I'm actually going through this now in the UK and I feel like the way they do it could be much better. The randomness of driving on real roads makes luck an important factor to passing.
As with most learning processes which finish with an exam, the need to undergo a general learning process to get to the stage where it's likely that you will actually pass is more important than the exact equivalence of the tests.
> and you can rebook another test asap if you're confident the only things you were failed on were hesitancy or overcorrection in response to chance events.
Yeah? How can I do that when tests are all booked pretty much everywhere for the next 4 months? If I fail I am likely waiting another 4 months before I can get another test.
The fact is that test centres have wildly different pass rates (some as high as 80% vs. some as low as 38%). That kind of variance shows that the testing is not fair.
I think the point is that depending on circumstances you can spend either 45 minutes driving down a more or less empty road or 45 minutes in rush hour traffic and it's basically impossible to judge someone equally in those two cases. I know people here in Sweden who after failing their test a couple of times in city traffic, schedule their next driving test at a test centre in a small rural village and pass easily. These people can then return home and start legally driving in the same city traffic they couldn't pass their drivers test in.
There isn't an expectation that new drivers will never be flummoxed by encountering weird behaviour from other drivers or an oddly laid out junction
Exactly! And that is why it is important that we make sure everybody gets tested on that before we give them a license.
But you're highly unlikely to find a UK test centre where the routes consist of more or less empty roads (UK population is not distributed like Sweden's)
> Exactly! And that is why it is important that we make sure everybody gets tested on that before we give them a license.
The test isn't to ensure that they consistently handle weird behaviour from other drivers or oddly laid out junctions flawlessly (experienced drivers don't either). If we expected that, nobody would ever drive at all, at least not without thousands of hours in a simulator. It's to ensure their approaches to junctions are at sensible speeds and they pay attention to what's going on and use mirrors and signals. You can do that in high traffic or low traffic, and it's by no means certain that the low traffic conditions would more favourable to you anyway
The average driver needs 45 hours worth of lessons. Add to that the cost of a provisional license, the theory test, and the driving test and it’s around £1,300.
Even in Spain it was about 22 quid per 45 minutes and then 150 euros for the test. And here in Sweden it's double that across the board :/