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Why is it so expensive? Is there required courses? I can understand that in cities, a DL might not be a huge deal but I can't imagine that rural France would be

• jacquesm 7y ago
  Because they actually want their drivers to be reasonably good. What goes for a driving exam in some countries is not up to standards in others. 50-60 hours of instruction isn't rare at all where I live.
  • _raoulcousins 7y ago
    Terrifying, but I drove for only two hours before getting my driver's license in California. At the time (and possibly still) you didn't have to have driver's training courses to take the test if you were 18+.
    • johannes1234321 7y ago
      In Germany you have to take theory lessons and test as well as practical lessons including some time highway (Autobahn) and at night. In the end there is a practical test, which (from anecdotal observation) a notable amount of people fail on first attempt. But once you have the license you can drive on highways without speed limits, where safety and following rules is important (while the free ride is a bit of a myth - many segments have speed limits, there is lots of traffic limiting speed and in case of an accident insurance restrict payment when going fast)
      • lovemenot 7y ago
        >> Drivers Ed is required to pass high school, Really? Now I realise why some Americans looked so confused and dismayed when I was living there without having ever learned to drive. So there's nobody from USA who chooses to have an education, and not to drive a car?
        • deleted 7y ago
          [deleted]
        • ghaff 7y ago
          I'm not sure it's universally true. I didn't but that was years ago at a private school and I still took a summer Drivers Ed class for insurance reasons. Given that most students do get a drivers license, it wouldn't be surprising if Drivers Ed were a mandatory part of some high school curricula. Note that this is probably just the theory part in most cases and doesn't include actual on the road instruction. (Which is typically done by parents or by a company--the latter again in part for insurance price reasons.)
        • jacquesm 7y ago
          Wrong comment thread?
        • fotbr 7y ago
          Drivers Ed was an optional summer course in my district, and did include an on-road component. Not required at all (although the insurance company gave a discount for completing it). HS graduation requirements vary (in some cases, much more than you would think) between districts. Usually, each town/city has its own district -- in rural areas a district may span many towns, in more urban areas, you may have more than one district in a single city. There are state guidelines, but we also have 50 different states. Federal guidelines are pretty sparse, and often only enforced by accepting funding -- don't take their money and you don't have to play by their rules. I suspect that there is no blanket statement about the US public school system that will hold true nationwide (except, perhaps "it could be better" or "it makes no sense"). The reaction to not having a license is probably simply due to 60+ years of "The American Dream" for a kid was having their own car and the freedom^tm that came with it, and the simple fact that in the majority of the country, public transportation is crap, and our cities are not designed around walking. So a car, and license, is pretty much a requirement.
        • elamje 7y ago
          I don’t see what you are quoting. That is not the case in Texas and I’m pretty sure other states as well.
      • benibela 7y ago
        I failed the test three times in Germany. After the second time I switched school, and basically had to start from scratch. Probably ended up costing me 5000€ or close to 10000€. And since that was in 2009, with the perfect time to put everything in the stock market, the opportunity costs were like 100000€.
        • vinni2 7y ago
          Wow! I thought I spent a lot when it costed me 2000€ after failing once. Now I feel lucky. But most German kids pass first time.
          • johannes1234321 7y ago
            I was curious about the "most pass" as I know so many stories of people who failed (I passed on first attempt myself) First article I found from 2018, citing numbers from 2017, says 37% fail theory, 28% during practical test, which is quite a lot, considering that you have extra training lessons and instructors should know what's being tested (conspiracy theory would be: failed test leads to more lessons and more fees) https://m.tagesspiegel.de/gesellschaft/panorama/knapp-37-prozent-fahrschueler-fallen-immer-oefter-durch-die-pruefung/21244016.html https://m.tagesspiegel.de/gesellschaft/panorama/knapp-37-pro...
    • JakeTheAndroid 7y ago
      This is still true. I moved from AZ to CA when I was 17 and my AZ permit expired. It was way easier and cheaper to wait until I turned 18 so that I didn't have to pay for the requisite driving training courses. Oddly enough, Drivers Ed is required to pass high school, but if you get your training or your license before you graduate you can supply them with the documentation and still get the credit. With my birthday being in July, I technically should have had to take a Drivers Ed course, but because I moved my senior year of high school, I basically got a lot of free credits because the state requirements were different and I would have had to essentially take an extra year of HS if they didn't just hand me credits. It's weird.
    • lucb1e 7y ago
      I don't understand what you mean. Is it terrifying to have to get so much practice before being allowed to drive on your own, or terrifying to drive with only two hours' experience?
      • nothrabannosir 7y ago
        It's terrifying to share the road with people who have driven only 2 hours in their entire lives.
      • refurb 7y ago
        Not sure it's correlated with traffic deaths. Traffic fatalities per billion miles driven: Belgium - 7.3 United States - 7.3 Slovenia - 7.0 Japan - 6.4 France - 5.8 Finland - 5.1 Canada - 5.1 [similar requirements as US for license] Germany - 4.2 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_traffic-related_death_rate https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_traffic-r...
        • lucb1e 7y ago
          I know France, Belgium, and the USA have no proper driver's education and that Germany and the Netherlands do (other countries I would have to look up). In Belgium, people learn from their parents and then take the exam and therefore keep repeating most of their parents' mistakes plus their own. Everyone in Germany and the Netherlands that I've talked to agrees that Belgians are terrible drivers, and France has a similar system and seem to be just as bad (though with fewer data points because they're further away). From your link: Belgium=7.3, France=5.8, USA=7.3 versus Germany=4.2, Netherlands=4.7. I don't know what the P-value on that is (I never thought of looking at this until you mentioned it) but so far it looks like the data matches intuition. Of course, there's a lot more factors, like that in the USA and Germany have towns much further apart than the Netherlands (I've said before that in NL you're never more than a few minutes away from being at least in hearing distance of the nearest human). This makes public transport much worse and those who don't like driving may be obliged to, but also the infrastructure costs more when there are fewer inhabitants per km² to make use of each road which should make the infrastructure worse. Indeed, driving from NL into Germany during rain, the highways instantly and universally turn from nearly dry (due to permeable concrete) to lots of spatting and aquaplaning risk. I'm also not sure fatalities is the only thing we should be looking at. NL is higher than Germany but if you have more city traffic than highway traffic, you probably hit more bicycles and pedestrians despite better infrastructure. Nevertheless, interesting statistic.
    • cogman10 7y ago
      Heh, I'm dating myself, but I got my first license at 14 in Idaho. The only thing I needed was a 10 minute practical exam and to pass the written exam. There was no minimum required hours of driving (Scary, I know!) They've since changed it to 16 with 50 hours of supervised driving.
      • LyndsySimon 7y ago
        It’s 14 here in Arkansas for a learner’s permit, and 16 for a full license. The permit requires a written test (that’s trivial), and you have have a permit for six months if you’re under 18 I think. You can get a limited ”hardship” license to go to school or work at 14.
  • briandear 7y ago
    Yet French drivers tailgate everywhere regardless of the speed. I could be driving in the Alps near Chamonix and some driver will be right on my bumper. People will park on sidewalks, drive on sidewalks, park the wrong way on streets, and smashing into a car to get into a parking space is common. Other than well known, automatic speed cameras, traffic enforcement is almost nil. That claim that they want drivers to be good is really a myth, it’s a racket with driving schools doing everything they can to complicate the licensing process because it’s a significant industry. A sport pilot’s license in the US requires the same number of hours of instruction as a drivers license in France. Road fatalities are less in France than the US, but that is unrelated to drivers education — it’s mostly because of drunk driving in the US as well as the longer distances traveled and higher average speeds. It isn’t because French drivers are better. Most cars in France and dented up because of minor accidents — if their skill was so much better, why are most cars dented up? French drivers might have, on paper, better training, but once they are released onto the roads, they seem to instantly forget everything. Regarding 50-60 hours of instruction, that’s enough for a private pilots license and airplanes are vastly more complicated than driving.
    • Scoundreller 7y ago
      Agreed with everything you say. Despite the nil enforcement, they strictly follow red lights. I'm surprised it's not more lawless. In N. America I ask people "What do the police do?" and locals answer "speeding tickets". In France, I never get a clear answer. While "It isn’t because French drivers are better." may be true for safety, I do find their drivers far more predictable than N. American drivers on highways. They'll stay in the right on the highway, unless passing. And when they finish passing, they'll go back to the right. With signals. At least in S. Ontario, drivers pick a lane randomly, and stick to it for ??? reasons. Signalling after its clear what their intentions are (ie: not a "signal" at all). Not uncommon to see drivers on an merge onto an open highway, and immediately start multiple lane shifts with nothing to pass for miles ahead. It took a while for my French handlers to get me to stop angling my wheel while parked because of the bumper cars you mentioned.
      • refurb 7y ago
• cgrand-net 7y ago
  That’s it: required courses (20h).
  • martin_a 7y ago
    Let me add for clarification to the parent commenter: In Germany you'll not only need to have at least a fixed amount of theoretical training and an exam about that, but also driving training in various conditions. Few hours on the Autobahn, few hours at night and obviously driving though the countryside and cities.
    • Mirioron 7y ago
      Does Germany require passing an ice course or training in the snow/on ice?
      • koyote 7y ago
        I do not know about Germany but in Luxembourg you have to take a special course within 2 years of getting your licence. This course is on a race track and you will learn how to deal with aquaplaning and controlled avoidance of obstacles amongst other things. They also force the car to lose control so that you can experience that (I believe you drive over a metal sheet that moves, causing the back to spin out). Not quite snow/ice training but it gives you some experience in how to deal with situations where you lose control of your car.
        • martin_a 7y ago
          Courses like this are not mandatory in Germany, but car clubs like the "ADAC" offer those for their members. They're still expensive (like 200 Euro for a day) and I'm not sure if insurance agencies give you benefits for taking part in those courses.
      • aeyes 7y ago
        No, where would you even have an ice course in Germany?