Fahrstunden: Die Lernenden haben Schwierigkeiten, vor dem Test zu bezahlen, aber die Ausbilder sagen die Preisfair
https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c7vnp4j2811o
Von honesto_pinion
Fahrstunden: Die Lernenden haben Schwierigkeiten, vor dem Test zu bezahlen, aber die Ausbilder sagen die Preisfair
https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c7vnp4j2811o
Von honesto_pinion
30 Kommentare
What is the BBC thinking with these articles, then? Driving lessons are expensive, yes, we get that, so here’s a bunch of people complaining that they can’t afford more than £80 or £90 a month but expect to be tootling around in cars as new drivers?
Absolutely, get a driving licence, it’s a skill and it’s worth having, but this article is trying to make out that the only barrier to automotive joy is the cost of driving lessons…
Anyone who needs a license, get it fast. I think in the next 5 years it will be pretty much closed off for new drivers outside of those who are really well off.
Driving instructors have to pay for the fuel and very expensive car insurance to do their job. You might find some cheaper than others but, by and large, their pricing is fair.
£40 an hour as upper limit.
Let’s assume 7 chargeable hours per working day.
Self employed typically so no holiday pay.
7 hours * 5 days * £40 * 48 weeks = £67900
Subtract cost of fuel, the car itself and depreciation, car insurance.
Making OK money but hardly making bank. Especially in high cost of living areas.
The average price quoted is £35 which doesn’t seem unreasonable for one to one tuition in someone else’s car. I doubt driving instructors are getting rich
Just another way in which right wing ideologies only benefit the ultra rich.
Everyone (who wants) has a right to drive and the government should bring about price controls so driving doesn’t just turn into some ultra rich pursuit with those who are less rich (including a disproportionate number of minorities etc) being excluded. This violates the equality act anyway.
BBC excelling themselves in poor journalism. How are these people going to afford a car if they cannot afford lessons?
The cost of the lessons is much less than the cost of purchasing even a cheap old car and the first year of insurance. Especially so for under 25s.
The biggest problem is wages have barely grown over the last decade or two, so the price of driving lessons (and driving in general) has increased with inflation + other market forces, but wages have remained the same.
Combine that with a high proportion of people who barely have any savings, you get articles like this written where people are struggling with the weekly costs
If they can’t pay for lessons they certainly can’t afford to buy, run, or maintain a car.
Presumably once they have a licence their car,insurance, tax and fuel are all free.
Given that I and my friends were paying £10-£15 an hour back in 1989, £35 seems quite reasonable.
Another BBC article designed to incite rage bait instead of any insightful reporting. A quote from one lady says she had to dip into her savings to pay for lessons… did she expect the council to be running them for free?
Up until 6 months ago for a year or so I paid £38 a lesson once a week. Had to pay extra for theory test, and in the 2 weeks prior to my practical test (passed first time) I paid for a whole block of ten lessons to have a lesson every single day to get enough practice in.
I’m now paying for insurance, tax, petrol and maintenance and upkeep which probably works out more than that.
If you can’t afford lessons, then you probably can’t afford to drive.
If you can’t to spend £140 a month on driving lessons you can’t even get close to being able to afford to run a car,
It’s always been expensive because they have to pay for the fuel. I did my lessons at 18 in 2011 and they were expensive then as well. But I could only afford to do it because I received £1000 inheritance from my grandparents. Turned out I was useless, so ended up spending the entire amount as it took me over a year before being test-ready.
If I remember right, my lessons were £30-35 for the session, so it seems it’s not much more expensive now.
Quite a few people think they’re clever saying if you can’t afford lessons then you can’t afford a car anyway, which a very short-sighted way of looking at it. Driving is a skill better learnt younger than older, when you have more free time (I learnt in summer holiday between years at Uni). A useful skill to have, just because you can’t afford a car right now doesn’t mean driving isn’t worth learning for future. Even if you can’t afford a car, you can drive a car for work, you can hire a car. Suddenly being in a position in life when you need to drive and not being able to for months is a big problem, it restricts where you can live and work, opportunity for travel or times when you simply need someone capable of driving. You can’t suddenly learn overnight when the necessity arises, learning to drive is best done before you have urgent need to be able to drive.
It’s crazy how long and expensive the process is.
We just keep adding more and more requirements and cost, but ultimately it just harms the economy – same as with house-building restrictions.
IMO it should be easier, but the laws should be much more heavily enforced regarding insurance, driving under the influence of drugs or alcohol, etc.
The main role of government should be to make everything cheaper and easier.
years of under investment. Like or not inflation has caused everyone prices to go up. I passed in March 2025 and paid close to 4 grand for just shy of 98 hours worth of lessons. 40 pounds per hour. Ye slow learner. It is what it is .Save your pennies see if family can assist but ultimately its going to cost. Overtime was killer for me .
It’s a rip off and they cheat students. My sister and brothers all passed under 25 hours and I had to pay 40+ hours of two hour lessons. I ended up getting my own car and passing first time in that.
The two hour lessons is to save them the aggro of driving around to pick up multiple people for lessons. I’ll die on that hill.
Where I live I see a lot of learners as on a test route and there seems to be far more independent teachers then ones attached to say AA so suggests that competition is fine and not a cause of prices
Once passed test then cost of insurance will be a shock
In terms of tests, is stupid how instructors can book so many tests causing backlog and that needs to be fixed.
A lot of instructors make you by a package of five lessons so there’s no way out of spending a shit load straight off the bat
Wait until she sees the cost of owning and running a car, £55 an hour for a mechanic to fix stuff in my experience, anyway.
One solution if you someone who needs a lot of lessons to learn (I read it takes 45hrs on average?), don’t have a family member to teach you and already have a desktop pc is to get a sim racing setup(£300, so around 9 lessons worth).
I only needed about 6 lessons before I could pass my test, because I had thousands of hours sim racing. To drill in good habits you can place 3 mirrors on your desk. I don’t see how an experienced sim racer would need more than 10hrs of lessons this way, and thus more than halve the cost of the average learner, the only issue is having a good desktop pc already which is obviously £1k+. Bonus is that sim racing is an awesome hobby to get into.
Personally I don’t think the prices are expensive. The insurance for the driving instructor will be sky high, petrol used, and maintenance on the car itself will be very high, and that’s all before the instructors salary and the licence fee they have to pay to be a registered driving instructor.
I would never have been able to drive without my parents paying for most of my lessons
If someone cannot afford car lessons, they cannot afford a car…
If anything this sounds like a rant about privilege and detachment from reality…
A car is not a privilege nor right, it’s luxury…
£35?! I wonder where it is. I pay £47 per lesson in the South and I kinda regret not doing them when I used to live up North. It’s expensive but everything else is compared to even before the pandemic.
In this age and era, it is quite primitive to operate a machine going 90km h all the time.
People complaining about the cost of driving lessons should, instead, be looking at why their wages haven’t gone up instead of blaming the instructors.
It’s the same as $80 video games: it’s going up in price but because our wages have stagnated it FEELS like it’s getting way too expensive. We’re all blaming the wrong thing here.