This article in Racing + Waiting raises questions about the driving test. It seems the author has a thing about this (in his own words). He argues that the test should include motorway driving, skid pan training, and some sort of continuing assessment for new drivers.
The article is based on a survey by Ford and the DIA – so it’s basically a publicity thing by a large car manufacturer, and an organisation which would find fault with anything the DSA did just on principle. The survey says that around 70% of current drivers “doubt their own abilities if they were to be re-tested”,
Let’s just look at some facts.
To start with, Racing + Waiting has selected a tiny part of the actual survey – more detail is given here. And even more detail here on the AutoEvolution site. The issue of the driving test is far from being the main thrust of the survey.
Next, most accidents involving young (or new) drivers occur on rural and twisting roads, at night, and with a car full of mates. Motorway accidents come way down the list.
And skid pan training? The author cites localised flood alerts, snow last winter, grease on the roads, punctures, and so on as reason for introducing this. But we need to be realistic about what skid pan training really amounts to.
Unless your job pays for it, almost no one could afford proper skid pan training – at best they’d get 10 minutes of playing around (and that’s assuming that there are more than a handful in the country to start with). And even if they got a whole day on the damned thing, what on earth makes the author feel that a new (young) driver is any more likely to remember that training than the stuff they supposedly forget that puts them in that 70% of people who doubt their own abilities?
In all honesty, the fact that the article leads with a photo similar to the one above says a lot more about the problem than the author might imagine. Accidents happen because of the mismatch between the brains of chimpanzees and the bodies of men – the two don’t mix. A 17-year old who drools over pictures like this, and who wets himself when Top Gear comes on, is a loaded gun when out on the roads.
A couple of years ago I was tail-gated down a single track road by a pratmobile as it was getting dark. I pulled into a farm gateway to make a phonecall, and the driver sped off with a spin of wheels. I heard him again in the distance and thought no more of it – well, I actually thought “wanker”, but you know what I mean. About 10 minutes later I almost shit myself when a voice out of the darkness said “can you help us?”
The screech I’d heard was him spinning off the road and into a ditch. When I got there his car was upside down in a nettle-filled ditch – I’d have missed it if I’d have driven by, it was so well hidden.
He didn’t end up in the ditch because he hadn’t had any motorway training. He didn’t end up in it because he hadn’t been on a skid pan.
He ended up in the ditch because he was a twat. That’s where the problem is – not with the test or their training.