If they don't think you're ready, they'll make you keep taking lessons for $58 an hour.
Notice a problem here?
In America you decide when you take the two tests, and you make the appointments yourself. If you get 83% of the questions right on the written test, you qualify for the driving test. You get a friend with a good car to drive you to the DMV, drive somebody around for twenty minutes, and if you do okay then you pass.
In Germany, the written test has thirty questions, and you fail if you get two wrong. That's a slightly-daunting 93%. If you pass, the fahrschule gives you driving lessons at a cost of 35 euros for 40 minutes. For the next few months, basically, you throw money at them whenever they request it. Every once in a while you'll say, “Hey, can I take the driving test now?“ and as they're counting your cash they'll reply, “No, it’ll just be a few more years.“
They might decide you need fifty lessons, which with classroom fees, signup fees and testing fees means you can easily pass $2,200.
In America you spent $33, plus the cost of your photo. You could hire Annie Lebovitz to take that and still not hit the German cost.
Germany’s Trump-like smug/stupid dichotomy is obvious here. Yes, Germany has fewer auto accidents than America. If you want, you can pretend it's this stringent system. Me, I'm wondering if maybe it has something to do with the people who make less than $80,000 per year and don't have $2,200 to blow.
Germany pretends the fahrschules can’t cheat you, because the fees are regulated -- but is $143 a reasonable price for the instructor who has to be there for your forty-minute driving test? Is it still reasonable if you fail within the first ten minutes and he effectively earns $858 an hour?
Have you figured out why there are fahrschules all over Germany now?
I should have known H would be a terrible driving teacher. People who are good at their professions don’t have time to casually mention their availability online. Tony Hawk isn’t going to staple ads to telephone poles asking, “Who wants to take skateboard lessons?“ But Google gave me just one other English-language possibility in the small town of Hannover, where I'm living now. A driving school advertised international clientele and foreign languages, but when I went there the staff looked like contestants in a Kim Kardashian lookalike contest. I asked if they spoke English and ten sharpened eyebrows went up. Someone replied, confused and haltingly, “Why would we speak English?“
I had no choice. I had to go with H, so I went to the driving school where he worked, Fahrschule Niepel, to sign up.
The owner, J, was a friendly man who laughed constantly. His English was as bad as my German so neither of us understood the other, but his laughter was so effervescent it won me over all the way to the $223.45 bill. The few written words on the bill were undecipherable except for one: I was apparently paying fifty euros for an app. It had an English option, J insisted. I'd study, then come in and take the practice test. After I passed that, we'd start with the driving part.
I went home, downloaded the app, and set the “English“ option, but it didn't actually change to English. I emailed J and never got a reply. I called the support number and they kept up the pretense, though they couldn’t actually point me toward any English instruction. I’m not sure why anyone pretended otherwise: I mean, let’s say you film a video in German, and upload it to YouTube. Now say someone in China watches it. Though their computer is set to Chinese and their YouTube profile is set to Chinese, it shouldn’t come as a shock that your video will not be magically subtitled. Similarly, if someone in England watches your video, the main character will not suddenly be dubbed by Helen Mirren.
With the language difficulties it was impossible to be sure, but it looked like I paid fifty euros for a largely-useless app: "Fahren Lernen," from fahren-lernen.de. This did not make me think well of Germany: in America you can download Angry Birds for ninety-nine cents, and it probably has more English-language driving instruction. Suddenly I understood why J was always laughing: you would too if just sat in an office and took 200 euros from random people with so little obvious return.
The one part of the app that changed to English was the quiz. Unfortunately, it had been translated into British English, and the first question was something like, “From whence must you halt whilst approaching a sunken kerbstone?“ I didn't have the faintest clue. The multiple-choice answers were all numbers, whereas my gut reaction was Spain.
Over the next few weeks I answered probably two hundred questions, and got at least half of them wrong. There had to be fifty about driving trucks, thirty about pulling trailers, twenty about children’s car seats, and five about horse-drawn carriages. “Why do I need to know all this bullshit?“ I asked a German friend.
His answer tells you everything you need to know about Germany, a perfect example of their “Plan for everything!“ style. “But you MIGHT want to drive a truck, or pull a trailer, or drive a horse-drawn carriage,“ he said. “The license gives you that right.“
“I’m NOT going to do any of those things,“ I protested. “Why doesn’t it quiz me about coffee beans and also license me to work at Starbucks?“
I remembered J had mentioned a book that had been translated to English that I could buy for 90 euros more. It was also in British English. I read it four times before I could make sense of it and learn how fast I could drive a 7.5-ton truck outside built-up areas, though it never explained what those were. I went back to Niepel and told J I was ready for the practice exam.
J walked over to a computer with a blank display. He hit a few buttons and it still had a blank display. Out of the German words that followed, I concluded that (1) this was the computer for the English-language practice test, and (2) it didn't work. J shrugged and made an appointment for me to take the real test. "You've definitely earned that $223 now," I thought.
I passed the written test and thought the worst was over. By a reciprocal agreement residents of 27 U.S. states can literally swap their driver's licenses for German ones. Residents of 11 other states don't have to take the driving test. Unfortunately I'd lived in New York, one of the remaining 12 states. But they were so carefree with most Americans, and I'd driven in America for thirty years without a ticket or accident, so this would be easy, right?
To the contrary, my nightmare had just begun.
