Finally Passing My Driving Test, and the Weakness I Had Backwards

I've been a car guy since I was a kid, which is an odd thing to be without a driving licence. I wanted one at 17, but I didn't have the money or the support to go through with it, so it waited.

I've got two kids now, and the arithmetic of moving a family around this country on train fares stops being funny quite quickly. There were road trips to France and Italy sitting on the other side of that licence, so I finally booked some lessons.

Six days before my test, I drove a mock test around West Wickham with Francis Noakes of Driving School TV, with a camera on me the whole way. I make video for a living and I'm not used to being the one in shot. Francis wanted to answer one question with it: can an app really predict whether you'll pass?

Learning to Drive

I learned with an instructor in a Dacia Sandero, forty hours of lessons in all, with about twenty hours of private practice on top.

Five or six weeks of that practice was driving my mum around rural Kent after she broke her hip, which meant national speed limit dual carriageways and nobody in the passenger seat with a set of pedals. I have ADHD, and given the space I will get in my head and psych myself out. That situation didn't leave any. She had hospital appointments to get to, so there was nothing for it but to crack on, and it did more for my confidence than any structured lesson could have.

Getting a Test Date

My test came forward by months because I posted on the LearnerDriverUK subreddit asking for a swap. Somebody emailed me offering one, and we swapped. That's how a lot of learners get a test, trading slots between themselves because the official route is jammed.

The rules have tightened a lot since. You now get two changes to a booking in total and a swap counts as one of them, and DVSA no longer allow unofficial services that scan the booking service for slots, with a cancelled test or suspended online access as the penalty if they catch one. I'd built a slot watcher for exactly that job, and I've since retired it. The repository stays public and MIT licensed so the work is there to read or fork, but the script itself does nothing now, and anyone still running it should take it off.

The App That Scored Me 994

The app is the reason the mock test was filmed at all. DriveScore is a ClearScore product, and it isn't built for learners. It runs in the background on your phone, uses the accelerometer and GPS to work out when you're in a car, and after 150 miles gives you a score out of 1,000 you can show insurers for a cheaper premium. It watches acceleration, braking, cornering, speed and whether you're touching your phone.

Mine sat at 994, and that's what Francis wanted to test. My instinct was that a number like that wouldn't tell you much about whether you'll pass. A score like that measures the mechanical side of driving: smooth inputs, braking in good time, not taking roundabouts like you're being chased. That's real, and a phone in a cupholder can see it. The practical test is about judgement, whether you read a junction correctly and whether the gap you took was safe or you just got away with it, and a phone can't tell those apart.

The Mock Test

It was my first proper mock test. My instructor will run one if you ask, but he isn't keen, and his reasoning is sound: he isn't a stranger, so sitting next to him is nothing like sitting next to an examiner. Francis filled that gap: a different person, a different car and an unfamiliar gearbox. We did it in an Abarth 595, which added a layer I hadn't accounted for, because the Sandero is a good deal wider and the spatial awareness you think is instinct is really a set of reference points attached to one specific hood.

Before we set off, I held my phone up to the camera without saying a word. On it was a list in my notes app of everything I thought was wrong with my driving: falling into everyday driving mode, being too assertive when taking small gaps, rolling back on hills and junctions on an incline, missing speed signs, and missing centre mirror checks. Francis heard none of it until we'd finished and parked up. He'd assess me blind, and afterwards we'd put his faults next to mine.

Over about half an hour he put me through everything West Wickham likes to throw at people, having told me up front that he'd be marking harder than an examiner would. There was the car park behind the high street that my instructor and I had never managed to find, in through a narrow yellow archway. He asked which bay park I was stronger at, I said reverse, so he had me forward park. Then came a hill start, a stretch of independent driving and the mini roundabouts the area is full of.

Two faults came back. I'd been tracking the right of the lane rather than the middle on the run down to the first crossroads, and I'd indicated too early coming off a roundabout.

Then we went through my list, and it turned out he'd been watching for every item on it. The hill start was smooth. When the limit went back up to thirty I said nothing out loud, but he saw me change into third and knew I'd read the sign. He'd been watching my mirrors specifically. Not one of the five had shown up.

The things on my list were real once. My instructor had raised them, I'd worked on them, and I'd fixed them without ever updating the picture of my driving I was carrying around.

Test Day

Six days later I passed first time with three minors, at 32, and the pink licence was finally mine.

I hadn't slept. Breakfast was porridge, two boiled eggs, a banana and a double espresso, and I made a point of stopping at one.

The manoeuvre I drew was the forward bay park, my weakest. I stopped off centre to the left and told the examiner I wanted to correct it. He asked me whether all four wheels were in the bay. I dipped the wing mirrors, opened the door and put my head out to look, and took the question for what it was: leave it, you're overthinking. I reversed out, kept my observations up, and that was that.

My three minors were Signals Timed, for indicating a few seconds early coming off a roundabout, Control Steering, for oversteering towards the entrance barrier at Hayes station car park, and Progress Appropriate Speed, for driving overly cautiously on a narrow rural forty.

The first was the same fault Francis had given me six days earlier, in a different car, on a route I'd never driven. The last was the exact opposite of what I'd been worried about. I'd spent weeks convinced I was too assertive taking small gaps, and the fault I actually picked up was for being too careful on an empty rural road. The bay park was the same. I was ready to fix something that didn't need fixing, and it took a question from a stranger to stop me. I had the direction of my own weakness backwards.

Once I'd passed, I recorded a follow up with the result on my X-E5, edited it and sent it over for Francis to add to the video, so the whole story is in there.

Final Thoughts

So, can an app predict whether you'll pass? Not in my experience. DriveScore scored me 994 and said nothing I could act on. Francis watched me for half an hour and named a fault that turned up again on the day.

That doesn't make the app useless. When you're convinced you're a mess behind the wheel, 994 out of 1,000 is a hard number to argue with. If you're the sort of learner who assumes the worst about yourself, it can put a floor under your confidence while you work on the things that actually need work, and for plenty of learners self doubt is a bigger obstacle than any manoeuvre on the sheet.

A week after passing I bought a 2016 Vauxhall Astra, the 1.0 litre Turbo EcoFlex in SRi Nav trim. Three cylinders and a big boot. It's a sensible family car, which is exactly what I needed.

What I actually want is a Nissan Silvia S15 Spec-R, and passing my test has done nothing to change that. If anyone has a clean one going spare, you know where to find me. The Astra has a trip to France to do first.