DD has turned 17, and I assumed it would be high on her list of priorities to learn to drive. We have a small car that she is insured on and could drive whenever she needed it, and have paid for driving lessons for her. She had a few practice sessions with DH, and I don’t know exactly what went on but she will now not drive with DH in the car, and won’t have a go with me either. She tells me her weekly lessons are progressing well, but not so well that she feels she wants to drive our little car anywhere with me in the passenger seat.
We live rurally, and there is no public transport within 2 miles of us. This was not the case when we moved here, but the local council decided that posh village folk did not need buses 🙄 and cancelled all the services some years ago, despite this being a thing we looked for when moving to our current home. We cannot let the children grow up isolated from their friends and social lives, so we have always given them lifts anywhere they need to get to, without question, but DD thinks it is not unreasonable for this to continue and that she can call us to collect her at any time of day or night with very little notice. She is undiagnosed ND, probably ASD, and this leads her to be both very abrupt in her requests for lifts, and also anxious about learning to drive when there are other cars on the road. It’s wearing me out a bit.
How do I persuade her to move forwards with this? The car is there for her, but she doesn’t like changing gear - is it a ridiculous suggestion to just take the car to a dealership and swap it for an automatic, and learn and do the test in that? I would just like to be able to get to the end of the day without having spent 2 hours driving her around when there is the means for her to do that herself if she applied herself to it. The trains were not running last week, and instead of driving her to the train station a few minutes away, I had to drive her to and from school, in my week off, and it took literally hours each day.