How driving test faults work: minors, serious, dangerous

The threshold in plain numbers

• 0 to 15 driving faults, no serious, no dangerous: pass.
• 16 or more driving faults: fail.
• Any serious fault: fail, even with zero driving faults.
• Any dangerous fault: fail, and the examiner may end the test early.

For comparison, a lorry, bus or coach test allows no more than 12 driving faults, and the ADI part 2 test that instructors themselves sit allows no more than 6. If you are a pupil complaining that fifteen is harsh, your instructor passed a test with six.

How a minor becomes a serious fault

This is the part almost nobody explains, and it is where tests are quietly lost. A driving fault is marked in a box on the form for that skill. Make the same fault again and it is marked again. Keep making it and the examiner is entitled to conclude the fault is not a one-off but a habit, and a habit that has the potential to be dangerous is a serious fault.

So three faults in the same box are worse than three faults in three different boxes, even though the running total is identical. A pupil who checks their mirrors properly except when turning right, every single time, is at more risk than a pupil who made three unrelated errors.

What the current numbers look like

Roughly half of candidates fail, and the pass rate has been climbing slowly: it was 40.8% in 2014 to 2015 and 46.8% in 2023 to 2024. Failures cluster in observation and judgement rather than in the manoeuvres people worry about, which is why route familiarity and independent driving practice move the needle more than another hour of bay parking.

What actually gets marked

The categories on the marking sheet that produce the most faults are consistently the same, and they are all about looking rather than about car control.

• Observation at junctions, which is the single largest source of serious faults.
• Mirrors, particularly before signalling and before changing speed or direction.
• Steering control and road position on bends and past parked cars.
• Response to traffic lights and signs, including creeping forward at a red.
• Moving off safely, especially the blind spot check.
• Making appropriate progress, which pupils rarely believe is a fault until they see it marked.

None of those are fixed by learning a route. All of them are helped by driving roads the pupil already recognises, because a driver who is not working out where they are has attention left over for the mirror.