994 Out of 1000: What an App Couldn't Tell Me About My Driving Test

Six days before my practical driving test, an app told me I was a 994 out of 1000 driver. Six days before my practical driving test, I also sat down and wrote a list of everything I thought was wrong with my driving. Only one of them turned out to be accurate.

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

The gap between that score and that list is how I ended up driving 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. A week later I recorded the follow up with my test result on my X-E5, edited it, and sent it over for Francis to add to the video.

The List I Wrote About Myself

I'd written the list in my phone's notes app and held the screen up to the camera without saying a word. Francis heard none of it until we'd finished and parked up. Falling into everyday driving mode. Being too assertive when taking small gaps. Rolling back on hills and junctions on an incline. Missing speed signs. Missing centre mirror checks. He would run the assessment blind, and afterwards we would put his faults next to mine.

I believed all of it. Ask most learners what they're bad at and they'll hand you a list without pausing. Ask them what they're good at and you'll get a shrug.

This 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 nothing about sitting next to him replicates the pressure of sitting next to an examiner. That's the gap Francis filled. A different person, a different car, an unfamiliar gearbox. Doing it in an Abarth 595 when I'd learned in a Dacia Sandero 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.

What a Telematics Score Actually Measures

The reason any of this was filmed is the app. DriveScore is a ClearScore product and it isn't built for learners at all. It's an insurance play. 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 it gives you a score out of 1,000 you can wave at insurers for a cheaper premium. It watches acceleration, braking, cornering forces, speed and whether you're touching your phone.

Mine sat at 994, which is what Francis wanted to test. Does a number like that have anything useful to say about whether you'll pass a driving test?

I build things like X-Alchemy alongside the video work, so my instinct was that it wouldn't. A telematics score measures the mechanical half of driving. Are your inputs smooth. Do you brake late. Do you take roundabouts like you're being chased. That's real and measurable, and a phone sitting in a cupholder can see it.

The practical test measures judgement: whether you read that junction correctly, whether the gap you took was safe or you got away with it, whether you should have moved off when you did or held back another two seconds. To an accelerometer, a confident pull out and a lucky one feel identical.

An app can measure what you did with the car. It has nothing to say about whether you should have.

Two Faults, Neither of Them on My List

Over about half an hour Francis 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. 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. A hill start. A stretch of independent driving. The mini roundabouts the area is full of.

At the end of it, two faults came back.

The first was lane positioning: I'd been tracking the right of the lane rather than the middle of it on the run down to the first crossroads. The second was signal timing, indicating 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.

Those faults were real once. My instructor had raised them, I'd worked on them, and I'd fixed them without ever updating the version of myself I was carrying around.

Three Minors, and the One I Had Backwards

Six days later I passed first time with three minors, at 32. 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, which is my weakest. I came to a stop 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.

The three faults 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 of those is the fault Francis gave me six days earlier, in a different car, on a route I'd never driven.

Then the third. I had spent weeks convinced my problem was being too assertive taking small gaps. The fault I actually collected was the exact opposite: too slow, too careful, on an empty rural road. The bay park was the same shape. I was ready to fix something that didn't need fixing, and it took a mild question from a stranger to stop me. I had the direction of my own weakness backwards.

The app 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, with my licence on the line.

What the Number Was Good For

None of which makes the app useless.

I've written before about learning to trust the JPEG instead of second guessing every file into a Lightroom backlog I was never going to clear. It turned out to be the same problem. The score taught me nothing about driving. What it did was make it harder to keep believing a story about myself that wasn't true, because when you're convinced you're a mess behind the wheel, 994 out of 1,000 is a hard number to argue with.

Telematics won't predict your test result and shouldn't pretend to. What it can do, if you're the sort of person who assumes the worst about yourself, is put a floor under your confidence while you go and work on the things that need work. For plenty of learners that self doubt is a bigger obstacle than any manoeuvre on the sheet.

Forty hours of lessons with my instructor got me there, and around twenty hours of private practice on top. Five or six weeks of that 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. It did more for my confidence than any structured lesson could have.

The test date 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 the whole system, learners 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.

None of that came from an app. The app just stopped me talking myself out of the rest of it.

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 car for a family, 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.