Albert Einstein reportedly failed his driving test for not checking his mirrors before setting off; Stephen Fry apparently failed his driving test twice – once for making an absolute hames of a zebra-crossing and then for throwing a flan out of the sunroof, and Pat from Eggheads is rumoured to have failed his for pulling in on the hard shoulder on an N-road to take a 20-minute phone call from his sister-in-law about having a sofa delivered. What can these hypothetical scenarios tell us? That I have already invested too much time into this relatively unimportant article? Almost certainly. That intelligent people are more likely to fail their driving test on the first try? To not put too fine a point on it – yes.
The name ‘Insurers Privilege DriveXpert’ might mean nothing to you, I will admit that, until about 7 minutes ago, it might nothing to me – and, by the time I finish writing this article, I fully expect that dynamic to have reasserted itself. But what if I were to tell you that they have done a study of some 1,500 people with full driving licenses, measuring the various pass rates of those with and without qualifications. And what if I were to then tell you that there was a marginal discrepancy in these results, outside any possible margin of error, which could lead me to safely headline this piece as I’ve done.
That’s right, according to their study of UK drivers, some 59% of those drivers possessing no qualifications passed their test first time, while the pass rate for those with A Levels dropped to around 51%. And oh, dear, sweet reader if you thought that we had come to the end of the use of percentages in this article then you are sorely mistaken. For anyone holding an undergraduate degree first-time pass-rates dropped to 48% while anyone with post-graduate qualifications, we’re looking at the loss of an extra percent yo’, bringing the average pass rate down to 47%.
What we see here is undeniable. The more educated someone is, the worse they are at driving. It is an evident and unavoidable correlation. Extrapolating further, it seems safe to assume that if you got anyone with a PhD and a couple of honourary doctorates to their name and showed them to a car, they’d collapse into a drooling wreck on the ground. If you strapped them into the driver seat they’d, at best, while accidentally flailing around in confusion, maybe flip on the indicators or turn on the radio. They would be so unprepared to engage with anything that could reasonably be called ‘driving’ that they ought be pitied more than anything.
Where does this information leave us? Well, I propose that the natural corollary to this would be that the less educated someone is the better they will be at driving. Which is why we must instigate some nationwide campaign to have people taught how to drive before the corrupting force of education has a chance to ruin their natural aptitude for gettin’ real behind the wheel. The younger the better. Before children are even taught the alphabet they should be affixed to a booster seat and bolted behind into the cockpit of a Ford Ka or some other car quirky and adorable enough that it would seem suitably cute to see a child driving it rather than a horrifying example of a study’s results being terribly misunderstood. Them babies’d be tearing it up Schumacher style (pre-accident) before we knew it!
