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It was a well-known fact that Tali’Zorah vas Neema was the worst driver in all of Migrant Fleet. In fairness, it wouldn’t be all that statistically improbable, considering just how many drivers there were in the Flotilla, but this distinction was clearly well-deserved. Just how a quarian, whose species typically respected all sorts of equipment, and especially vehicles, as if their lives depended on it (which they did) came to drive exclusively in a straight line, was a mystery to most.
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It quickly became a well-known fact that the illustrious Commander Shepard was a terrible driver. Despite his entire elite-biotic-engineer-sniper-commando routine, he tended to refuse to turn unless absolutely necessary, and “absolutely necessary” meant, at least to him, at the very least a building, and most certainly not some puny cliff, regardless of the elevation change and its direction. The Mako was an amazingly sturdy vehicle, and Vakarian’s constant calibration of literally every one of its components (which, fortunately for all involved, included safety harnesses) ensured peak performance. The ground team’s opinions were split on whether the vehicle’s continued survival was a good thing - because if the damn thing finally broke, they could have a break from it, at least long enough to pick up a new one. It didn’t help matters any that the Normandy’s primary destination for the moment was Therum, which, if extranet was to be believed, sported literal rivers of lava. And so, during the endless “shakedown runs” in which Shepard experimented with various team combinations, he was increasingly, if quite politely, asked to let someone else take the wheel.
Ashley Williams was the first to fall victim to the “policy” of sorts that some of the crew members came up with. It was, as it turned out, somewhat important that Garrus Vakarian never complained about the Commander’s driving. It was chalked up to turians’ tendency to follow orders (they didn’t know this particular turian all that well yet), and so the granddaughter of the general who surrendered found herself in an APC with the First Human Spectre up in the turret and a turian cop driving. Big mistake. Where Shepard went straight regardless of obstacles and as such maintained something resembling a safe speed, Vakarian swerved madly around anything he could, somehow without slowing down, ever. The Mako didn’t have much in the way of inertial dampeners, especially not of the sort spacecraft used to maneuver at tens of Gs without flattening the organics inside, so all of the maneuvering was quite easily felt by the team. It didn’t seem to faze either of the two men, who continued to yell something vaguely-excited at each other over the frantic whirring of six motors, but Ashley was thanking God she decided to skip breakfast on a whim, which has never happened before.
She herself did not possess the certification the Systems Alliance deemed necessary to operate such a vehicle and, despite the Commander’s (whose own certification status the crew was in a blissful ignorance of) repeated offers, did not want to bend (or twist or cut or even break) the rules even, as the valiant Hero of Humanity put it, “just a tiny bit. It’s not like anyone’s gonna care .” Navigator Pressly choked on his coffee, just a tiny bit, but it’s not like anyone cared, except Shepard, who was always there for his subordinates, whether they needed an ancient suit of armor recovered (that was a story in itself) or a slap on the back, even if they were no-fun, dress-uniform-wearing old geezers.
Wrex was simply unable to fit in the driver’s seat under the sloped reinforced glass. Kaidan survived all of ten minutes of Shepard’s incessant backseat driving and direct orders to “just take us there instead of around every pebble on this icy shitball” before switching seats and almost not regretting it.
This left exactly one candidate, but there was just one small issue. Tali has not seen a real ground vehicle until ending up on board the classified stealth frigate, much less learned to drive one. Still it was not an issue for the Commander, who gladly offered to teach her, and the quarian, feeling the peer pressure as well as plain and simple curiosity, just as gladly accepted.
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“Alright, so,” Shepard began his instructional career, “there should be two pedals.”
“There are two pedals,” the quarian confirmed sheepishly.
“Damn right there are two pedals!,” a turian voice came from the turret, “I put them back there myself!”
“Shut up, Garrus. The right one is for going forward.”
“Right for forward,” Tali nodded, hoping not to break anything expensive - it sounded really easy to do.
“Try it,” the human encouraged. She did just that, and the Mako roared forward and to the right, coming to a halt against a convenient boulder, rattling the people inside.
“Okay,” he surveyed the driver and her pose, “maybe hold onto the wheel.”
“The wheel?,” the girl gasped lightly, to his great surprise. She popped open her harness and reached for the door handle.
“The steering wheel, Tali,” Shepard reached across and tapped the piece in question. “You turn it in the direction you want the car to turn.”
“Understood,” she nodded again.
“Now let’s learn to reverse. The other pedal makes you slow down or go back if you are stopped.” Quarians as a whole tended to be quick learners, and this one was particularly good.
“What’s next?,” she asked, ready to drink every drop of arcane vehicular knowledge.
“Now we go get the local pirates, Tali,” the Commander smiled. “Just look at the map, point us toward them, and off we go.”
“Just… go?,” she questioned, her squint visible through the tinted visor. “No steering?”
“Where we’re going, we don’t need roads!,” Shepard laughed, though neither of the aliens understood why. “Just go in a straight line and Vakarian will fix it later - yelp!”
Turns out, the Mako’s gunner can give the front passenger a swift kick, especially if the said gunner is a turian with reach above-average even for his species.