Driving Permit debriefing

If you are one of those lucky bastards who have come to Sweden from an European Union country, then you need only to apply to have your driving permit transferred to a Swedish permit. If you're like the rest of us, you have to do the lot. You can drive on your home country permit for your first year in Sweden, so that buys you a little time. My advice is to start as soon as possible with your training. A year can fly by, and the stuff does take a while to learn. Three ways of going about this. First up, enroll with a driving school. Some merits with this, as you get everything organised from the ground up. And there's help on tap for the tricky rules that exist for Swedish roads. Of course it costs the most. Allow between 9,000 and 10,000kr for a full school experience. Alternatively, do the whole thing yourself. A bit more of a gamble, but obviously the cheapest option. I understand you can get away with about 4,000kr. The third option, which I went through, was a mix of private learning, and traffic school. This has set me back about 7,5000kr all up. Here's how it panned out for me. There are 4 parts to gaining a Swedish driving permit; 2 risk training courses (riskutbildning), a theory (kunskapsprov) test, and then the pratical (körprov) driving test. The riskutbildning courses must be completed before you can sit your theory and practical tests. You can book the tests in advance of the riskutbildning dates, which I did. There was a 3 week delay between when I booked, and the actual date of my test. It might be longer in other towns. The first riskutbildning is pure theory, and must be booked through a driving school. 3 hours of sitting in a classroom listening to an instructor, and watching videos. The topics are alcohol, drugs, medicines, stress and fatigue. Which was pretty much how I prepared myself for the course. But the point of the exercise is to understand how those factors influence driving, and the consequences thereof. Pretty common sense stuff if you're not one of the 18 year olds in the course, but I must confess that I did take some points of interest away from the day. The cost for the experience ? 650 kr. The requirement to pass this course is, basically, to turn up. There is no formal test or exam. The other riskutbildning course is skid training. That's a bucketload of fun. It's 90% practical, so wear your best fighting trousers. You don't have to book through a driving school, but I could see it would be a bit of a hassle to do it privately. My advice is to use a school. We had to travel about an hour and a half to the skid track, and then spent about 3 hours there. So it's pretty much a whole day booked out. I paid 1300kr directly to the track operators on arrival, and then another 800kr to the traffic school for the transport to and from, and also for the driving school instructor's time in helping us around the course. That helped a lot, firstly because he spoke English, and secondly because he knew us. Worth the extra money in reduced stress, in my opinion. The skid training itself involved about 25 minutes practicing straight line braking and cornering on both a dry and slippery course with a front wheel drive car. And then 25 minutes cornering on a slippery course with a rear wheeled drive car. The instructor sat up in a control tower and gave instructions over a radio. It was pretty straight forward. You can't really fail the course, but you do have to stay in the car until you get the exercise sort of right. I say "sort of", because parts of the track are designed so that you will slide out under speed. The object of the exercise is really to show how it will all go wrong if you drive too fast for the conditions. So nothing really to panic over. The final part of the skid training course was to sit in a suspended car inside a garage, and then have them flip the car upside down. The object is to learn how to get out of a car when it's upside down. No worries if you are an 18 year old, 40kg anorexic Swede who can fold themself in half, but a bit more complicated when you're a 45 year old 90+kg Kiwi attempting to navigate from the back seat to the front seat in an upturned Volvo. Personally, I think the instructor just decided to have a bit of fun. Overall, it was a good learning experience. First thing on the list for the theory section was to buy the books. No shortcuts, you need the books. There were 3 official books, sold as a package. They sell them in various languages. Even English. The book package cost 600kr. Now, here's where Swedes come into their own. No Swede is really comfortable in telling someone else what to do. So the rules are, well, they're more of a guide. Take, for example, the speed for driving past a bus. In New Zealand, it's 30kph. Nice and simple, no arguments. In Sweden it's "sufficient speed to be able to stop if necessary". What the fek is that all about ? Basically about half of the road rules are like that. Which makes learning them extremely time consuming. You have to know pretty much every line on every page. And you have to understand it completely. Questions can come from the strangest places, where it looks like no one would EVER ask a dumb question like that. Being as the rules can be somewhat open to interpretation ( god bless them ), this is where a relationship with a traffic school (trafikskola) comes in handy. I paid about 200kr as a "joining fee". I then paid another 600kr to have access to their online computer training. You can buy traffic school programmes in shops, but the one I purchased from the traffic school was almost identical to the one used in the final test. So money very well spent. I used that a lot, and it paid off. If you can answer every question on the traffic school data programme, you be able to answer every exam question. I found this to be vital, as not all the information you need is found in the books. Don't ask me why, I didn't write them. The theory exam itself takes place using a computer at a Vägverket office. There is a time limit of 50 minutes, to get at least 50 of the 70 multichoice questions correct. The cost of the exercise was 400kr. The practical side, I was pretty comfortable with. After 20 years of driving. However, I was aware that I now had 20 years of bad driving habits also. And there's a few things that Swedes are rather picky on. Like environmentally friendly driving, for example. So here I used the traffic school again. I booked 2 one hour driving sessions with them, so they could show me what the examiners are going to be looking for. One trip was around town, the other was on open roads. Well worth the 1600kr total cost, as many of the points raised came up during the practical test, and I was also familiar with the test driving route. There's a requirement for a compulsary eyesight test and health declaration prior to sitting your tests. The driving schools will also not permit you to drive with them until you have those also. So get them out of the way first. Cost me 200kr at the local optician. Ok, the practical test itself. The final hurdle. I went a few minutes early, so I could cruise the car park and check out the examination cars. I had chosen to hire one of their cars for the exam, which cost 400kr. Traffic schools hire their cars for the same cost. You can't use your car from home. The actual test cost 700kr and lasted all of about 15 minutes. A few minutes in a residential area to show that you know the right hand rule. A few minutes on an open road, to show you know how to get on and off of one. And a few minutes negotiating traffic in the middle of town. I found the time spent driving with the traffic school to be invaluable here. So there it is. Stressful as hell, and expensive to boot. But also unavoidable. The system does try and help you along the way. Somewhat. Their intention is for you to be a good driver, not to try and make you fail. Accept that it's hard work, and you'll be just fine.