I have actually given some version of this lecture to each of my children, including my now-14-year-old. I guess the moral is, be glad you're not my child.

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I love driving. I think it's freeing, and it's incredibly useful. I want you to drive. But I want you to drive ONLY when you've shown me you can drive without putting yourself or others at risk.

A car is a weapon, one that kills over 100 people every day in our country. I have seen people die in automobile accidents. I have been in automobile accidents. You don't want to be part of that.

I know you think I'm overreacting to your running a stop sign. You think it's no big deal. You're wrong. It's a huge deal. Can you imagine a new pilot who says, "Overrunning the runway is no big deal"? Blowing through a stop sign is something that you can never do. Never. As in, not one time. You have to be 100% reliable in stopping at stop signs. 99.9% is not good enough.

Let's say you drive every day, and every day you encounter three stop signs, and you're 99.9% reliable at stopping at a stop sign. Three stop signs per day is unrealistically low, but let's go with that. That means that, on average, you will blow through a stop sign about once a year. If you stand one chance in ten of hitting someone by running a stop sign, then on average you will hit someone every ten years. That's expensive. It's also dangerous. If only one accident in three results in an injury, then you are likely to injure two people during your driving lifetime just from running stop signs. If one accident in ten results in the death of another motorist or pedestrian, then you stand a substantial chance of killing someone by running a stop sign.

You DO NOT want that on your head for the rest of your life. Your uncle hit someone on a bicycle once. It was purely an accident, but it was his fault. The bicyclist survived, but was permanently injured. I bet your uncle thinks about that every day. He would pay any amount if he could undo that. But he can't. We just got your grandma's driver's license revoked because she's not competent to drive. She realizes that. Better not to drive at all than to hurt or kill someone in an accident that you caused.

Driving really is great, and I want you to drive. But you have to be a careful driver. You have to leave all your aggressiveness behind when you get behind the wheel. I'm no perfect driver, and I have done stupid things I'm not proud of. But I expect you to be a better driver than I was. I want you to be a better driver when you're my age than I am now. The way you drive when you first start out sets the pattern for the rest of your life. I want your first pattern to be that of a careful, patient driver.