History of Stevens Advanced Driver Training, LLC.

I started Stevens Advanced Driver Training in 1979 to train police and emergency vehicle operators. Those drivers previously had no access to car control and emergency skills training procedures that were common knowledge at the racetrack, where I had worked for Skip Barber and others for the previous five years. In twenty eight years teaching pursuit and emergency skills at the Vermont Police Academy, we have not lost a trained officer to a car crash and we have not had a single training incident that resulted in injury or crash damage to a vehicle.

I apologize for the play on words, but that's no accident. This kind of training cannot be done without exploring the limits of control every day. A driver who is prepared to handle a life-threatening emergency on the road is a driver who has practiced emergency skills at the limit of the car until it has become second nature. And this kind of training cannot be done safely every day for thirty years unless each Stevens instructor is committed to mastering the hundreds of details upon which a safe program is built every day. Ours is a unique program. But it isn't the cars or the facilities that make us unique; It is the instructors, whose one-on-one, in-car training compresses three decades of institutional memory into exactly the message each driver needs to break through and master the car control skills we all need to survive. Ask anyone who has ever taken our course.

Our lives changed in 1996 when we began training newly licensed drivers for Cooperative Insurance Companies in Middlebury, VT. Working with Co-op over the next five years, we developed a specific teen protocol that provided large numbers of teens essential skills before they were placed at risk on public roads. Co-op's data on their clients has shown significant accident reduction, and an early look at a current two-year study on drivers trained while still on permits by the Vt. Justice Research Center shows that none of the 142 participants was the at-fault driver in a police-reported crash in the first six months of the study. Because of this kind of documentation of results, other schools have asked to use our program. One exceptional case is In Control Advanced Driver Training in Massachusetts, which was successful in having our specific program written into law without significant alteration in the current Junior Operators legislation. We have provided this program to Massachusetts teens throughout the state from 2001 to 2008 in partnership with the Massachusetts Automobile Dealers Charitable Foundation.

Our mission statement says in part that we will be the leader in safe, hands-on emergency car control training, with a primary (but not exclusive) focus on new drivers, achieved at the community level with the help and cooperation of our local and national business partners. It is our goal to be instrumental in the creation of a safe driving culture. We are proud of our past, but we know we have barely scratched the surface.

Sandy Stevens