Not one of the 535 licensed New Zealand drivers put through a 24 question test of basic road rules got every answer right, and most of them could not score above 70 percent.
The findings come from new research by the New Zealand Automobile Association, which has used them to call for optional road rules refreshers when drivers renew their licences. AA research and road safety manager Dylan Thomsen told RNZ programme Checkpoint on Tuesday that the results were “quite concerning”, and that the failure of a single participant to get full marks was the part that stood out.
The benchmark makes the numbers look worse. A learner licence theory test in New Zealand has to be passed at 90 percent accuracy. Of the 535 fully licensed drivers the AA surveyed, Thomsen said only a handful managed that mark on a test of the rules they are already legally entitled to drive under.
“It really showed that we’ve got some big gaps around basic driver knowledge in New Zealand, and we think that that’s something that we need to fix,” Thomsen told Checkpoint.
The most uncomfortable finding for anyone who assumes experience fills the gaps is that it does not. Drivers who had held a licence for more than four decades scored about the same as drivers who had held one for a single year. Forty years of daily practice produced no measurable advantage on the written rules.
That pattern makes more sense once you look at where the wrong answers clustered. Thomsen said the weakest scores were on rules that have changed in the last decade or so, which is exactly the material a driver who passed their tests in the 1980s has never been examined on.
“Bus lanes, cycle lanes, new types of variable speed signs, just those things that had kind of been introduced in the relatively recent past in New Zealand, that’s where the scores were lowest,” he said.
Even the strongest area was not strong. Give way scenarios produced the best results, and those topped out at around 80 percent. “You really wanted a lot more than that, [when it comes to] knowing who has the right of way,” Thomsen said. Roundabouts were another weak point, with many drivers unsure when to indicate and others not indicating at all.
Only 60 percent knew the rules for passing a cyclist, which Thomsen said was disappointing given how directly that one affects the most exposed people on the road.
He was careful not to overstate the safety consequences. “These road rules, they’re not necessarily the things that lead to those fatal crashes that make the headlines, but it’s the bedrock of us sharing the roads well together and it’s all the minor incidents,” he said. “It’s when people get it wrong and they have a near miss or maybe a minor prang that ends up in panel beating and insurance claims … all those kind of things, if we improve it, the roads get a bit safer and also a lot nicer for people to use.”
The AA’s proposed fix is deliberately modest. Rather than compulsory retesting, which would be politically difficult and administratively enormous, it wants the government to attach a voluntary refresher to the licence renewal that drivers already have to do.
“We think the best and easiest way to do that is make it an optional thing when you renew your licence – you can either do it the standard way, just the paperwork exercise, or we can have a discount for people who do a road rules refresher,” Thomsen said. “It makes it a bit cheaper for people and they get to check that they actually do know all the road rules, see some of the recent things that have changed … we just see it as a win-win.”
He put a price on it. “We have about 380,000 license renewals a year. If you were discounting those by $20, you’re talking less than $8 million,” he said. The arithmetic checks out at about $7.6 million if every single renewer took up the offer, which is the upper bound rather than the likely cost. Thomsen suggested the money could come from the existing road safety advertising budget or from traffic fine revenue.
The timing is what makes the proposal interesting. The research lands while the licensing system is being simplified in the opposite direction. Under changes announced by Transport Minister Chris Bishop in February and due to take effect on 25 January 2027, the second practical test that drivers currently sit to move from a restricted to a full licence will be scrapped altogether. The hazard perception component shifts to the restricted test, the learner period stretches to 12 months for drivers under 25, and the cost of getting a class one car licence drops from $362.50 to $282.50. Bishop described the package as the first major changes to the licensing system since 2011.
Those reforms are aimed at a real problem, which is the cost and difficulty of getting a full licence in a country where a licence is often the difference between having a job and not having one. But they deal with the first few years of a driving life. The AA research is about the fifty that follow. Most New Zealand licences renew on a ten year cycle, and a renewal is a photograph and a fee rather than any kind of test. A driver who passes at 18 can reach retirement without ever formally demonstrating that they know a rule introduced since.
Whether small gaps in written knowledge translate into crashes is harder to establish, and Thomsen did not claim they drive the fatal statistics. Readers can look at the long run pattern in our road toll tool, which tracks deaths on New Zealand roads back to 1921, and at where crashes actually happen in our crash map of every reported crash since 2000. Thomsen’s own estimate was that hundreds of minor accidents a day could be avoided if the knowledge gap closed.
The current rules are free to read. The NZTA road user questions and answers cover most of the material the survey found people getting wrong, and the AA runs its own road code practice tests online at no charge.
Would you back a discount on your licence renewal in exchange for sitting a short road rules refresher, or is this a problem better left to the people who actually cause crashes? Tell us what you think in the comments below.
This article was written by AI, briefed to report the facts, hopefully without some of the bias people bring to the job π
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