More on Aspies and driving.

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In need of advice here. My Aspie wife is 40 and has never driven a car in her life. She is terrified to even try. I want to teach her though. I myself didn't learn until I was 24, but that was more due to the fact that for most of my life up to that point I could not afford and did not need a car. Are there Aspies here in the US who never learned even that late in life? I ask American Aspies because I know learning to drive is very different in Europe.

My great grandmother was on the spectrum and never got her license. She could pass the written tests, but she struggled with actually driving. Fortunately for her, she lived within walking distance of the places she needed to go and she could call my grandma to drive her to places that were to far away to walk to.

I am 25 and I am working on getting my license. I have failed the road test three times and I was two points away from passing on the last try. I will try again after Christmas.

Your wife might find driving overwhelming. Maybe she feels like she doesn't have the coordination to do it. What is it about driving that terrifies her?

Pretty much everything, like to much going on, very afraid of hitting someone or something, like sensory overload. My main problem with learning to drive was I had to stop being hyperfocused on what was directly in front of the car, but this is way beyond that. Like being on the road could cause a meltdown.

It's better if your wife gets a professional instructor, rather than you teaching her.

I didn't get my license until I was 37. I'm 56 now, and I'm a pretty good driver now.

You might try a game like Gran Turismo.
It's got pretty good physics, and you don't have to worry about hitting anything.

If I relied on my skill in video games with driving as a prominent feature, I would never have learned to drive. I always totally sucked in those games.

That's the only one I've ever been good at. It's actually a driving simulator, so the cars move pretty accurately. Still not the real thing, and won't replace time on the road, but I think there's a lot that can be learned from it in a totally safe environment.
But I've always been pretty obsessed with driving, and for a while with driving really fast.

I read a story about a kid who won a tournament playing that game, so they put him in a racecar and he made it onto the podium.

I'd go for a real gradual approach. How about a riding lawn mower, just to get used to driving anything? You can stand on the back to co-pilot. I knew a woman who was well into her 40s before getting her license. She practised driving up and down a long rural driveway, and her husband asked her to drive around the potholes. She was genuinely puzzled, lacking spatial awareness. Her parents had never let her run around as a little girl, so whole zones of basics were pretty dead.

I was lucky to have had to get around by bicycle for basic traffic sense, and then drive farm equipment to get used to machines. I was also mad keen on cars. However, for a long time, I might easily have gotten in an accident rather than cross the white line. I kept in my lane by lining up with features on the car hood, not by thinking of myself as a large body, looking for passageway as I do now.

I grew up in the US before moving to the UK, so I did have a US licence when I was living over there. My dad started me out very gradually to get me used to the idea. I started on the bumper cars at the local amusement park - it's not quite the same, but it got me used to the idea of using the wheel to steer the car and the pedals to control the car. When I was able to make it around the bumper cars without panicking then he let me drive the riding lawn mower around the garden and down the drive and back with him either seated on it next to me or running along side so he could reach the controls. Once I could show that I was able to not hit things with that and could do some basic manoeuvres, then he moved to the actual car. We would start off in an abandoned parking lot that was completely clear of cars and I would practice getting the car to do some basic things like go around in a circle and move forward and backwards.

Something that was also helpful was whenever he took me anywhere and he would drive, he would ask me to keep a running commentary on what is on the road ahead. This really helped with the recognition of hazards in the road and made me focus on my surroundings as well as what is just ahead of me. I was encouraged to think about not only what I saw but why the cars were moving in the way that they were. The car ahead was braking going around a corner on a flat surface - maybe there was a queue of traffic ahead that we couldn't see?

The last step was to be able to do that while driving on the road myself. It took me a while to get there, but I'm certainly a much better driver for it and passed my test with no issues when I eventually took it.

I would also recommend a professional driving instructor - preferably one who has experience with teaching people with autism if you can find one. It will be less stressful for the both of you.

Do you find driving in the urban UK much different than driving in the US?

There is no "US standard." To get through Omaha at rush hour, I just drove faster than average, so I could ignore the mirrors as I watched for signs. In SoCal, things are so frantic that when I went down with a friend, I wouldn't let him drive his own car for a month, and he did not complain.

I drive in Manhattan. My wife refuses to let me drive in the UK.

Manhattan is easy, as cities go. Big but slow. You might have trouble staying on the left in the UK - reflexes are powerful - and you'd have to learn roundabout etiquette.

It's about the same really, but the difference is the rules of the road in the UK. Once you know those, it gets easier. I do still find it stressful when they don't have clear road markings or signs that tell me what lane I need to be in or clearly marked street names. But other than that, it's about the same.

However, I refuse to drive in London. The stress is just not worth it & parking is a nightmare. I much prefer public transport when I'm in London.

Chicago is the same as London then.

She has made it clear to me that she cant handle this, which is OK since I take her to work at the hospital on my way to the lab. I would just like her to learn in case she needs it for an emergency though.