Problems with recall:
What you always have to remember is that training the recall ( and the STOP) never ends, for those who say there dog is trained to the recall ( and the STOP) your either a liar or delusional. Unless your dog has experienced every eventuality in life how can you ever say that something someday will have a stronger lure away from you than your authority to bring it back in the same instance. As an example, my dog has literally done a somersault when I gave the stop when he chased out a roe deer a yard in front of him ( his brain told him to stop, but nobody told his back legs!!) But I do not consider him trained on the stop as he took twenty yards to stop to a hare!
As others make up names for training techniques, and seem to make money out of it, I think I should start one myself ( I can but hope the cheques will follow!) This is the `Three ring principle' , when I had my own web site I did a cartoon that shows how this works, but I'll try to explain it.
Both you and the dog and a distraction have a ring some distance around you all. Your ring is that of control, the dogs ring is that of self interest and the ring around the distraction is that of temptation. When you have trained a dog to do something and it is succesful, it is because your ring of control and the dogs self interest are overlapping and the distraction ring is beyond the dogs interest ring or weakly overlapping. As the dog moves further away from you your control ring and the dogs self interest ring start to move apart, as the overlap of these rings becomes less so does the likelihood of the dog not responding to your training command. If the dogs ring then starts to overlap the distraction ring the lure becomes stronger, and there comes a point when the temptation exceeds your control and the dog breaks away.
The object of training is to constantly increase the size of your ring of control until it can cover both the dogs ring AND the ring of temptation, in this way no matter how close the dog gets to the distraction he will always obey your command.
In order to increase your ring of control you need to first realise how far around you it actually is, for some it is on the end of a lead, or dare I say it, less! and for a grouse hunting dog it could be 1/2 a mile or more with an experienced handler, and of course everything in between.
Your ring of control is where the dog obeys all its training without hesitation, the moment the dog wavers its on the edge of control. ( This is without any distractions) You should always train within your ring of control and once you are gaining success then and only then start to increase the distance between you and the dog. Remember as soon as you change the environment of your training, you must shorten the distance once again as the rings of distractions will be bigger and stronger.
Thus if your dog recalls in the home and garden, you must visualise those distances when out in the fields/parks and not exceed them until the dog is compliant. It is very important never to give a command unless you can enforce it, and this is where a stop becomes essential. ( A dog will always consider you stronger smarter and faster until you prove otherwise, so never chase your dog to catch it unless you can!) A simple exercise would be to sit the dog and walk the distance away and then call the dog to you and do this before letting your dog run free, thus the dog remains focused and has no distractions, this also means that not only does the dog get rewarded as you deem fit at the point of success, but more importantly in the dogs mind that compliance ultimately gets rewarded with a bit of free play afterwards. Of course non compliance can be quickly checked and free play can be withheld and training on the lead could be substituted. This method also allows for the use of a long line so the dog is not free to bog off if you have really over estimated your control!!
I can't help with the `lunging at cars' senario, as its a behavioural issue, and is one that you need to see first hand, and find the trigger to get the correct solution. I would add that of the dogs I've seen this in, both being collies and terrier breeds, those that were not sorted ended up under the wheels of a car!
Peter