The Instructor Behind Woiliow Driving Academy

Eighteen years. I stopped counting tests somewhere past four thousand. People think the job is teaching a person to drive. It is not. Most of them can move it round a car park by the third lesson. The job is teaching them to read the road at speed, before it reads them. That is the hard part.

I am Anto Kavanagh. Before I ever sat in the passenger seat of a dual-control car I was a courier, bike then van, all over the city against a clock. So I have done the bad roads in the bad weather with the whole of Dublin behind me leaning on the horn. Then I trained as an Approved Driving Instructor and I have been doing that ever since, out of Tallaght, with learners from everywhere. I do not care where you are from. I care whether you checked the mirror.

What this site is, and what it is not

Not a shopfront. No fleet of shiny motors to admire, no team of smiling faces, no wall of five-star reviews. There is me, and there is what I have picked up, set down here so it might save you a test fee or a fright. Want a school? The pages here tell you how to pick a good one. Want to know how the theory test, the EDT lessons and the driving test actually run? That is what I am for.

I have no interest in selling you anything. I have a low opinion of bad habits and a lower one of the myths that go round: that the tester works to a quota, that nerves are what fail people, that you can cram the theory the night before and it sticks. None of it is true, and I will say so flat, because softening it is how you fail.

What I actually want for you

Two things, this order. Not dead on the road, then a pass. Not the other way round. A licence you got by fluke, off a tester having a soft morning, is a licence that lets you drive badly and legally for fifty years. That helps nobody, you least of all.

The things I keep coming back to

Read a few of these pages and you will notice the same handful of bugbears, because they are the ones that cost people. The parent who taught you wrong and is still sure of himself. The handbrake nobody touches on a hill start until it rolls back. The two-second gap everyone can recite and nobody keeps. The phone lighting up in the door pocket at the worst possible second.

None of that is me being a crank. Each one is a fault I have watched turn into a fright, or worse, from the passenger seat. If I go on about them it is because going on about them is cheaper than the alternative. Fix the small things and the big ones mostly never get the chance to happen.

Two kinds of learner. One thinks the test is the finish line. One thinks it is the start. The first passes and forgets the lot by Christmas. The second is the driver I would want beside my own family on the road. Be the second. Now go and practise the thing you are worst at.