Last night I attended the MSA East Midlands AGM and one of the guest speakers, John Lepine MBE – MSA General Manager, touched on the subject of technology and how our modern tuition cars now come with a host of toys to play with.
This got me thinking, how many of us “Share Our Toys”.
Parking sensors, parking cameras, automatic parallel parking, lane departure control, radar collision prevention, the list seems to grow with each new model produced.
Now not may of our students are fortunate enough to be able to afford a brand new car, but at some point in the future the two shall meet.
Do we, as instructors have a moral right to educate our pupils on these new toys and how many of our pupils care, or indeed want to spend £30 for an hour to be taught how the car can park itself, when the last lesson was on reverse parking?
We are being drawn into, what shall be an evolving syllabus, the addition of the satnav to the independent drive, means we will have to factor this into lesson plans, if you have not been teaching it already. Personally I have been delivering satnav lessons for a couple of years, however I started my day today pondering, “do I need to factor in a hands-free lesson and demonstrate the Bluetooth connectivity in my car ?
Change is inevitable, it’s sometimes labelled as “progress”. Autonomous cars are on the horizon, with testing already underway in Coventry, ( BBC News ) do we kick against it or embrace it and “Share our toys” ?
ADI NETWORK 
A more important question: thirty years ago when cars were less complicated, Why was I able to charge the equivalent of £40 an hour for a driving lesson?
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That has to be an industry stigma, in not wanting to raise hourly rates out of fear.
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