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 should give you pause. 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's not a Reddit quirk. That's your driver population. And statistically, it's also your fleet.

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. If we licensed chess players the same way. A beginner would learn how the pieces move, plays 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, you're licensed to play chess!” But would that make them a good chess player? The Grand Master thinks several moves ahead. They anticipate their opponent's strategy. They force their opponent into positions that serve their larger plan. And just like Grand Master 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 car. They're taking action to reduce the risk of a crash. At times, they're even controlling 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 behavior 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 lets look at 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, then doesn’t it follow that the best drivers are those who possess the skill to avoid crashes? Wouldn’t the degree of skill also be determined by the spectrum of crashes a driver consistently drove so as to avoid them? 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 behavior. It doesn't touch the belief system driving the behavior. And until that belief system is disrupted, the behavior 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 behavior 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 common, 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?

Standard defensive driving tells drivers what to do. It rarely explains why, and if it provides a practical component to help them actually change their habits, it offers no ongoing means of making sure it sticks. The result is training that drivers endure to check a compliance box, without ever understanding why their habits leave them exposed, or what the physics are working against them in the moment. Genuinely advanced defensive driving works differently. It explains the physics. It addresses the limits of human perception and reaction time honestly. It gives drivers specific strategies and tactics they can apply, and it presents them in a way that makes drivers want to apply them. That last part is not a small distinction. When a driver understands why a habit puts them at risk, not just that it does, the instruction sticks. Understanding produces adherence in a way that compliance never does. Can overconfidence in driving skill be identified before a crash happens? Easily. When supervisors are trained in a comprehensive system that allows them to read how a driver understands risk in real time and how they respond to it, overconfidence is not difficult to recognize. It shows up in how a driver positions their vehicle, how much space they maintain, how they respond to emerging hazards, and how they process the environment around them. None of that requires waiting for an incident. It requires having supervisors who know what they're looking at. What's the business case for investing in advanced driver training for a fleet? Fleet managers can keep investing in compliance training that doesn't move the needle and continue absorbing the same crash rates and the costs that come with them. Or they can invest in something designed to shift the safety culture and give drivers an ongoing incentive to improve over time. The math is straightforward. If a training program prevents two collisions, it has paid for itself. If it reduces the incident rate by 60 or 80 percent, the impact on the company's bottom line is significant and measurable. The question isn't whether better training costs money. It's whether the current approach is actually cheaper when all the costs are on the table.

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 has spent nearly three decades thinking about why driver behavior is so hard to change, and how to actually change it. Her path into road safety was not a career plan. Hired into the sales department at Young Drivers of Canada, she was required to take the program as a condition of employment. She went from believing her aggressive driving habits were a sign of skill to recognizing they had been a sustained act of luck. That shift was sharp enough that she immersed herself in crash research, driver psychology, and industry training standards before becoming their on-air expert for media, and eventually completing YDC's instructor certification, a process requiring more than four times the training of a standard driving instructor license with mandatory annual recertification requiring instructors to retrain and meet progressively higher scoring targets on practical in-car exams, advancing through successive certification levels as a condition of continued employment. She delivered YDC's commercial driver training program, Collision Free, working directly with experienced drivers and observing firsthand the attitudes, blind spots, and psychological reluctance that make behavior change so difficult to achieve in professional driver populations. After leaving YDC, she founded an entertainment company producing live, interactive events for corporate clients including oil and gas companies, Canada Post, and the Calgary Board of Education. Every program was built on a single mechanism: competitive psychology. She learned, in practice, how to use the human drive to compete to move people toward behavior they would never choose on their own. She has been combining those two bodies of expertise ever since, and it is the reason she understands not just why fleet drivers are certain they don't need to change, but how to make them want to.