How (Not) to Pass a Driving Exam in the Netherlands as an Old Fart in a Mid-life Crisis

I have a driver's license! And it's been twenty years in the making.

As a teen, I was learning to drive because that's what teens are supposed to do. I could never afford a car, but at least I could respond to those cryptic recruitment ads requiring a driver's license for an office job, which would often turn out to be an MLM, a cult, or both. It was the mid-aughts in Eastern Europe, and my driving instructor smoked a lot. I worked with his wife, who was selling advertisements for a radio station whose basement studios I grew up in. I didn't like driving, manual gear shifting freaked me out, and I had no motivation to pass the exam because I wasn't ready to join a cult.

Luckily, I messed up my ankle so bad that I couldn't even walk for a couple of months, and then I moved cities and decided to postpone the whole driving thing until next year.

And suddenly, it was 2023.

Do you even need a car?

I live in the Netherlands now, where public transport is expensive but reliable. Yes, it's better than Deutsche Bahn. No, it can't deal with snow. Yes, we only get snow one or two days a year.

While Dutch urban centers are very well connected, except at night, the older I got, the more I felt the need to stop relying solely on public transport.

I was photographing a convention some 60 kilometers away on a day when the entire public transportation system was on strike. A cat of ours broke his leg and was sent to a surgeon in a village 70 kilometers away, which somehow translated to two and a half hours by train... one way. Another cat had to have major surgery only twenty kilometers from our house, and with public transport, that took about an hour.

It gets even worse if you want to go somewhere less urban. If I wanted to photograph the sunrise in a heather field in the east of the country, I would need to catch a train before midnight. In foreign countries, I took a lot of road trips with friends and realized I wanted to be the friend who takes people on road trips. I could change a tire, but otherwise, I felt pretty useless.

Then, a mid-life crisis hit me, and I dyed my hair teal, disappeared for a while, and re-emerged, having realized that I wanted to learn to drive (and also to swim, but that's a different story), and I did it, and here's how.

Dutch driving theory exam: prepare to study

The driving theory exam in the Netherlands is difficult. The only one I'm aware of that is more difficult is the one in the UK.

Back in my day, in the mid-aughts in Eastern Europe, the theory exam was something you could prepare for in a day. It was just a couple of pages of traffic signs, and you'd probably already know them.

Driving theory in the Netherlands, twenty years later, was... different.

Many people fail this exam. A guy I know knows a guy who took it TEN TIMES. It's, however, not expensive (compared to the practical one): as I'm writing this, it costs around 50 euros (per attempt, of course).

The theory exam has 65 randomly selected questions divided into three sections. I don't know how many questions are precisely in the database, but it's assumed there are 1000-1500.

The first part of the exam is Hazard Perception: you're a driver, and you get an image of what you see through the windshield, on your dashboard, and in your mirror, and you have eight seconds to break, decelerate, or do nothing. If you're slow, this does time out, and you're immediately served the next question.

The second and third part of the exam are called Knowledge, where they check if you know the rules, and Insight, where you should apply them correctly.

You can take this exam in English, but beware - after a rough patch and several failed attempts (more on that later), a friend told me: "Hey, I think the translation is throwing you off." And he was right!

For instance: "Motorcycles may overtake you on the right," if you're Dutch, means they're legally allowed to overtake you on the right. I'm not. Dutch, nor a motorcycle.

So eventually, I focused on recognizing and eliminating the obvious crap in multiple-choice questions and then wrestling with the language. Some terms are also not easily translatable: an autoweg is a highway, and an autosnelweg is a faster highway. Some attempts at translating those to English may result in highway and motorway, which might mean motorway and highway somewhere else, and usually, they both mean the same thing, but one of those has a different meaning in Australia.

Driving lessons are fun, sometimes

If you've done as I said and not as I did, you now have a certificate saying that you've passed the theory test and are ready to learn to drive! You have 18 months to pass your driving test, so hurry up!

There is no one-size-fits-all when it comes to choosing a driving school. There's a school in Amsterdam that won't teach you to drive a car but will teach you to drive a Tesla. Some schools are modern, using mobile apps and digital personalized checklists, and they're usually more expensive. Some are analog and old-timey but cheaper.

I reached out to a guy who immediately tried to upsell me and who told me that the waiting lists for driving tests are six months long. I emailed a highly-praised school, and they never responded to my email (not even after numerous follow-ups). In the end I opted for a driving school from my neighborhood that wasn't the most modern of the bunch, but it was affordable, it’s been around forever, and their waiting list wasn't long. They also have so many students that they also have a lot of cancellations - which means they can (re)book your driving exam on relatively short notice.

Know when to stop (or at least take a break)

In September 2023, our cat Gary started getting sick. His chronic condition, successfully kept at bay for over a decade, was getting worse. In October, he underwent major surgery, where he had 90% of his large intestine removed. The recovery took a couple of months. My financial recovery took even longer.

At the same time, my work started ramping up, as it always does after the summer. I couldn’t say no to it because there was cat surgery to pay for, and by that time, my savings for driving lessons were getting thin.

I tried to power through all that - that’s what you do, right? And between all the work, all the extracurriculars, and all the Gary anxiety, I failed a theory exam upon a theory exam that I went to because I couldn’t reschedule them. I ruined my motivation for driving while I plateaued on every other front as well, got a three-month-long migraine that gave me significant brain fog and, in turn, even more stress and a three-month-long bout of insomnia.

Eventually, in late November, I took a break from my driving lessons. In December, I fought fire with fire and got Botox for my migraine. It worked! Gary was doing okay, and we had just figured out his new medication. I could finally sit down and study, so I passed the theory exam in mid-January and resumed my driving lessons a couple of weeks later.

Yes, you need an interim exam

Interim test, or tussentijdse toets (yes, Dutch is a real language), is a mock exam you can take when your driving instructor assesses you're at least halfway there (a common practice seems to be 3/4 of the way there, but your mileage may vary (pun intended)). You should be able to perform special maneuvers safely, so you should spend some time practicing parallel parking, reverse turning, 3-point turning, U-turns, reverse and bay parking.

An interim exam can't pass or fail you, but it can get an exemption from having to perform special maneuvers on your actual driving exam.

But the best thing about taking a tussentijdse toets is that it looks exactly like your driving exam will - and at the end of it, you'll get helpful feedback from the examiner, so you'll know what to focus on for the big exam.

After my tussentijdse toets, the examiner told me I would get the exemption from special maneuvers but that I needed to make my world bigger. Aside from this being a sound life advice, it actually helped - I was so nervous that I got tunnel vision, which, in turn, made me more nervous. I worked on that for my driving exam, and...

Driving test

... I passed it in one go!

And hopefully, this article will help you do the same.

If you've done everything as I said, and not always as I did, at this point, you should be ready to take the "big" test. You should also be exempt from special maneuvers, which means you'll have more time for actual driving - for better or worse.

I took my driving test in June of 2024 at CBT Noorderbocht in Rotterdam. Around two-thirds of it was driving with verbal instructions from the examiner. A third of it was driving with navigation.

(You will have spent a considerable amount of time using navigation during your driving lessons - that's how you'll drive in the real world, and they want to make sure you can do it safely.)

With all the bikes on the road and narrow inner city streets, the Dutch are very particular about keeping all the road users unharmed. That translates, among other things, into an elaborate scanning technique (yes, they will look at your eyes, and yes, it's more complicated if you're wearing sunglasses). You're allowed to make mistakes, but you have to resolve them safely. You can also ask for clarification if you don't understand an instruction, so don't try to play smart!

Your examiner can also play a part in your performance during the exam. My examiner was a woman, and she was very relaxed and soft-spoken. That was great because some male examiners can be too broey (and testosterone confuses me).

You’re a driver now

From the first minute of my driving test, when I decided to overtake a very slow biker on a narrow street, I thought I would either pass it with flying colors or fail it miserably. Luckily, it was the former!

My examiner didn’t tell me that until we were back at the exam center, out of the car, up the stairs, and back at the desk where we started.

And then… you drive! But what? And where?!

Having spent as much time and money on my driving lessons as I have, I didn’t want to be one of those people who had gotten their licenses, never drove again, and are now afraid of cars. (And for some reason, most people my age seem to belong to that camp).

A friend who had also obtained her license very recently told me that I had to drive somewhere every week - otherwise, I’d lose confidence and start avoiding it. And I listened to her.

When I picked up my license, I immediately signed up for a car-sharing platform and took my partner to Ikea. And we didn’t die! Over the next couple of weeks, I had to remap the roads in my mind - during my lessons, it got so repetitive at times that I had to divorce them from reality not to go crazy. 🤪 A friend visited me, which was also a great excuse to drive around.

However, booking a shared car proved a bit nerve-racking. Sometimes a car I wanted wouldn’t be available and I’d have to rent a car I didn’t know, or with poorly written instructions, or that I wouldn’t know how to use (PLEASE STOP TURNING CARS INTO IPADS, THANKS).

I also managed to spend 200€ on shared cars in only two weeks - and for that money, I thought, I might as well just own a car - especially since I didn’t see myself driving any less.

So, a week later, I sent this photo to a friend. She told me it was a photo an American teenager would have.

Welp.