There are two sides to every story so we'd like to respond to Soheyla K. First, we take safety very seriously at Courtesy Driving School. After all, we're in the business of safety and have been for 32 years. With a fleet of eight cars on the road at any given time, we want to make sure those cars are properly serviced and safe. We deal primarily with a AAA approved independent shop that understands how important the safe operations of our cars are. We expend approximately $25-30k per year to accomplish this. Every 6,000 miles the brakes and tires are inspected by the shop (outside of the daily checks by instructors) and if the instructor or student point out a problem the vehicle is shut down. If anything needs to be fixed or replaced it is done right away. With that said, you don't know that you're going to have complete brake failure until it happens to you.\r
When this particular incident occurred the car was towed immediately to the shop and was thoroughly inspected. We were told that there was nothing wrong with the brakes. But surely there had to be! If complete brake failure is rare then surely brake failure twice is incredibly rare. So we had the car towed to another shop to get a second opinion and they confirmed what our main shop said. Nonetheless, the brakes and master cylinder were replaced by the second shop. We then took the car out of the fleet and this car is now being used as my personal car and has been for months, without students and without incident. \r
When Soheyla's son was involved in the accident the protocol is to make sure everyone is okay and safe and then they must call a parent. Soheyla's son called his cousin instead. Regardless we should've called the parent. We did apologize to Soheyla several times. Then after she made several calls into our office, Soheyla came in approximately three weeks later to our school and asked if we would finish her son's driving time with conditions---including that we could not take him out on the freeway. She was told that we have to do freeway driving since that is part of the curriculum. This was unacceptable to her. Her response was that we should close the school and she left. Her son called about forty five minutes later and requested a transfer to another school. We then transferred the finished classroom phase and the partial driving instruction to the new school. The student has long since finished. \r
We regret what happened, we have taken steps to make sure it never happens again and we wish Soheyla's son well.
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