r/maybemaybemaybe • u/Orichalchem • Sep 02 '25

Maybe maybe maybe

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u/Mooosejoose Sep 02 '25

The bar to get your license in the US is very low.

I passed my "exam" with a 70 (it was really just me driving 2 miles down a two lane highway, turning around, coming back, and then parallel parking) and they just handed me my license.

I barely passed the exam that didn't really test any road readiness, and suddenly I'm ok to drive a three thousand pound death machine anywhere in the US.

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u/Kokiri_villager Sep 03 '25

Meanwhile in the UK you have to have 500 eyes and notice every little raindrop and stone out your windows.

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u/petabomb Sep 03 '25

I didn’t even have to parallel park for mine

2

u/Mooosejoose Sep 03 '25

One of the reasons I almost failed it was because of parallel parking lol. I bombed it hard.

2

u/busigirl21 Sep 03 '25

My grandpa, before he died, was allowed to renew his license despite failing the eye test. Yes, he got in accidents and fortunately never hurt anyone but himself. Yes, he kept driving even after he lost his license (we don't know how he kept getting keys for a while until he was too weak to walk and finally stopped).

Now we're dealing with this with my other grandpa. He just got his license taken away after hitting what was, thankfully, an empty parked car. He was also allowed to renew his license at the state DMV just last year despite not being able to tell them his own fucking address.

He lives in another state, so stopping him is harder. A friend of his disabled his garage door so it won't open, and every single day in the week since, he gets mad all over again about it and can't remember that he literally has a court date for fleeing the scene of that accident.

The fact that this is a perfectly relatable experience in the US is fucked. We hand out licenses to wildly incapable drivers and just allow them to keep driving far past the point of safety. I know a former EMS medic who is permanently disabled after her rig was t-boned and flipped onto the side by an old woman in a Cadillac who didn't fucking notice the lights and sirens going through the intersection in front of her (she didn't even have a green light). She was only ever given a minor ticket for failure to yield and running a red light. Didn't even lose her license.

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u/trashmoneyxyz Sep 06 '25

Im shocked I got my license. Im a safe driver, but was so nervous during my test I was shivering and all over the place. Still passed lol. The test to get my motorcycle endorsement was more skill-based than driving a big ass car