The Institute of Advanced Motorists
IAM Roadsmart used to be the Institute of Advanced Motorists. It promotes safer driving and advanced road skills.
A quick guide to the IAM (now IAM RoadSmart) — and a note that we're not them!
First things first: Driving Masters is not the Institute of Advanced Motorists. We get many calls from people who've ended up here looking for the IAM and trying to cancel their subscription or find their members card!
If that's you, you want iamroadsmart.com. If you're after one-to-one advanced driver coaching with us instead, get in touch — we'd love to hear from you.
Right, with that out of the way...
The Institute of Advanced Motorists has been around since 1956. It's a registered charity, and for most of its life it was known simply as "the IAM". A few years ago it rebranded to IAM RoadSmart, though plenty of people (us included, half the time) still call it the IAM out of habit. Same organisation, same mission: helping drivers and riders become safer and more capable after they've passed their L-test.
That mission matters. The standard UK driving test gets you legal, but it doesn't really get you good. The IAM exists in the gap between "licensed" and "genuinely skilled", and it's been quietly filling that gap for nearly seventy years.
What the IAM actually does
The headline product is the Advanced Test — a practical assessment of driving (or motorcycling) to a higher standard than the basic licence. The system behind it traces back to police pursuit driving, codified in Roadcraft, the police driver's handbook. If you've ever wondered where phrases like "system of car control" or "the limit point" come from, this is the lineage.
Around that core sit a range of courses: refreshers for drivers who haven't been on a structured course in years, assessments aimed at younger drivers, mature driver reviews, drink-drive rehabilitation, and a commercial arm that handles occupational driver risk for businesses with fleets.
The IAM also lobbies government on road safety policy and runs research — useful, often overlooked work that informs the wider conversation about how we keep people safe on UK roads.
How it's structured
There's a head office, and then there's a national network of local volunteer-run groups. The local groups are the engine room. They're where most people preparing for the Advanced Test get their training, typically with an "Observer", a volunteer who's themselves passed the test and gone on to qualify as a coach. You meet up, go for drives, get feedback, work towards your test. Once you pass, you become a full member of IAM RoadSmart, and many people then train up as Observers themselves and pay it forward.
It's a community model, and it works. The volunteer ethos is genuinely impressive.
What you get out of it
People come to advanced training for different reasons. Some want lower insurance premiums (a handful of insurers do offer a discount for advanced-test holders). Some have had a near miss and want to take driving more seriously. Some have just always wanted to drive properly and never had the chance to learn how.
What they all walk away with is similar: better observation, smoother control, more accurate anticipation, and a quieter sort of confidence behind the wheel. Driving stops being a series of reactions and starts being something you do deliberately. It also, for most people, becomes more enjoyable.
The IAM brands this as "Skills for Life", and that's a fair description. Once you've internalised the system, you carry it with you.
How Driving Masters fits in
We share the IAM's belief that advanced driving is one of the best investments any driver can make. Our instructors are Roadcraft-trained and many have IAM or police backgrounds. The difference is we run one-to-one coaching as a paid professional service rather than a charity-and-volunteer model, a different structure, but the same underlying craft.
If you'd like to know more about what advanced driving actually involves, or you'd like to book a course, have a look around the site. And if it's the IAM you want, we'll happily point you back to iamroadsmart.com.
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