So I've posted before about the difficulties, or rather the obstacles, for getting a Swedish drivers license.
First you have to attend a four hour class on driving risks where they talk about things that affect your driving decisions, such as alcohol, drugs, stress and the like. This is rather boring and somewhat obvious if you've been driving for more than a year, or even if you have half a brain.
Then you get to take one of the learning center's cars out on a series of skid like tests on a slippery track. This might sound fun but it really isn't. Basically you drive a base model, front wheel drive car that can barely dream of getting out of its own way. Many will tell you that the course is more slippery than ice but if you've lived in a winter climate for any length of time and driven during the winter, you'll know straight away that ice is way more slippery. Anyway, you drive this course doing things like braking before you reach a certain point while in a corner to show you how the car behaves while braking and cornering. Driving around and around in a circle to show you how the car will slide while cornering. Trying to do a slalom run where the distance between cones changes and finally doing a lane change to simulate avoiding a moose or other large obstacle, again on the slippery course. Assuming you have passed both of those you get to take the written test.
As I've said before studying for this test in English is a joke. First off the translations are done in absolutely horrible British English. Typical errors include simple things like using "to" instead of "too" but also get much more complex such as asking a question of "What is the greatest difficulty to judge when passing another car" and the answer they want is "Judging the speed of oncoming traffic". What?!? Who passes when there is traffic coming at them so close that you have to judge the speed? And if there was oncoming traffic why wasn't it mentioned in the question/scenario?
Another classic that is sorely missing in translation is "What does 'the basic rule' say?". The correct answer is "It decides which spirit that shall prevail in the traffic." What? What are they saying? Since when is there a spiritual component to basic driving rules? I've had a few OMG moments while driving when there were close calls and such but that's about as close to spiritual that I've ever gotten while driving.
Here's another fun bit...one question asks how many passengers a car can have, the correct answer is 8, but there is another nearly identically worded question and the correct answer is "as many as the registration form says".
There are also dozens of questions that anyone who went to school in the USA will hate. They all basically boil down to that age old question of "if train A leaves from here traveling at X speed and train B leaves from there traveling at Y speed, at what point will they meet?". However most of them are on the order of how much time do you save if you drive 10kph faster or how long does it take you to stop if you are driving X speed. They're completely ridiculous, if you're driving something like a VW Polo the braking distance is light years longer than if you're driving any sports car. You just can't even put the two in the same question, but they do.
Finally there is my favorite. The question asks "What distance is
suitable to keep to the car in front of you?" and shows a picture.
Awkwardly worded to start with, but ok, easy enough to understand. The
possible answers are "100 meters", "3 seconds" and "3 seconds". That's
right, they gave the same answer twice. The answers appear in a random
order each time you see the questions. The correct answer is "3
seconds", however it is still possible to get this one wrong even if you
choose "3 seconds". That's right, only one of the "3 seconds" answers
is correct...WTH?!? I'm not even going to get started ranting on this
one...I'll leave that up to you to imagine...
Here's the real kicker of the test that nobody can explain to me. The test is 70 questions, you need to get at least 52 correct to pass. However, before your test is graded they throw out 5 randomly selected questions. They then claim that "this will not affect your score". How the hell can they randomly discard 5 questions and not have it affect my score?!? What if all 5 were correct and I have several wrong answers? Of course that will affect my score! Some will tell you that they put in several questions that do not count, they are there to see how people will answer a question of a certain type, like to see what people think or how they think about a given situation. If they are throwing those out, I still don't see how it is a fair test. If I get a "test" question correct I should still get points for it.
Anyway, I've been studying for quite a while off and on trying to "get" what the people were thinking that wrote this test in English. You basically have to read the question, read the possible answers, go back to the question and re-evaluate what they wrote to figure out what they really meant and then go pick an answer. Anyone enjoy translating English to English?
Tomorrow I go and take the test, hopefully for the only time. If I pass, next week I will go for my road test where they will basically have me drive around very similar to how it is done in the USA only with a focus on what they call "Eco-driving" which is a total pile of rubbish if you ask me. Basically they're just testing to see how "eco-friendly" of a driver you are, you can't do too much, don't use the clutch too much, don't brake too much, basically let the car drive you. Seems to me that they are trying to prepare the driver to be on a train, not actually "drive" the car.
Wish me (good) luck...
