With more than one million pounds worth of car insurance claims made every hour in the UK and the main reason these accidents happen down to driver error, its good to find out why. To find out a little more uSwitch decided to create a basic driving theory test for 2,500 experienced drivers.

What did they find out? Well only 1% of respondents got all the questions correct and this is not a major surprise, but when you then read that 34% got under half the questions right and 8% got every question wrong…you wonder why they are on the road.

If one third of the 2,500 experienced drivers do not know the national speed limit (as they did not), then this can put other drivers at risk and explain partly why driver error is one third of all car insurance claims. While 2,500 motorists have been taken to represent the whole of the UK, it will surely not give the same results. If it did, this would work out at 13 million drivers not knowing the national speed limit.

The uSwitch test also uncovered other worrying results like 58% of drivers not knowing who gets priority when traffic lights fail, now you can imagine the chaos there as the times I have passed through traffic lights that have failed, so many drivers look lost.

With 4.42 million accidents happening this year, this will cost the car insurance providers £8.4 billion and also a good chance it will increase your premium to help pay for it. There is positive news in all this and that’s with the road accidents, this figure is falling about 5% each year.

Should we now be testing the 30 million motorists who have not had a theory test and if they fail it, should they have to retake their official test?

Source: Read