One instructor, one car, since 2007.
Rams Driving Academy has never been a franchise or a fleet. It has been the same person teaching in the same way for the better part of two decades, in a city that has changed a good deal around it.
Starting in 2007
The academy opened in Adelaide in 2007. Baranikumar had already been teaching people to drive for years by then, and the decision to run it under his own name changed the paperwork rather than the method.
It has stayed deliberately small. One instructor means the person who assesses you on the first lesson is the person sitting beside you on test day, and that nothing gets lost being handed between people. It also means availability is finite, which is the honest trade-off.
What changed, and what did not
Plenty has changed since 2007. South Australia introduced the competency based logbook pathway alongside the single practical test, so learners now choose between two routes to the same licence. Speed rules around stopped emergency vehicles have tightened. Phone detection cameras arrived. School zone enforcement got serious.
What has not changed is the shape of a lesson. One person, one car, going at the pace of whoever is driving. That was the method in 2007 and it is still the method, because it is the only one that works for someone who is genuinely frightened of the thing they are sitting in.
The step sheets
The most useful thing to come out of all those lessons is the least glamorous. Over the years the explanations that actually worked got written down, refined, and eventually typeset into printed sheets: one per manoeuvre, in order, with the reference points that make each one repeatable rather than lucky.
Students get them on paper so they can revise between lessons. All 11 of them are now published here as the manoeuvre guides, free to read whether or not you ever book a lesson. Several of the diagrams in them are the original hand drawn ones, redrawn but not improved upon.
Who comes through
The mix has shifted over the years. A large share of students now hold an overseas licence and are converting it to a South Australian one, often under time pressure from a job. Others are learners doing it the ordinary way, and a steady number are licensed drivers who lost their confidence somewhere and want it back.
Lessons are taught in English, Tamil and Hindi, which is part of why that mix looks the way it does. You can read what those students wrote afterwards on the reviews page.
Still the same phone number.
One message, seven days a week. Tell us where you are up to and we will take it from there.