bet it's cheaper for them to Uber everywhere.

Hopefully not on any road near you.

It’s actually ridiculously simple to not break the law or get in an accident.

Driving a car is absurdly difficult, incredibly dangerous, takes only a second of distraction to kill yourself and others and in general is such a nightmare that it is contrary to what you say a miracle that people aren’t crashing into each other all the damn time.

Like, everybody I have gotten in a car with for the past 10 years invariably will get stressed out significantly by the unavoidable chaos of driving enough to visibly become emotional about it even during a short drive. Driving is miserable.

I legitimately don’t get people who can’t drive.

Setting aside folks with serious disabilities, folks with long term mental decline, folks with mechanical difficulties, folks with rambunctious kids in the back seats, folks in neighborhoods with high speed limits and generally unsafe driving conditions, folks who have to drive through inclement weather, folks who don't regularly maintain their car's brakes and tires, folks who drive cars that have poor visibility (big trucks, particularly), and folks who just never learned rules of the road before getting a rubber stamp from a DMV that does not give a shit...

It's difficult to understand why other people don't drive as well as I do.

One sec. Sorry. Banging this out on my phone while driving and I had a whoopsie-doodle. Let me clean this up and I'll finish my post.

I believe it. A childhood friend of mine had totaled like 7 (very cheap) cars by the time he turned 25.

After a particularly brutal crash, he was diagnosed with epilepsy after having an absence seizure in the presence of an ER nurse.

Hasn't wrecked since.

If it isn't a real story, there are plenty of real stories like it. There are just a disgusting number of people who are reckless drivers.

Almost no one in the town I live in uses their turn signals. It's infuriating. I can't tell you the number of times I've almost rear-ended someone who suddenly slam on their breaks in the middle of an intersection and turn off. I also live in a subdivision with no sidewalks and a speed limit of 25 mph. People are regularly walking their dogs and kids are everywhere. I see people flying down the curvy subdivision roads doing at least 50.

I'm amazed I haven't heard about anyone getting killed.

Pffft, that’s what the insurance is for, so they don’t have to learn.

From the amount of accidents they have had. Maybe start with walking and see how that goes first before getting anything with wheels.

I imagine they're one of those people who just have piles of trash in their car sliding around the floor and probably dashboard too.

It can be done. I drove Uber part time and a group of girls in the back decided why not drunk water bottle fight. One rolled under as I was going downhill. That is up there with one of the most terrifying moments of my life.

I used the emergency brake and stomped the foot brake as hard as i could multiple times until it was crushed then fished it out.

I no longer drive Uber part time.