10 things they don’t learn in driving school, but they should

Somewhere, you probably know the case, either from your own experience or through your descendant, when a young driver successfully passed his driving school exams, usually rode some old baker and felt like the king of the roads. That is, until the first carom came.

Of course, this does not only apply to young people, because even an inexperienced fifty-year-old can pose a similar risk, but is it really always just the experience? Are our driving schools really that perfect? No way! And we’ve found ten important things you should take away from B driving school, but usually don’t.

All images used are for illustrative purposes only.

You will rarely see a driving school vehicle overtaking another vehicle, unless you count going around an obstacle or overtaking a tractor. In most cases, training vehicles with a student behind the wheel pay for traffic brakes, which is not surprising given the assumed inexperience of the trained driver.

But who will teach him to overtake correctly, to estimate the distance, to shift down, to accelerate, and only in front of the rear of the overtaking vehicle – i.e. at the moment of the speed difference between the two cars – to swerve out of his lane with the turn signal already activated?

If you park three times at the front, twice at the back, and once with your ears scratched, this does not mean that you are ready for heavy traffic. There is still a high percentage of motorists among us who simply do not know how to park. And why? Because no one taught them that in driving school.

“I had no idea it was possible to brake like that on a pig,” said a certain driving school instructor after completing a course dealing with emergency braking at Polygon Hradec Králové (training center).

Very few driving schools let their students try to brake really hard, so that the person in question really gets to know how ABS works, that the pedal must not release while he is “kicking the pedal”, that he must “stand” on the pedal with his whole weight and how it differs braking distance in dry, wet or with increasing speed.

The majority of Czech driving schools still offer courses with vehicles with a manual transmission, while the trend towards obtaining the B78 group (automatic only) is generally only growing in large cities. In any case, there are several types of automatic transmissions, some of which behave quite differently, while others are quite similar.

One way or another, every driving school student should try driving with an automatic, while for those less skilled it can be a stepping stone to a manual, because the first drives do not have to deal with gear shifting, but rather things around.

Recently, an editorial colleague forced me to believe that the correct solution to unwanted rear axle skid in a rear-wheel drive vehicle is to add gas. I am looking forward to showing it to all of us at the Hradec Polygon this year.

In any case, driving school graduates only heard about skids on a theoretical basis, but during their training, a minimum of them arrived at some training ground where they could test how skids occur/appear in practice and how to solve them.

Isn’t that important? Where! The first snow and (not only) young ones fly into the ditches, because 40 km/h is not a high speed after all. Friends, on a surface with reduced adhesion how many times to too high.

“But I have an assistance service arranged, I don’t have to.” Yes, you don’t have to, just be aware that the range of the assistance service is about 45 minutes, or several hours in case of calamities. So isn’t it better to be able to change that wheel or light bulb yourself?

With the acquisition of a group B driver’s license, you can drive vehicles with a total weight of up to 3.5 tons and a trailer with a total weight of up to 750 kg. Also, the vehicle set, if its total weight does not exceed 3.5 tons. So yes, you still need a B to drive a car with a total weight of 2,500 kg and a trailer with a total weight of 1,000 kg.

And now, who of you in the driving school drove with a tow truck for a clean B? It used to be quite common, but today… Only rarely.

Did you know that with a group B driver’s license you can also drive motorcycles with an engine volume of up to 125 cubic centimeters and a power of 11 kW, if the machine is equipped with an automatic transmission? No? And can you drive such a machine? Not too, see?

We understand that if a seasoned “Ačkař” (motorcyclist) gets his B driver’s license, he does not need to test the scooter, but what if you are not a fan of motorcycles? And no, a scooter is really not a bicycle…

There are still motorists who hold the steering wheel in a position other than three quarters to three. For more than 20 years, various training institutions have been fighting against past regulations that taught steering wheel grip incorrectly. The situation is thus improving, but it is far from reaching satisfactory values.

This is also reflected in training in driving schools, in which proper holding of the steering wheel is often not given as much emphasis as it should be. But the correct grip is the basis, and if you don’t learn it right away, relearning is often not such an easy matter.

Have you noticed how many times modern electrified cars can brake hard without activating their brake lights? This can be a problem for novice drivers, as they have not yet developed such a distance estimate, and their clue that the car in front is slowing down can be precisely the red glowing brake lights.

So that was a selection of ten important things that they don’t teach you at B driving school, but they should. We also do not claim that we have named all of them here, so we also give you space to write in the comments (or to [email protected]) what you missed in our list.

We will go through the texts carefully and evaluate them together with experts. Indeed, it is quite possible that the missing items of automotive education for group B that you proposed will be put on another article. So we’ll see and wish for safe kilometers with the wheels as low as possible.