Teach Yourself to Drive in Northern Ireland: From Car Control to Driving Test in 20 Lessons (Learning to Drive in Northern Ireland)

This book will take you smoothly from that first Sunday-morning drive around a deserted car park, all the way through to your driving test, covering all aspects of car control and road knowledge, and giving you all the test information and manoeuvring skills you’ll need.

So this book will help get you driving test ready. And that’s the Northern Ireland driving test. The vast majority of the media out there – from books to online videos – refers only to the GB test. And, although the tests are similar, there are still plenty of differences between their test and ours:

• Safety questions
• Speed limits
• Pedestrians at junctions
• Independent driving
• Motorways

So plenty for us to get our teeth into!

The idea behind this book is for you to simply read one or all of the lessons here before heading out to your car to practise. Then you can revise the lessons as often as you wish. Or, if you’re about to embark on a course of driving lessons, you can use this book to give you a firm foundation of knowledge, to set you on the right track.

These lessons have developed over my thirty year career as a driving instructor, teaching fifteen-hundred pupils and covering half-a-million driving instruction miles. In 2015 I received the Northern Ireland Driving Instructor of the Year award. My road experience also includes working as a lorry driver, as well as decades of motorcycling – and both trucks and bikes have taken me all over the UK and Europe. I’ve also written extensively on the subject of driving, both online and for publication.

The lessons here, then, are a result of a lifetime’s road experience.

But what these lessons aren’t is a rehash of any official-sounding government driving book. So, errors and omissions, though hopefully few, are nonetheless accepted! But, if you’re able to practise the lessons, and develop as a driver, this is where the knowledge and experience of your Supervisor comes into the mix. We’re all working together. I lay the foundations, you guys build on them.

Ah, yes…your Supervisor. That’s what we’ll call the person who’s helping you with the practical aspects of your driving. This could be a professional driving instructor, or could just as easily be a friend or family member, but someone giving you their time – and quite possibly lending you their car – to help you on your quest to passing the driving test.

On the audio version of this book – which is just me reading all this stuff to you – the individual lessons run from just a few minutes up to about half-an-hour, with a total running time of about five hours. And, yeah, I know, that sounds like ages but, during a course of driving lessons, a professional instructor would spend just as much time working through these same lessons with you, but with the two of you often just parked at the side of the road.

Okay – fair enough – having covered a new lesson, a professional instructor would then help you to practise that lesson. But the actual lessons you’re taken through are essentially universal. So, although every instructor likes to think of the way they teach as being unique, they all teach basically the same lessons.

They’re the lessons in this book.

So, here we cover the full syllabus, taught systematically, building up your skills and knowledge in a structured way. The techniques and skills you must master, all the road and test knowledge you must know, it’s all broken down into its component parts and laid out in the three sections of this book:

• Section 1: Your car’s controls and developing real control
• Section 2: Understanding the rules of the road and mastering traffic situations
• Section 3: What to expect from your Driving Examiner and what your Examiner will expect from you

Everything you need.
It’s all here.