You may already have heard the story about the woman from London who has sat her driving test an incredible 110 times without passing.
The unnamed 28-year-old from Southwark, south-east London, has apparently spent £3410 sitting her driving theory test – yup, she has yet to even attempt the practical – and still she hasn’t quite secured a pass.
Which does tend to make you think that maybe, just maybe, she should give up on her cause now and spend her money on something more appropriate. On a more affordable form of transport, for instance, such as a chauffeur-driven limousine. Or, I dunno, a helicopter.
However, as the late Frankie Howerd once said, titter ye not. This morning I did something approximating a very slight amount of research about the UK driving test, and the average first-time pass rate for the theory test is a fairly dismal 65 per cent. According to the percentages button on my electronic calculator, that means 35 per cent of us are little better than our unnamed lady friend from Southwark.
Worse still, the average first-time pass rate for the driving test as a whole in the UK is just under 50 per cent, which means over half of us fail the test at our first attempt. Which, all things considered, is fairly pathetic, given how relatively simple our test is compared with the one they have in, say, Germany.
But what I want to know is this: is the average Autocar reader better or worse than the national average person when it comes to passing the driving test? How many of you passed first time, for instance? And if you didn’t, how many times did it take you to pass? And how much money, approximately, did you spend on driving lessons before you passed?
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RPrior: "Now I have an
RPrior: "Now I have an accident free driving record, after over 3 million miles, 50 years and 24 cars later."
So you've averaged 60k miles per year for half-a-century? Crikey!
Five times a 50-something-percenter
Passed in 2007 or 8, after a year's worth of two-hour weekly lessons (or was it fortnightly? I don't know how you folks are remembering minutiae from the 1960s).
Theory - passed first time by a comfortable margin.
Practical - passed FIFTH time. Yes. The test does seem to vary by region - my girlfriend took the test a couple of years later and only had to drive around deserted backroads and perform one or two maneuvres, all of mine were in bustling town and city centres with an exhaustive workthrough of maneuvre repertoire.
It worked out though, I didn't stand a chance until driving had become so effortless and second-nature for me that I didn't even have to think about it, and had experienced just about everything the road could throw at me. I ended up being released into the wild as a much better driver than I would have been if I'd passed first time.
Driving Test attempts
110 attempts to pass even the theory test is just silly. There really ought to be a limit on the number of times that one is allowed to take either the theory test or the practical test - I would have thought, off the top of my head, having done no research at all, that maybe a figure of six goes at passing the theory test and four of the practical, would weed out all those who are obviously either mentally or physically incapable of passing. If someone has to take more than 100 goes at passing, that must reflect badly on their ability to cope with all sorts of situations that are encountered whilst driving a car on a daily basis.
I passed my test on the first attempt in 1970, four months after my 17th birthday, when there was no theory test. I'm not sure that it is necessarily a good thing to pass first time as it can make one a bit too cocky about one's abilities.
I had learned the practicalities of actually driving a car some years before on private property and by moving family cars around the driveway at home, but my first solo drive on the public highway was still a bit scary; it took a few trips to get used to how quickly other vehicles move around one and so on but I still enjoy driving despite the sometimes ridiculous amount of traffic on the roads these days.