Don't Cram - Pass Easily       

Driving is one of the riskiest things we do – especially if you’re a new driver. According to parliament’s transport select committee, over 38,000 people are killed or injured each year in collisions involving at least one driver with less than two-years experience on the roads.

One of the issues this committee recently looked at was how people learn to drive and whether this could be changed to help reduce road accidents. The committee suggested introducing a minimum learning period, which would mean taking at least 12 months to learn to drive. This sounds like a good idea as it means learner drivers get more experience on the roads before getting their full licence and they would have practised driving in more varied conditions, like icy weather or in the dark.

However, one of the impacts of this minimum learning period would be to effectively raise the age people are allowed to drive unaccompanied from 17 to 18. What would this mean for young people who rely on driving for getting to work or college? In Sweden, when the period of driving training was increased they also lowered the age at which you could get a provisional licence. This may be a way of introducing this change without disadvantaging 17 year olds.

The transport select committee also said they think the whole process of driver training needs to be seriously improved. In addition to the minimum learning period, they want the Department for Transport to look at how to make testing more effective and maybe introducing ongoing driver assessment. The debate on how we learn to drive is going to go on for some time and it’ll be interesting to see what the government actually decides to do and how this affects both learner and qualified drivers.

It’s probably a few years until the driving theory test will become irrelevant and with a review of how effective it currently is we can expect changes to the driving theory test in the next few years.

However there is a vision of cars in the future that will be able to understand signs and signals on their own and react accordingly. These cars are currently being tested by the US military for use in battlefield situations, but it will be only a matter of years until these technologies start hitting real roads.

Directional signs must only have a limited life - in the next ten years all new cars will start coming with Satellite navigation as standard - and then why spend the money on sign that only tell people what they already know!

With cars like these soon on the road will the instructional signs disappear soon also? To get a car to understand signs it is less efficient to get them to read an actual sign - but to get the sign to send out an electronic signal to tell the car it is there. This sort of replacement project would cost a lot of money though, but what if the road signs became virtual and only existed inside the Satellite Navigation software then that could be the end of road signs as we know them.

It might be that the current generation taking the driving theory test will be the last to take the driving theory test as we know it and that not only the test - but the reasons for the test might change in the future.

For now though it is clear that there is a new driving theory test starting in September - it will have 50 questions not 35 and will have a pass mark that is now higher at 86% - this is future that most current students should be worrying about! The new test questions will be launched on Monday for people to start practising.