Prerequisite
Students must have successfully completed either:
Foundations I — Driving Physics & Vehicle Control
FDA Basics Level Curriculum
This course is designed for FDA graduates who already possess a foundation in vehicle control and are ready to apply that knowledge and experience to a new or unfamiliar vehicle.
Course Overview
Every vehicle has its own personality.
A skilled driver must become familiar with it.
A newly acquired vehicle may accelerate faster, brake differently, respond more quickly to steering, transfer weight differently, provide different levels of grip, or communicate through the steering wheel, brake pedal, throttle, and chassis in ways that are unfamiliar to the driver.
Most drivers discover these characteristics gradually on public roads.
Florida Driving Academy believes there is a better way.
Public roads are not the place for a young driver to explore the capabilities and limits of an unfamiliar vehicle.
My New-to-Me Vehicle provides two sessions of purposeful vehicle familiarization under instructor supervision. Using the student's own vehicle, FDA creates opportunities to deliberately experience acceleration, braking, steering response, grip, balance, and handling in a controlled environment before those characteristics are encountered unexpectedly in everyday driving.
Students experience how their vehicle responds to full-throttle acceleration, progressive and threshold braking, ABS activation, freeway entry and exit, and progressively demanding cone-course exercises.
The objective is not to teach the student to drive all over again. It is to help an already-trained driver become familiar with a different automobile and calibrate existing driving skills to its particular characteristics.
What Students Experience
Students are introduced to the characteristics of their own vehicle through purposeful exercises involving:
- Smooth and full-throttle acceleration
- Progressive and threshold braking
- ABS-activated emergency braking
- Steering response
- Emergency lane changes
- Weight transfer
- Cornering and vehicle rotation
- Grip and vehicle balance
- Freeway entry and exit
- Parking-lot maneuvering
- Low-speed precision control
- Progressive cone-course driving
Where the student's demonstrated skill level and the training environment permit, more developed students may also experience controlled exercises involving the recognition and induction of understeer and oversteer.
Behind-the-Wheel Training
Training takes place entirely in the student's own vehicle.
Exercises are conducted under instructor supervision using controlled training areas and appropriate public-road segments according to the objective of each exercise.
Training may include:
- Vehicle familiarization
- Seating-position optimization
- Visibility assessment
- Straight-line acceleration
- Full-throttle acceleration
- Progressive braking
- Threshold braking
- ABS-activated braking
- Freeway acceleration and merging
- Freeway exit and deceleration
- Phase I Cone Course
- Phase II Cone Course
- Phase III Cone Course
- Instructor-guided assessment and refinement
The progressively demanding exercises allow the student to experience how the vehicle responds as demands increase rather than waiting for ordinary traffic—or an emergency—to reveal those characteristics.
Course Format
Two Sessions
60 Minutes Behind the Wheel per Session
Total Driving Time: 2 Hours
Requirements
Students must provide:
- Current proof of vehicle insurance
- Signed Florida Driving Academy liability waiver
- A vehicle in safe operating condition
Course Outcome
Students leave with a deeper familiarity with their specific vehicle and firsthand experience of how it accelerates, brakes, steers, corners, transfers weight, activates ABS, and responds as driving demands increase.
The course provides an opportunity to calibrate existing driving skills and expectations to the vehicle they will actually be driving—deliberately, under instructor supervision, rather than allowing the public road to become the laboratory.