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Through our team’s 90+ collective years of experience as emergency services drivers, we’ve determined that the best way to teach driving is one-on-one.
In a group course setting, it’s too easy to take a back seat and become a passenger in your own learning. Our instructors will sit in that passenger seat and guide you through a better and safer way to drive your vehicle, whether it’s a 4WD, family wagon, or performance car.
Whether it’s absolutely bog standard, or you’ve started making some modifications, our training will adapt around you and your needs.
With our instruction in your 4WD, you’ll become more aware of the capabilities of both your vehicle – and you.
First Time 4WD‘s courses run from 10am to 4pm. This includes five hours of intensive professional instruction time and a break for lunch.
A First Time Advanced Driving course will typically run for around four hours on either a morning or afternoon. If it suits you better, we can split the course over a couple of evenings.
Workplace Check Drives run for two hours.
For Caravan Towing Courses, allow four hours and for a Trailer Towing Course, about 1.5 hours.
Our First Time Performance Car courses are also four hours.
For pricing on tailored training packages for business and industry, please contact us.
Our 4WD instructors have our own vehicles and recovery equipment on hand for recovery training and demonstrations. This means if you’re undecided on what you need to fit on your pride and joy, or what recovery equipment you actually need, you’ll be able to find out what will suit your own off-road needs in a First Time 4WD hands-on way.
After your course, our instructors can help you decide what you need, and then recommend a retailer to help you out.
We understand that feeling when your new 4WD gets its first scuff. We’ve been there! To minimise the chances of this happening, we tailor courses to suit your 4WD and the type of off-road driving that you expect to do.
If the day of your 4WD course is declared a Catastrophic or Extreme Fire Danger Rating day by the Country Fire Service (CFS) or Country Fire Authority (CFA), you will have the option to reschedule or receive a full refund.
We agree that certain skills learned at a race track can be useful for when it all goes wrong and it is out of your control. However, most of the skills that can be taught at a race track can be taught safely on the road.
We firmly believe that it is more beneficial to learn skills on the same or similar roads that you drive every day! You are training in real life situations, not in a sterile environment.
The simple answer is YES!
Our instructors are all either retired or still serving emergency services first responder drivers, each with between 10 and 35 years of experience. Furthermore, they’re all qualified emergency services driving trainers, highly experienced in advanced driving techniques.
Importantly, we are not teaching our clients how to drive faster or recklessly. We are teaching a proven system of car control that enables drivers to be safer, with better understanding of their ability and their vehicle and more control when it comes to responding in real-life road conditions.
We’ve read the studies that say defensive driver training courses give a false sense of confidence, but we’re not sure how you quantify a finding like that.
We do agree that purely teaching defensive driving isn’t the answer.
Emergency services around the world spend hundreds of thousands of dollars every year training their staff to advance their driving knowledge and confidence, to make them safer drivers.
Similarly, our training is designed to keep you safer and make you a better driver using our system of advanced driving.
This is your course. If you’d like, your instructor can teach you basic maintenance checks, or even walk you through how to safely change a tyre.
Again, we can tailor our course to suit your specific needs. Talk to us about what you’d like to learn when you book. (There are no silly questions!)
Our Advanced Driving Stage 2 course introduces a more efficient and smoother way to steer your vehicle as well as building on the techniques and training we have already given you.