Taking a driving test for the first time can be a super nerve-racking process, but these 17 drivers took their anxiety to a whole new level. We can't believe the things that happened in these cars and we're glad we weren't there to witness it all firsthand!
The Biggest Road Block
“Was an examiner for a few years. My applicant hit a house. Street curved, applicant hit the gas instead of the brake (there was no curb) and drove across the lawn, completely out of control, and smashed into a brick house. Broke the house and the car. I was young then so I was fine and so was the young girl applicant. If it happened now I’d probably end up in the hospital. That’s not even the best thing I witnessed but it’s the best story featuring myself.” Source
How Was He Supposed To Know?!
“I failed my first test because I kept landing on the wrong side of the street everytime I turned with the excuse of ‘there’s no cars, how am I supposed to know which lane is mine’ and because I didn’t do any full stops because ‘nobody actually does that.'” Source
That’s Just Harsh
“My ex failed her drivers test because of her grandfather’s death. She had gone a few months without a license, but when her grandfather passed away, her grandmother couldn’t be trusted to drive herself around safely. The driving instructor was a born again Christian. He got into a conversation about her accepting Jesus. And her family accepting. This rolled into him telling her that her grandfather went to hell for not accepting Jesus before he passed. She started bawling uncontrollably. On the highway. He made her pull off at an exit and she ran his mid-90’s Nissan Maxima over a curb and down into a small ditch. Needless to say she didn’t get her license, and he was banned from talking about Jesus while teaching kids to drive. (He was a teacher at our high school and the class was through the HS).” Source
Hold On, I’m Taking A Test
“A friend failed when I called them during the test. He answered the phone and told me he can’t speak because he’s in the middle of a driving test.” Source
You Were Kidnapped?
“I played an evil prank on my younger sister during her driving test. She wanted to use my car for the road test. I didn’t want to let her, but my mom forced me to. I was put out, so right before she came to take the car for her driving test…I had my friends hog tie me and I hid in the trunk. Waited until her test was well underway, and started thumping on the trunk and screaming. Finally after 15 minutes of writhing and starting to get pretty sweaty (seriously was considering kicking out a headlight) the driving examiner made her open the trunk, where she found a sweaty teenage girl gagged and hog tied in the back, pretending to be terrified. What did my sister do? Deny it? Explain it? Scream? No. She took one look and said ‘Ugh. It’s just my sister.’ Shut the trunk, and actually tried to get back in the car and finish her test. That sure was a tricky one for our mother to explain to the police.” Source
A Medical Emergency
“One man had a massive heart attack during the test. Blood exploded from his mouth. His foot went down hard on the pedal. Went through bushes, a brick mailbox, a ditch, a fence, and a shed before stopping. The young girl (me) giving the road test freaked the f_ck out, had a nervous breakdown, and quit.” Source
I Swear It Wasn’t There When We Started
“My ex-wife failed her test (on a route that we trained on) by running a stop sign, then claiming she never saw it…. I don’t know how she didn’t see it, with the flashing red lights and all…. But I’m glad she never got her license (I don’t think she has it still).” Source
Let’s Just Take A Little Cat Nap
“I have a reverse story about how a driving examiner failed at examining my test. We had to drive on the insterstate for a certain period of time to show the instructor we were comfortable with fast moving traffic. So I pull onto the interstate and everything is going well, my eyes are on the road, 10 and 2, in the f_cking zone, not looking anywhere but on the road and at my mirrors. Feels like I have been driving for hours. Finally, I look over and my instructor is dead asleep. I’m close to 2 hours from where I started and I nudge the instructor, she wakes up, freaks the f_ck out and tells me to pull off the next exit. She gets behind the wheel and drives us back, politely asks me to not mention what happened to anyone. I passed.” Source
Wait, Which Way Do I Go?
“My friend somehow drove counter-clockwise on a (clockwise) roundabout…” Source
Just Let Me Hit The Gas!
“My uncle has a great driving test story. For part of his test, the instructor had him drive on the highway for a little while. Everything was going fine until, up ahead, the road was closed for construction. Now, he should have slowed down, but he was inexperienced and sped up to pass the car in the next lane but didn’t really have enough space. The instructor sees traffic cones and constructing workers ahead so he starts slamming on the instructor brake on the passenger side. My uncle notices the car lurch from the brake, but he’d just passed the other car and wants to change lanes. So, he floors the gas to make up for the instructor’s braking. At this point, he’d already starting running over the safety cones, and they’re flying up behind the car as he speeds over them. Finally, just as the construction workers are getting ready to dive away from his cone-flinging death machine, he manages to change lanes. All the while, fighting the braking of the instructor by flooring the gas. He failed the test.” Source
Just A Little Swim
“My mother drove the driver’s ed car off a bridge into a creek in 10th grade. Still passed. I failed my test 3 years ago when I moved to a new state because I was using my girlfriend’s car, which was a Mini Cooper with a really tight turn radius and weird acceleration. I had never driven it before so it was a bad choice for parallel parking. It was extremely embarrassing to pull back into the BMV to tell her I failed so she would be driving for our dates for a few weeks.” Source
So Close, Yet So Far
“My old instructor told me his best story. Student did really well on the test. Pulled over and parked at the side of the road at the end of the test because the car park was full. Examiner fills in the paperwork that says he’s passed, hands it to the student. Student is really happy, thanks the examiner, opens the car door, doesn’t look…and a passing van takes the car door off. Pass retracted instantly and the student owed the instructor a new car door. Imagine what a pisser it is to fail with the pass certificate still in your hand.” Source
Just Take It Anyway
“I have a friend that failed his first driving test because he completed a left turn when the light turned yellow. The test administrator claimed he was running a red light, and told him he should have reversed back to the original position. Another friend failed the driving test three or four times, for various reasons. On the fourth or fifth try, she finally passed the driving test, and we are all fairly certain it was a pity pass. She is 25 now and still an unbelievably god-awful driver. My 92-year-old grandmother, who has always been an awful driver, performed so poorly on her driving test in the 1940s, the test administrator gave her her license on the condition that she agreed to only drive to and from work. My mom and uncle frequently joke that she would have had her license revoked if she had ever had to retake the driving test.” Source
That’s A Scary Sight
“Not a driving examiner, but a stage check instructor at a flight school, so similar idea. One girl came in as a private pilot and wanted to continue her training. I flew with her a few times to get her used to our airplanes, etc. as a bit of a re-check to see where she was at. She was more hazardous than a new student in their first week of training. She got halfway to takeoff speed on a taxiway, and when I took over and slowed us down she asked why we were going so fast. She had the throttle set to nearly full with no brakes.
Same thing climbing out of the airport – I told her to level off at an altitude, and she set full power and pointed the airplane up so we kept climbing. 500 feet too high… 1000 feet too high… I finally had to take over so we didn’t enter airspace we weren’t cleared into. Her response was similar… wanted to know why we kept climbing. Tried steep turns with her, they’re supposed to be a 360 degree turn while maintaining altitude. I recorded our flight track, and it looks more like the drop at the top of a rollercoaster when we started the turn. After losing about 1,500 feet in a few seconds and accelerating rapidly towards the ground, she took her hands off the yoke and told me I had controls. Had to stop her from entering active runways people were landing on that we didn’t have clearance for multiple times. She owns her own airplane and is legal to fly it. Scary thought. She ended up leaving the school once she figured out she wasn’t up to our standards, let alone those of her private pilot certificate.” Source
A Parallel Disaster
“My first time was totally fine. My second time (I moved and my old license was so expired I had to start over) was hilarious. Sometimes, I parallel park like I was born doing it. It’s so beautiful when I’m in the groove and do the perfect, ‘back, swing the back, swing the front, pull forward to center, fin.’ Other times, you might think I’m having a grand mal seizure and I’ve got the shifter in one hand and the wheel in the other. I took my test in a quiet residential neighborhood, figuring the DMV would be slower and the test more relaxed. We drove around on some residential streets, I stopped, I yielded, it was good times. Then, on a long block with no one parked on the curb but a lonely van 3/4 of the way down, it’s parallel parking time. Examiner tells me to parallel park right behind the van. I pull in front side, right on the curb, right behind the van. I look at the examiner and smile. He chuckles and says, ‘try again.’ I shrug and put the car in reverse. I pull alongside the van, put the car in reverse and start swinging in. I hit the curb. Back and forth, I probably hit the curb six or eight times. The examiner by this time is having a seriously hard time composing himself and he’s doubled over laughing. Once he can sit back up and breathe he says, ‘well, you’re persistent, I’ll give you that’ and we carry on. We get back to the DMV and he starts chuckling again as he’s totaling up the test. Finally, he looks up smiling and tells me I passed. For you, though – relax. You’ll do just fine, because you’re not doing anything you don’t know how to do, right?” Source
Wait, Put It In Reverse!
“Not an examiner but I have a great story. When I was taking my driving test the DMV (as usual) was packed and most people driving the course that day were learner drivers or testers. Now the route wasn’t that hard–a few right turns, a few left turns, stop streets, traffic lights–the usual stuff. Anyway, I pull up to a red left turn arrow behind one other car at a dead stop. The car then heads into the intersection, gets half way through and the realizes they made an illegal left turn through a red light into oncoming traffic. Next thing I see is the car grinding into reverse and speeding back towards me. While this is happening I put my hand on the gear shift just incase I needed to get out of this guy’s way and mentally prepare myself for impact or to use the horn but thankfully no need. It then stopped just short of the crosswalk, a few feet from my car but still definitely blocking the cross traffic. Out jumps the DMV tester with her clipboard. And she just walks up to the center divider and back towards the DMV. Just leaving this poor kid two thirds in the intersection blocking the cross traffic. Anyway, the light turned green. The kid pulled his left turn. Pulled up to the curb and got out leaving his car idling as I drove past in the number 1 lane. The examiner couldn’t stop laughing at the poor kid.” Source
I Give Up
“I was an examiner for 4 or 5 years. I have lots of stories. Here’s a sampling. We were turning left at a large intersection controlled by traffic lights. This road is a 6-lane road that’s divided in the middle. We had a green light and everything was fine. As she got about halfway through the turn, she looked up and saw the red light facing in the other direction, panicked, turned back to the right, which now means we’re driving down the wrong side of a huge road. Thankfully, there was another intersection nearby that had a red light, so there were no cars coming. That gave us enough time to turn around and head straight back to the test centre. She didn’t say a word to me after that–completely silent. I felt kind of bad because I think she was a decent driver that was just really nervous and f_cked up badly. Another time, during winter, we were driving a little fast for the conditions. The roads weren’t used much and were a little slick. We were approaching a 90-degree turn and she wasn’t slowing down. On the outside of the turn was a deep ditch filled with icy water and muck. I distinctly remember debating with myself as to whether I should tell her to slow down but the part of me that wanted to see what would happen won, so I kept my mouth shut. She started to make the turn but the tires lost grip and we went into the ditch sideways, and came to rest at probably a 45-degree angle. I had to climb out the driver’s side and we both walked back to the building. Her dad had to call a tow truck to haul the car out. That story kind of makes me sound like a dick but when you do that job it’s almost like you’re watching a movie sometimes. I’ve been in situations that were incredibly dangerous, but I’ve just watched them unfold without even a rise in my heart rate. Afterwards I would think to myself ‘Man, I really should have done something there,’ but at the time you’re just this passive observer of whatever is going on. It’s a bit surreal sometimes. Yet another story – we were parallel parking and the guy hit the accelerator instead of the brake and sent us up over the curb with the rear tire. When we stopped there was a loud hissing sound coming from that wheel, so I knew the tire had blown from the force of the impact. I said to the kid, ‘Ok, let’s get out.’ He asked why, and I told him the tire had blown. He didn’t believe me. He had to go out to check. Last one. We had hit the curb pretty hard during parallel parking a few minutes previously and were now turning left at an intersection. As we were turning I looked out the passenger window and watched as the hubcap separated from the wheel and continue down the road. I have plenty more stories about merging onto the highway, failing priests and nuns (the nuns were always terrible), motorcycle tests and just plain stupidity. And no, Asians weren’t the worst drivers. That honour goes to people 50+ getting their licence for the first time. Almost guaranteed fail.” Source