What penalties will fail you?

Mr Arrior

Just wondering what mistakes during the test will fail you automatically and what ones are you allowed to make a few of?

Thanks

dennyk

This booklet from the RSA provides a good overview of the fault marking guidelines:

http://www.rsa.ie/Documents/ADI/Information%20Pack/DrivingFault_Marking_Guides.pdf

The chart beginning on page 18 lists specific examples for each grade of fault in each category. Anything that falls under a Grade 3 fault will fail you, and of course you'll also fail if you accumulate too many Grade 2 faults in a single category or overall. Grade 1 faults do not count against you at all.

Note that many of these can be a bit subjective, and I'm sure there is more training on grading specific faults given to testers than is documented in this booklet. In general, Grade 3 faults would be for screwing up in such a way that you could cause an accident or otherwise create a dangerous situation, e.g. running red lights, signalling the wrong direction, careless/reckless/distracted driving, lack of control, etc.

Mr Arrior

Had a driving lesson recently. My first in long time after completing my 12 compulsory ones in order to get rid of bad habits.
One thing that puzzled me was the progress part of driving. The instructor was advising me to get into third and fourth gear as often as possible so I don't get penalised for lack of progress. One of these was in a narrow residential area. Now my car is a 1.0 litre and I didn't see much point going up into third gear as first off why encourage going faster in areas where people can easily walk out in front of you and I found myself dropping down to second gear in certain areas as third was simply to high for certain parts. Surely staying in second gear would be alright in these areas as long as you're not crawling along.

dennyk

You should drive at a safe speed for the road conditions (but never more than the speed limit), and you should select the appropriate gear for your speed. If the street is narrow and there are a lot of parked cars, you'd definitely want to go slower.

Progress is one of the more subjective parts of the test, for sure. I got no marks for it on my test, and I was taking it easy enough in the housing estates, especially where the road was crowded with parked cars. If you're getting up to speed reasonably quickly (don't just crawl away at idle from a stop, give it some gas) and you're driving at or near the speed limit whenever road conditions make it safe to do so, I'd say you'd be OK, but it might depend on your tester.

Speed can be a bit subjective as well. I remember way back when I was first learning to drive, tooling around my neighborhood at 15mph felt terrifyingly fast until I got used to it. If you don't have much experience, it might feel like you're going faster than you really are. Look at what speed you're actually traveling when your instructor says you're going too slow; he might well be right.