What a scenario. You’re sitting in the tiny backseat of a Ford Mustang that is wildly out of control. Slick pavement underneath, the car’s tail slides around, and you’re now skidding backward, utterly unable to affect the final destination. Dread is the prominent emotion.

Thankfully, the incident was provoked by a driving instructor on the grounds of Ford Motor Company’s vehicle test center in Romeo, Michigan, a rural community about an hour north of Detroit. Appropriately for this exercise, we were on what engineers call a skid pad, one of many specific driving areas on this expansive 4000-acre vehicle testing facility. The aforementioned driver was coached into the skid by our driving coach, and after another four or five tries, she began to get the hang of provoking a slide and then controlling it.

Welcome to Driving Skills for Life, a free program sponsored by the Ford Motor Company Fund, a charitable arm of Ford Motor Company. The program’s goal is to teach high-performance-driving skills to some 700 teens, not their parents.

Is the training effective? The answers we got from the teens were overwhelmingly positive. “I didn’t know it really took that long to stop a car,” said one of the participants in a typical response. The teens were excited to be able to drive aggressively in evasive maneuvers. Most also admitted that their parents had not provided them with safe opportunities to test a car’s limits or any kind of practice in making evasive maneuvers. The obvious benefits provided by Driving Skills for Life were not lost on the young drivers.

Instruction focuses on four areas: hazard recognition, speed management, vehicle handling and managing the space around the vehicle, plus a classroom training session. While the program ran approximately eight hours, students spend only minutes behind the steering wheel. The pure logistics of moving 300 people through the prescribed exercises severely limits the hands-on time.

“We realize that we can’t completely transform drivers in a day,” says Jon Adkins of the Governors Highway Safety Association of Michigan, another important partner in the program. “But we hope it will raise the awareness about teen driving safety, and of the program.”

We asked the program’s instructors whether they felt the program was effective. The consensus was that if students are willing to learn, they will take away valuable information. They also admitted that one day of training that nets a student less than 20 minutes of behind-the-wheel time can only improve skills so much. In order for teens to make significant gains, more time in the driver seat is needed, and ideally, the time should be spread out over several days or longer.

What Driving Skills for Life may change is the awareness levels of teens and parents. Instructors at the event encouraged parents to take a greater role in actively teaching their teens about driving more safely.

Don’t turn the keys of your Ford over to the teen until you’ve taken the time to make sure they are capable behind the wheel, in all kinds of driving situations.