About Us

Improving young driver safety requires a new vision and a new understanding of how attitude and emotion affects young drivers.  The basis of Motorvate Young Drivers is that by promoting improved communication, and by understanding young driver emotion and psychology, we can improve the way young drivers – all drivers! – think and view the driving task.

The key to how this works is recognising that most driver training – in fact, most of anything to do with young drivers – operates under the illusion that young drivers will be happy to be told that their driving needs improvement and will do whatever is necessary to be better drivers.

This is false – the majority of young drivers already think they are good drivers and don’t really want to know how to be 'better'. Even – perhaps especially – if they don’t tell their parents, teachers and the authorities that they feel this way. For that reason, most of what happens in the field of young driver safety is largely ineffective.

With more than 20 years experience working with young drivers, Jennie Hill and Geoff Fickling, through the Motorvate and Blood, Sweat & Gears books and courses and in conjunction with KIA Australia, have developed strategies to recognise this phenomenon, explain why it happens, and give innovative answers to parents, teachers, young drivers and authorities on how to change the fact that the most common cause of death of anyone under 34 years of age is in a road crash.

Safer cars and roads, and tougher legislation, are not reducing young driver road tolls. It’s well known that young drivers are much more unsafe than older drivers (up to four times more likely to crash in their first years of driving). This is proof that young drivers aren’t listening, much, yet most funding and attention continues to focus on safer cars and roads. There's nothing wrong with that, but driver training that centres on understanding your own and others' attitudes is far more effective - and way less expensive!

Motorvate Young Drivers contends that we must use methods by which young drivers are positively influenced or motivated to want to drive more safely - which is where the word Motorvation comes from!