The Comfort Zone is a combination of speed – steering and/or braking where the vehicle reacts as the driver expects it to. The Red Zone is a combination of speed – steering and/or braking that creates big changes in the way the vehicle responds, changes that are not expected, and create anxiety. The Red Zone is not a place a driver would go to on purpose, it is a place visited only when bad things are happening. Whether driving to the mall, driving the boss to work or driving in a high risk environment most driving is done in the comfort zone.

It is the transition from Comfort to Red that creates a training challenge. In an emergency a driver will be required to quickly transition from their Comfort Zone, into the Red Zone. Research papers produced by the Society of Automotive Engineers (SAE) have been studying this transition from the comfort to the red zone for decades. All data indicates that going from the Comfort Zone to the Red Zone, happens with an increase of a fraction of an inch on the steering wheel, and/or an increases of speed as little as 2 MPH.

To complicate the issue research has shown that the driver gets into the Red Zone way before the vehicle does. The driver will feel uncomfortable (the researchers way of saying scared) way before the vehicle is anywhere near its limit. Look at it as the vehicle has a limit and the driver has a limit. The drivers limit is much lower than the vehicles limit. In fact data shows that the driver limit is as much as 50% lower than the vehicles, which means when the driver thinks and feels like they are in the Red Zone they actually have 50% more of the vehicle they can use before they are actually in the Red Zone.

Basically the driver is uncomfortable with a combination of speed – steering and/or braking that are below the amount of speed – steering and/or braking the vehicle can take.  One of the many unique skills of our instructors that in any driving scenario they know what combination of speed/steering or speed /braking that the driver will go from comfort to red.

In our opinion this transition from the Comfort to the Red Zone is the essence of driver training. One of the goals of a driver training program is to raise the amount of steering and speed the driver is comfortable with. Common sense dictates that a driver has to be trained to recognize and manage this transition.