Practical Road Test Tips

The practical test is a demonstration that you can control the vehicle and read the road. Examiners mark habits, so practise them until they run without you.

Before you get in, walk round the vehicle and look underneath it for anything in your way. Then set the cockpit up in order: seat, doors closed properly, belt on, mirrors adjusted so they show you something. Check the vehicle is in neutral with the handbrake on before you start the engine.

Through the drive:

• Keep both hands on the wheel, at about ten and two on a clock face, and feed it through them. Crossing your arms is marked against you.
• Mirror, blind spot, signal, then manoeuvre, in that order. Signalling first and looking afterwards is doing it backwards.
• At a stop sign, stop completely, at the line where there is one and immediately before the sign where there is not. The vehicle must come to rest, whether or not another vehicle is anywhere in sight.
• Treat a pedestrian crossing the same way. Come to rest, give way, then move off cleanly.
• At an uncontrolled intersection, give way to traffic on your right. At a traffic circle, give way to what is already going round, and signal left just after you pass the exit before the one you want.
• Keep to the left, and keep well left on a blind rise or a corner.
• On a hill start, hold the vehicle on the handbrake and the biting point rather than rolling back. Select the low gear before the hill, not on it.
• In a manual vehicle, work up and down through the gears as the road allows. The examiner is watching whether you match the gear to the situation.
• Drive within the limit, and below it where conditions ask for less.
• Make your observation visible. An examiner sees a head check, but not a flick of the eyes at a mirror.

Things that end a test: hooting at other road users out of impatience, waving at people you recognise, a phone anywhere you can reach it, and attempting to bribe an examiner, which is a criminal offence and is dealt with as one.