This article was prepared by Petra Bagust for AMI and is being published by the New Zealand Herald as advertorial.
Like it is for many young people coming of age, getting my driver’s licence as a teenager, opened up the road to freedom and independence – though becoming a fully licensed driver had its share of potholes.
I still vividly remember meeting my match at one particular roundabout, where my ability to stall reached a zenith. After four or five failed attempts to move forward, I put the handbrake on in the middle of the road, got out of the driver’s seat, walked around to the other side of the car and made my father drive me home.
Eventually I did master driving stick, and it’s been a gift for my husband and I to teach all our children how to drive a manual in the last few years. Our two eldest are on their full licences, and our youngest is on his restricted and counting down the days until he’s on his full.
It’s given them the same sense of agency and freedom I remember feeling when I got my licence at 18.
I have to say though, it’s a different experience as a parent. After years of ferrying everyone everywhere, there’s that moment you watch them drive away for the first time by themselves. There’s a sense of pride, of course there is – but the exposure also hit me, because I realised I would be totally helpless if anything was to go wrong.
Watching the people I love most in the world drive away and having to trust they make it home again was a transitional moment for me.
I see in my eldest son that sense of invincibility many freshly minted drivers have (‘I can go anywhere, do anything, any time I want!‘) which only exists because you haven’t yet experienced all the ways your car can fail you. You haven’t popped a tyre on a quiet country road hours from home or had to approach strangers for a jump-start during a road trip.
All this was brought home recently when my daughter and her boyfriend decided to make the ambitious drive from Dunedin, where she was studying, all the way back to our home in Auckland. It takes around 20 hours of driving and requires travel through some of Aotearoa’s most majestic but challenging landscapes – mountains, a desert, an ocean!
I was excited for them, but when my daughter told me “I don’t know if the car will make it home, it’s been playing up recently”, I couldn’t stop thinking about how vulnerable they were. Two young adults with not a tonne of driving experience between them, putting all their faith in a 1996 Toyota Carib.
It was one of those parenting moments where you go, what do you do? They’ve got time commitments they need to be back for, holiday jobs and a ferry crossing that hinge on them getting where they need to be at the right time. All we could do is cross our fingers and hope.
We’re grateful they did make it and everything went as well as it could. But it made us sit up and think, when we aren’t able to help our children, who is?
Thankfully, we have found a solution to this dilemma in the form of AMI Roadside Rescue. It’s a great service that gives drivers (and their parents!) the peace of mind that when they set out to explore this beautiful country, someone has their back if they break down, get a flat tyre or battery, run out of fuel, or need a minor roadside repair.
What I’m most excited about is AMI has decided to provide this service for free for the first 12 months for all new restricted or full licence holders, regardless of if they are insured with AMI or not – at no cost, and with no hooks. Such good news for my kids who are trying their best to stick to their modest student budgets!
With AMI Roadside Rescue you also get unlimited callouts from day one, and coverage for you and any car you drive, as well as anyone driving your car – they’re the only roadside service to offer those benefits.
And as the parent of adult children – one of who now lives in a different city to me and another who travels regularly to see her out-of-town boyfriend – I love that the service is available to them throughout the country, 24 hours a day. What a game changer.
So, while I’ll continue to wish I could be there to help out when things go awry, I won’t have to worry when I watch my kids drive away on any adventure. And as they continue to learn the hard-won lessons of the road – like we all did – I can take comfort in knowing they have a safety net.
As our youngest is on his restricted licence, I’ll be signing him up for his free year of AMI Roadside Rescue right away. Next stop, full licence!