Why 93% of

Drivers Think

They're Above

Average

What this means for

your drivers, your

safety program, and

your bottom line

The Reddit Experiment

I asked a simple question on Reddit: What makes you an above- average driver? Over 600 responses came in. If you manage a fleet, what I found was consistent with what the research documents. Almost every single respondent believed they qualified. Only a handful showed reasoning that reflected genuine expertise. Just two described knowledge and understanding that would actually place them in the lowest crash-risk category. One person claimed superiority because they could drive multiple vehicle types. Another said strict traffic law obedience was the mark of excellence (apparently unaware that rigid rule-following can create dangerous situations in the real world). Many pointed to habits that are genuinely dangerous and framed them as proof of skill. That is not a Reddit quirk. It is what the research on driver self- perception predicts. And statistically, it reflects your driver population.

This Isn't Opinion. It's

Documented.

The 93% figure isn't anecdotal. Swedish psychologist Ola Svenson documented it in 1981 in Accident Analysis and Prevention, and it has been replicated across cultures and decades since. More than half of drivers in his study placed themselves in the 81st percentile or higher for safe driving relative to their peers. Researchers call it the above- average effect. It doesn't mean drivers are arrogant. It means the system that produced them gave them no reliable way to measure themselves against anything real. That's the structural problem. And it starts on day one.

The License Illusion

We all learn to drive the same way. Study the rules, practice with an instructor, friends or family until we can pass a road test, then receive a license that we imagine is a certification of competence. Consider what it would look like if we licensed chess players the same way. A beginner would learn how the pieces move, play a few practice games with Grandpa, and then sit for an exam. As long as they don't make too many illegal moves during their test game, congratulations - they're licensed to play chess! But would that make them a good chess player? A grandmaster thinks several moves ahead. They anticipate their opponent's strategy. They force their opponent into positions that serve their larger plan. And just like grandmaster chess players, there are drivers on the road who are thinking several moves ahead, reading crash risk and mitigating that risk 360 degrees around their vehicle. They're taking action to reduce the risk of a crash. At times, they're even influencing the behaviour of the drivers around them. The road test was never designed to produce those drivers. It confirms minimum legal competency. That's it. Every driver on your fleet passed that test. That's the baseline you're working from.

The Feedback Problem

In most skilled disciplines, bad technique gets corrected. A coach sees it. A score reflects it. A result makes it undeniable. Driving doesn't work that way. A driver can tailgate at 70 mph for twenty years and never crash. But that's not evidence the behaviour is safe. It means the specific condition that would expose it hasn't presented itself yet. A child runs into the road. The car ahead brakes hard. Debris appears with no warning. When that moment comes, no amount of skill or experience changes what happens next. The space isn't there. Stopping distance is physics, not judgment. The crash was already determined the moment the driver closed that gap. And yet the driver who has tailgated for twenty years without incident interprets that record as confirmation of superior skill. Research on driver self-perception bears this out. People credit themselves when things go well and blame other drivers, road conditions, or bad luck when things go wrong. The habit never gets examined. The confidence only grows. This is how a driver with genuinely poor habits ends up completely certain they're one of the better ones on the road. And it's why simply logging more miles doesn't fix the problem. Experience without feedback doesn't build skill. It builds confidence in whatever habits were already there.

What Truly Defines

“Good Driver”

Drivers tend to believe that the best drivers drive like they do. But consider it from another angle. What is the worst thing that can happen when a person is driving? If we can agree that a fatality or life-altering injury are the worst outcomes, then doesn't it follow that the best drivers are those who possess the skill to avoid crashes? And wouldn't the degree of skill also be determined by the range of crash scenarios a driver consistently avoids? That last part is where most training programs stop short. Legal fault and driving competence are not the same measurement. Your insurance company determines who pays. It tells you nothing about what a more skilled driver might have seen coming and prevented entirely. Federal crash research consistently identifies human factors as contributing to the vast majority of crashes. But contributing to a crash and causing it are treated as different things legally. From a skill standpoint, they are the same question: could a more aware driver have seen this coming and prevented it? In most cases, the answer is yes. That's the gap your training program either addresses or doesn't.

Why Training Alone

Often Doesn't Move

the Needle

Fleet managers know this frustration. You bring in training. Drivers sit through it. They pass the assessment. Six months later, the same behaviours are back. That's not a training delivery problem. It's a belief problem. Drivers who are convinced they're already above average don't absorb corrective information the same way. The research on this is consistent: overconfidence in driving skill is one of the most significant barriers to effective safety intervention. You're not just competing with bad habits. You're competing with the certainty that the habits aren't bad. Compliance-based training targets behaviour. It doesn't touch the belief system driving the behaviour. And until that belief system is disrupted, the behaviour tends to return.

What the Best Drivers

Actually Do Differently

They exist. Drivers who accumulate hundreds of thousands of miles without incident, not through luck, but through deliberate, continuously refined skill. Ask one of them why they positioned their vehicle in a specific spot at a specific moment, and they can tell you exactly why. They're reading the road several seconds ahead. They're tracking the behaviour of the drivers around them and anticipating what those drivers are about to do. They're managing risk that the other drivers in the same situation haven't even registered yet. Pattern recognition. Threat anticipation. Spatial awareness. The ability to read another driver and predict their next move. None of this appears on a licensing exam. None of it develops automatically through ordinary driving experience. All of it requires deliberate study and practice that most drivers never pursue and most training programs never address.

The Question Worth

Putting to Your Fleet

The question isn't whether your drivers are above average. The question is: what standard are they measuring themselves against, and who told them they'd reached it? Because the gap between "I haven't crashed yet" and "I have the skill to prevent crashes" is enormous. One is statistics. The other is something that has to be built deliberately. And it starts with being willing to acknowledge it isn't already there.

Frequently

Asked

Questions

Why does compliance-

based training produce

short-term results but

rarely stick?

There are two problems, and they compound each other. The first is that compliance-based training doesn't overcome the driver's existing bias. Drivers who are convinced they're above average have already decided that the standards being presented don't apply to them. When they're told again what following distance they should be maintaining, they've already concluded that standard is arbitrary, or designed for drivers less skilled than they believe themselves to be. The instruction lands and goes nowhere. The second problem is that driving habits are deeply ingrained. Without an ongoing component to the training strategy that gives drivers a real incentive to keep improving over time, they revert. Not because they're lazy, but because in their own minds, their way is good enough. They have enough to deal with without adding what they see as unnecessary advice on top of it. There is a third factor worth naming. Drivers often see themselves as every bit as much an expert as the person training them. If the trainer doesn't demonstrate real expertise, something the driver can recognize as knowledge or skill they genuinely lack, there's little reason to listen. Authority in this space has to be earned in the room, not assumed because someone is standing at the front of it.

How do you identify

drivers in a fleet who

are high risk despite a

clean record?

The only reliable way is through a live driving evaluation conducted by a supervisor trained in a, comprehensive framework. Traffic patterns repeat. Crash patterns repeat. A driver's habits can be evaluated against those patterns in real time, specifically looking at how readily they recognize emerging risk and how they respond to it. A well-trained supervisor working within the right framework can identify the types of crashes a driver is most likely to be involved in based on their actual driving behavior, before any crash has occurred. A clean record tells you what hasn't happened yet. A live evaluation tells you what the driver is setting up for.

Is a crash that's legally

someone else's fault

still a fleet safety

concern?

Yes, and for more reasons than most fleet managers account for. Legal fault determines liability. It doesn't determine whether the crash was preventable by a more skilled driver. Fleet safety programs that only track at-fault incidents are working with incomplete data. A driver who is repeatedly involved in crashes ruled not their fault may still represent a pattern worth examining from a skill and awareness standpoint. There is also a psychological cost that rarely makes it into the business case conversation. When a crash involves a fatality, particularly a pedestrian or a child, the human consequences don't stop at the scene. Drivers can lose their ability to function on the job. The trauma is real, and the organizational impact of it is real. That cost doesn't appear on an incident report, but it belongs in the conversation about what fleet safety is actually protecting against.

What does advanced

driver training actually

look like, and how is it

different from

standard defensive

driving?

Defensive driving is not a single thing. It exists on a spectrum, and where a program sits on that spectrum determines whether it produces genuine behaviour change or simply generates a completion record. At the low end are compliance programs that restate traffic law, remind drivers of rules they already know, and assess whether they were present. These produce no measurable behaviour change in experienced drivers for reasons covered throughout this article. Further along the spectrum are programs that begin to explain the physics behind the rules - why following distance is not arbitrary, what perception and reaction time actually cost you at speed, how stopping distance compounds with velocity. These are more effective because understanding produces adherence in a way that compliance never does. A driver who genuinely understands why tailgating is dangerous in physical terms is harder to convince that their experience exempts them from the risk. But understanding alone is still insufficient without two additional elements. The first is a practical component - real evaluation in real traffic conditions against a consistent framework, not a multiple choice quiz. The second is an ongoing structure that gives drivers a reason to keep applying what they have learned after the training session ends. Most programs that reach the physics explanation stage stop short of both. Genuinely advanced driver training addresses all of it: the physics, the psychology of why experienced drivers resist, the practical evaluation of actual driving behaviour, and a cycle structure that builds habit over time rather than generating a one-time compliance event. The question to ask of any program is not whether it teaches defensive driving. It is where on that spectrum it actually sits, and whether the structure is capable of producing lasting change in a driver who arrived convinced they did not need it.

Sources

Svenson, O. (1981). Are we all less risky and more skillful than our fellow drivers? Acta Psychologica, 47(2), 143-148. Koppel, L., Andersson, D., Tinghog, G., Vastfjall, D., and Feldman, G. (2023). We are all less risky and more skillful than our fellow drivers: Successful replication and extension of Svenson (1981). Meta- Psychology. Tri-Level Study of the Causes of Traffic Accidents - Executive summary record (TRID) NHTSA. (2015). Critical Reasons for Crashes Investigated in the National Motor Vehicle Crash Causation Survey. Report No. DOT HS 812 115. Roy, M.M. and Liersch, M.J. (2013). I am a better driver than you think: examining self-enhancement for driving ability. Journal of Applied Social Psychology, 43(8), 1648-1659.

About the Author

La Velle Goodwin is a collision prevention specialist and the founder of Driving Hero Academy. She spent 13 years as a senior instructor at one of North America's most rigorous driver training organizations, completing a certification requiring substantially deeper training in crash causation, driver psychology, and instruction methodology than standard driving instructor licensing, with mandatory annual recertification. She delivered the organization's commercial driver training program, working directly with experienced professional drivers and observing first-hand the psychological resistance that makes behaviour change so difficult to achieve in that population. After leaving, she founded a corporate entertainment company whose programs were built entirely on competitive psychology - using the human drive to compete to move people toward behaviour they would never choose if simply told to. That work ran for over a decade across clients including oil and gas companies, Canada Post, and the Calgary Board of Education. The Crash Proof System brings those two bodies of expertise together: the science of how collisions develop, and the psychology of what actually makes people change.