cross a flooded parking lot, a BMW 3 Series sedan engine purrs to life. The car accelerates, pressing its tires through the puddles that mimic the edgy feel of driving through a real soaker, when a hard brake or errant flick of the steering wheel can turn traction to hydroplane in a split second. The driver hits the brakes on the wet pavement, letting fly a rooster tail of spray and launching into a skid — but maneuvering safely to a controlled stop.

The driver’s door opens and out steps … a 17-year-old, adrenaline-stoked grin spreading ear to ear, who bounds across the pavement toward a band of nervous parents: “Mom! Did you see that? That was amazing!”

Welcome to Driver’s Edge: a behind-the-wheel driving instruction program that gives our nation’s least seasoned drivers — those ages 15 to 21 — safe and controlled exposure to scary, real-world driving situations. It’s an opportunity that can, quite simply, save lives. According to the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, motor vehicle crashes are the leading cause of death for 15- to 20-year-olds.

This statistic is one that Jeff Payne, Driver’s Edge founder and CEO, is passionate about changing. But his efforts would likely be limited to the program’s Las Vegas hometown if not for a strategic alignment between Payne’s organization and Bridgestone Firestone North American Tire LLC, an operating division of Bridgestone Corp., the world’s largest tire manufacturer. The alliance gives Payne a national platform for his life-saving educational program and helps Bridgestone achieve its significant community-development objectives, all while leveraging the infrastructure — and operating costs — of Bridgestone’s own behind-the-wheel dealer-training program, Drive and Learn.

Over the course of every year, Bridgestone brings its Drive and Learn tour to about 15 cities nationwide. Following two days of dealer education, the Drive and Learn team leaves the setup intact, and turns the entire road-show complex, from tractor trailers to tents to vehicles prepped for behind-the-wheel learning, over to Payne — at no cost to him — for another two days of young-driver training through Payne’s nonprofit Driver’s Edge program.

Heading into the fifth year of the partnership, it’s become clear to Bridgestone that this is one carpool that works.

Shared Passion

A professional auto-racer since the age of 17, Payne has an empathetic soft spot for overconfident — and underconfident — young drivers. He turned this understanding into action by founding Driver’s Edge in 2002. “It was born out of my frustration that everyone is so quick to point fingers at young drivers,” Payne says. “We say ‘they’re reckless, they’re out of control, they think they’re invincible.’ But how do we expect them to know they’re not invincible when we haven’t given them the proper tools? We don’t teach kids how to drive. We teach them how to pass a test. It’s like saying we have a lot of teens drowning in swimming pools so let’s put up more fences around pools rather than teach them how to swim.”

Payne launched the free Driver’s Edge program in response, debuting the first driving safety, emergency-avoidance, and response-techniques sessions in Las Vegas to great community acclaim and parental gratitude. Convinced he had a worthy initiative underway, he approached Bridgestone for support. Payne, who had been a driving instructor for Bridgestone’s Drive and Learn dealer-training program, thought the company might consider an in-kind tire donation for his program’s cars.

Bridgestone executive, Dave Gardner, then manager of product marketing, came to Las Vegas to observe the program in action, and immediately saw an opportunity to do something much bigger than hand over a few tires. “Dave walked around, talked to parents and teens, took a million pictures, and said right away that we needed to take this program on the road,” Payne recalls. “We had a follow-up meeting during the SEMA Show (an automotive specialty trade show) here in Las Vegas, and all of a sudden we were off.” Bridgestone’s offer: We’ll bring the trucks, cars, and infrastructure; you just teach the kids.

Susan Sizemore, senior public relations manager at Bridgestone Americas Holding Inc., was part of those initial conversations about the partnership. “As a company, we were impassioned to make a difference,” she says. “We’re all on the roads together. Many of us had kids that were soon to be teens. And Jeff is so passionate and focused — when you hear him talk about the program, his whole focus is to save lives. We wanted to help him bring that to more people.”

A Perfect Partner

The consumer-side event program is a logical extension for Bridgestone, which always has been viewed as a dealer-education leader in the automotive business. It offers ongoing seminars to its dealer base on everything from business management to basic retail skills such as customer consultation and management.

But its business, every day, is tires. And putting its rubber on as many roads as possible requires a committed and knowledgeable dealer network. To keep that dealer network — from the dealership owners to retail counter staff — up to date on its technical and design innovations, Bridgestone launched the Drive and Learn road-show training program for it’s dealership owners and employees in the mid 1990s.

Each Bridgestone Drive and Learn event puts Bridgestone dealership owners and employees in the driver’s seat to get a firsthand feel for Bridgestone tires relative to competitor’s products under various real-world driving conditions. “Many of our print materials can teach retailers about our product technologies, but it’s hard to put something real behind it until you actually experience the technology from behind the wheel,” says Mark Johnson, manager of product marketing at Bridgestone who also manages the company’s Drive and Learn events. “Dealers come away from the event with a lot of practical knowledge about the advances we’re making, and how to make the right recommendation to a customer based on the way that customer drives.”

Known in its early years as Ride and Drive, the road-show dealer-training program has evolved from a basic test-drive opportunity into a comprehensive and energizing experience for dealer staff. “Early on, we’d simply fly in, rent some cars, go to a local dealership and set up some small tents, then change the tires on the cars and let the employees take a quick test drive,” Johnson says. “Now it’s a much bigger production.”

That bigger production now includes two proprietary tractor-trailers which carry all equipment including tents, seating, two 50-inch plasma monitors, and eight vehicles to each of the 15 to 16 stops on the annual tour schedule. The company’s road-show logistics partner, Milwaukee-based Real Time Logistics LLC, manages the full Drive and Learn logistics, from driving the trailers to on-site setup to assigning eight driving instructors to the events.

It is this infrastructure — trailers, tents, cars, and plasma screens — that Bridgestone makes available to Driver’s Edge in nearly every market in which it stops each year. But while the two experiences share infrastructure, they differ markedly in objective. “Jeff is focused on teaching driving skills to young drivers,” Johnson explains. “Our Drive and Learn events focus on relating our technologies and what the tires are capable of to the driving experience.”

Drive and Learn: Tire Tutorials

Each two-day Bridgestone Drive and Learn event stop is split into a series of four, four-hour sessions that put Bridgestone employees in the classroom and behind the wheel to pump up their knowledge of Bridgestone tire technology. Each session, held in a large parking lot, averages 40 attendees.

The program opens with a classroom session, in which attendees view presentations about Bridgestone products, and hear how they’ll be experiencing that tire technology firsthand throughout the multi-session event.

Following the classroom sessions, attendees hit the pavement in two driving activities. In one event, attendees twist and turn through a tight driving course to gauge how the tires hold under conditions with a lot of steering input. For the second driving event, a fire truck floods the pavement so the Bridgestone staff can feel how the tires perform in a potential skid situation.

In both driving modules, participants cover the same course in the same car at least twice: once on Bridgestone tires, and once on a comparable product from a competing manufacturer. “In a lot of cases, attendees don’t anticipate seeing the differences,” Johnson says. “A lot of the comments from attendee forms after the event reflect that they were surprised that there was so much difference between the tires. The important thing is they’ve had a chance to determine for themselves what those differences are.” Payne, a former Drive and Learn instructor, echoes, “Now they can go back to the showroom with confidence and say, ‘I drove this tire myself and this is what it feels like in these conditions.’”

Each session concludes with a high-energy LeMans Competition that pits relay teams of employees in a timed driving event that measures speed and accuracy. Drivers maneuver a marked course as quickly and accurately as possible, avoiding any cone-crunching incidents. “People really get into it,” Johnson says. “Once the competition starts, they bond.” Payne agrees: “I was at a Drive and Learn day outside of Minneapolis at a sports campus with a bunch of soccer fields and a huge parking lot,” he says. “You could hear those teams screaming and cheering for each other from several soccer fields away. It’s great teambuilding, and they can go back to the showroom and keep talking about how much fun it was.”

Each participant receives a pocket-sized Drive and Learn Participant Guide, which offers a brief company overview, a Drive and Learn agenda, product spec sheets, a product and industry glossary, and an annual racing schedule for nine motor-sports organizations from IndyCar to SuperCross — a nod to the fact that many Bridgestone dealership employees are serious motor-sports enthusiasts.

For automotive enthusiasts of all ages, the chance to push someone else’s high-performance car through tight twists and turns while a professional driver — many of whom Drive and Learn participants recognize from televised racing events — rides shotgun, is a high-value and memorable experience. “Attending Drive and Learn is absolutely used as a reward for dealer staff,” Johnson says. “We see and hear time and time again that the program really creates a lot of enthusiasm that they take back to their stores, along with the knowledge to help customers know more about the choices.” The knowledge not only helps the retail staff better explain Bridgestone’s product choices, it helps them better match those choices to each customer’s preferred driving style. The consultative selling skills are a subtle — but important — byproduct of the firsthand Drive and Learn experience. “It helps them to appreciate the differences between categories of tires, such as performance and touring, as well as the brands,” Johnson says. “If a vehicle is a candidate for both types, now the salesperson can gauge the driver’s style and preference for ride and handling and make a firsthand recommendation.”

Driver’s Edge: Finding the Limits

After the two-day Drive and Learn session, the site setup is handed over to Payne’s team for the Driver’s Edge course. Bridgestone signage stays in place and all vehicles are re-equipped with Bridgestone tires after the comparative tests during the professional Drive and Learn event. The company has no overt involvement with Driver’s Edge on-site activities. Any connection is purely visual on the part of attendees.

Payne and company take their young drivers through two more days of driving instruction, with two sessions per day. Up to 85 young drivers, along with their parents, attend each four-module session.

Like Drive and Learn, two of the Driver’s Edge modules feature practical, non-driving instruction and occur before the teenage drivers get behind the wheel. One module, typically given by local law-enforcement representatives, adds sobering elements, such as demonstrating “jaws of life” accident extrication or asking the teens to don “Fatal Vision Goggles” that replicate the effects of alcohol impairment. To ratchet up the realism, officers either ask the teens to complete a short driving maneuver in a golf cart, or to attempt to pass a field sobriety test while wearing the goggles. The second non-driving module is built on Firestone Complete Auto Care’s Car Care Academy program, and introduces the young drivers to essential automotive-maintenance tasks.

Like their dealership counterparts, the teens are eager to get behind the wheel of the real cars — particularly when they see BMWs parked on the pavement. But in this case, they’re not comparing and contrasting tire performance. Instead, they’re focused on that fine line where control cedes to chaos as they find the limits of a car and of their own abilities to respond appropriately in an emergency-driving situation.

It’s an opportunity that both unnerves and relieves parents, Bridgestone’s Sizemore says. “As a parent, I would never take my son out and let him push a vehicle to the limits that they can in the program,” she says. “But for them to be able to do this in a safe setting in such well-engineered vehicles is a tremendous learning opportunity.” Sizemore’s son, along with many children of Bridgestone employees — including those of CEO Mark Emkes — have taken part in the program over the years.

In the first behind-the-wheel module, the novice drivers practice panic braking and evasive lane-change skills. The exercise demonstrates the difference in feel between antilock brakes and non-ABS vehicles in a hard-braking situation, while debunking a common performance misconception about what ABS-equipped cars can do. “We ask kids on our pre- and post-test about the benefits of ABS brakes,” Payne says. “They don’t stop you faster or do anything magical. They simply prevent tires from locking up so you can still steer.” Feeling the ABS rattle firsthand in this controlled environment helps kids stay calm and in control should ABS kick in during a real-world driving situation.

Next, the young drivers hit the skids just like the Bridgestone dealership employees. In this case, Payne and the team of professional drivers coach the teens about what to do if a vehicle loses traction and goes into a skid. “Most are only taught to turn into the skid,” Payne says. “But what happens next? Now they know to use their eyes as a guide to where they want to go. And I’d much rather have the first time a teen goes into a skid be in a parking lot with an instructor than on a highway off ramp.”

Properly Inflated Sales, Safer Streets

To date, the two-fer road show has brought significant results both for Bridgestone’s business and for the communities in which it does business. Johnson says that secondary reports from dealerships point to stronger sales of Bridgestone tires immediately following a Drive and Learn event because of the knowledge and enthusiasm the employees bring back to the dealerships after their firsthand driving experience.

The company, while saying that sales are not a primary objective of its Driver’s Edge sponsorship, does acknowledge a localized halo effect from its visual presence at the event. “We don’t push any literature on parents, and Jeff’s program speaks in general terms about taking care of whatever tires you have on your vehicle,” Sizemore says. “But we do have parents approach us and say that the very fact that we have taken an interest in the program has influenced their buying decision. They are pleased to know that Bridgestone has taken an interest in their community and their kids’ safety.”

For Payne’s Drive and Learn program, Bridgestone’s support is essential to its reach and success. The company’s in-kind infrastructure support ensures a national presence for Payne’s teaching, while allowing him to keep the program free to any interested young driver. “When I was 17, I saved up all my money and went to professional driving school,” Payne says. “Many families can’t afford that kind of focused behind-the-wheel training. We’re trying to make a difference, and there is no reason the program should be available only to those with means.”

Most important, Driver’s Edge benefits every single one of us, every day, by delivering safer and smarter kids to our streets and highways. The University of Nevada Las Vegas conducts follow-up surveys of Driver’s Edge participants at 12- and 24-month intervals. According to one such survey of 2,000 students, 100 percent said Driver’s Edge made them a safer and more aware driver, and 82 percent said skills learned at Driver’s Edge helped them avoid a potential collision.

Of students who had a police-reported collision since attending the class, 71 percent said skills learned at Driver’s Edge helped lessen the collision’s severity. And in a follow-up study of 1,000 16- to 18-year-old Driver’s Edge alums against a control group of 1,000 non-students, those who had attended the program reported 53 percent fewer collisions than those who had not attended.

Bridgestone, committed to continuing its own Drive and Learn events, recently signed on for another three years as the primary sponsor for the national Driver’s Edge tour. “The partnership with Bridgestone is what took us to the next level,” Payne says. “I don’t know where the program would be if we didn’t have their support. It definitely wouldn’t be at the level it is now. Would we have a national tour? I’d like to say yes, but I just don’t know.”

That partnership, says Johnson, is what matters most to Bridgestone. “It’s really something we’ve been proud to bring to market,” he says. “It’s so good to feel like a leader in education. We take tremendous pride in how the program has developed over the years.” e