Are you a good driver?
Is your spouse or teen with ADHD a good driver?
We might hate to admit it, but the answer is often, “no” or “it depends.” ADHD cripples the executive functions required for safe and conscientious driving.
Thanks to lower maturity levels and lack of driving experience, teens and young adults are especially at risk. Young ADHD drivers are significantly more likely to have multiple car crashes, to suffer injuries from those accidents, and to be at fault in a crash.
Walking into a lamppost can be funny — the same mistake in a car quickly turns tragic. As Jeff Emmerson of Living With Adult ADD writes, “all it takes is a split second to take a life when we’re distracted.”
Driving with ADHD: how to stay safe
The best thing you can do to protect you, your family, and others on the road is to take your medication. It’s the only proven way to make an ADHD’er a better driver.
But we aren’t always on our meds, and for some, that’s not enough.
As it turns out, driving a stick shift may reduce your risk of being in an accident.
Many ADHD’ers — myself included — say they feel like better drivers with a manual transmission. A study from MIT confirmed it: people with ADHD performed better in a driving simulation when using a stick shift.
Driving a stick shift forces you to focus your whole body on driving. You consistently use both hands and feet, you need to know how fast you’re going and what gear you should be in, and you need to control your speed when you start from a standstill. Many drivers say it’s just more fun. Keeping your mind and body engaged will help you avoid fidgety, stimulation-seeking behaviors and distractions.
Not only that, that fact that you need both hands to operate the steering wheel and gearshift may make you save the food or cell phone for later.
Another angle to consider: as a new driver, my trusty five-speed Toyota Camry kept me in the parking lot for longer than my peers. Experts recommend giving ADHD teens more supervised practice hours to monitor and develop driving skills. Spending more time getting used to the mechanics of the car — in an empty parking lot, away from high-pressure, high-stakes situations — ensured that once I hit the road, I felt 100% comfortable with the basics.
While stick shifts have gone out of vogue in recent years, they have distinct advantages for ADHD’ers. If you’re shopping for a car, give it some thought. All my cars, since that very first one nearly 15 years ago, have had manual transmissions. It really does make me feel more in control — of the car and myself.
And when it comes to car safety, I want as many statistics on my side as possible.
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I totally get it. But man I couldn’t get the hang of it until I was 23 or so and my husband had enough and was like you are gonna learn or die trying.
Ha! My husband and I are the opposite. I’ve always loved it and managed to teach him, but he was never converted. Ironically, he says his ADHD doesn’t affect his driving very much. He says driving sort of hypes him up or something. He also doesn’t easily get drowsy while driving, whereas I do. Different brains 😉
I was recently diagnosed with ADHD (at age 44). I have always enjoyed driving a manual transmission. It’s all starting to make sense…
Hi there! I hope your diagnosis has brought some relief. I could hardly believe it when I started to see how all these previously disparate pieces connected to the same puzzle. It’s really something.
My son is ADHD, ODD, slightly Bipolar and depressed. Anyways, he’s 18yrs old and his grandpa is trying to teach him how to drive. He does really good one day and then the next day he drives like a jackass. He’s almost caused several accidents thinking he owns the roads and people should stop for him(thanks to his aggrogant father). He has ran 2 red lights and a stop sign thinking he had the right of way and then he also waits until the last minute before he applies his brakes and yes he’s on medication. It’s been a couple of months now that he’s been practising I’m really worried that he’s not ever going to get driving figured out no matter what vehicle he drives.
Whew! That would have me worried, too. At age 17 I lost a friend to a car accident, and this was not uncommon in our rural town with lots of winding roads. More than a handful of my schoolmates didn’t reach their 21st birthdays.
This was a game-changer for me as a kid — knowing firsthand what can happen. And yet, I know I still took risks I wouldn’t take now, and let my temper get the best of me. I was young, and young people don’t have the perspective on this stuff. Add ADHD to that and you have a recipe for trouble.
I can’t tell you if he’s ready to be on the road or if his medication management is in the right place, but both might be good to contemplate. If he’s 18, there’s perhaps not much you can do if he insists on driving. However, if you own the car and you don’t feel comfortable, you wouldn’t be out of line to tell him he can’t take it out until he shows more responsibility and self-restraint. When you get behind the wheel of a car, you take your life into your hands — and that of everyone around you.
I suspect my father might also be adhd (I’m diagnosed, he’s not, but he has a lot of traits). He drives like his butt is on fire with the trucks he has nowadays. He used to drive a lot better back in the day when he had a 90’s ford F250. This makes sense. The F250 had a manual transmission, unlike the trucks he’s driven since then.
I try not to be a distracted driver. I only know how to drive automatic, and I need to stop f*(&ing with my music and skipping tracks while driving.
I sort of miss the days when I had a CD changer mounted under the front passenger seat of my car. There was no f-ing way I was going to be able to mess with that while driving. I’m not too bad now, but I definitely tend to my Pandora stations at red lights.
I’ll skip tracks if I’m on a pretty desolate back road (we’re talking a casette adapter and a large capacity iPod here, in a cup holder mount on the dash). I try not to do it on main roads in the city though because they are chaos during rush hour. And definitely not the highway.
Be careful on the back roads, too! I grew up in the country, and I lost several of my classmates to car accidents. I actually feel way safer driving in the city because of my teenage experiences — at least on the surface streets.
Not THOSE kinds of back roads. I’m talking side streets with not much going on. Haha. I’m familiar with dangerous back roads in the country as there are plenty where my grandma lives down in the ozarks. City driving stresses me out because I have a hard time processing in real time with so much going on during rush hour (in addition to ADHD I am also autistic so that explains this). I don’t necessarily live in the biggest of cities but I wouldn’t call it small either. I’ve lived in Kansas City proper my whole life. Most of the chaos I deal with is people cutting people off, people jaywalking everywhere all over the road like human frogger, and the random dog bolting across the street with the owner running after him. And of course sirens at any moment’s notice to pull over. And whatever the hell those /Other/ drivers are doing (like going backwards through a roundabout lol).
Oh man, I know what you mean. Sometimes I feel like I could use five more sets of eyes!