National Driver Training Institute

About Institution

National Driver Training Institute was the brainchild of Founder and CEO Wayne Tully who, by the mid-1990s, had grown alarmed by the increasingly ugly statistics on teen driver fatalities.

Like most professionals in the industry, Wayne had long known that states could not afford to provide the kind of driver training in public schools that their own experts had advocated. And indeed, by this point, many states had pulled out of the drivers ed business altogether. But while ever more parents were now picking up the tab for the improved drivers ed programs offered by private companies, the expected downtick in teen crashes did not occur. Something new was going on, and Wayne Tully, with his extensive background in traffic safety and training, was the first to spot it and take action.

It wasn't just that state requirements weren't factoring in the increase in traffic and driver-distractions young drivers now face - although both are serious problems indeed. It was that states were not paying attention to the evolving psychological profile of the young drivers themselves. Our increasingly digitized lifestyle is training our young to be bold and adventurous on their first attempt at everything, confident that the petty little errors can be cleaned up later on: Spelling and grammar corrected, numbers recalculated, photos touched up and video clips reedited.

Exactness is now inconsequential to success. Rather, it is the willingness to bravely blunder forward that is the premier character trait determining a child's future. For almost two decades, parents and teachers alike have been hard at work nurturing this trait at the expense of others. Today's student driver really knows no other learning format, so we should not be surprised to find that they're basically programmed to "crash now, figure it out later".