If you’ve tried booking the UK practical driving test in the past few years, you’ll know that it is extremely frustrating. Depending on where you live, it feels impossible to get a booking, or if you do manage to get booked in, it is usually months away. The fastest way I found to get a driving test was to use a third-party booking service.
In Summary
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Booking A Practical Driving Test Through DVSA Website
The official way to book a driving test is to go to the DVSA website and complete the booking form. Unfortunately, many of the test centres across the UK are constantly fully booked. So, unless you fancy taking your test at some test centre in a remote Scottish town, you’re stuffed.
Below are the methods I tried to get a practical driving test booked:
1) Get up early Monday morning
The DVSA releases new test dates (6 months in advance) at 6:00 am every Monday.
- You will find loads of other people and bots (automated) are also trying to book a test. The queue quickly reaches 10,000+ people.
- I found that even If I managed to get a good position in the queue, there were never any slots available at any of my local test centres.
- Even though the booking system doesn’t officially open until 6:00 am, it’s worth checking beforehand, as I found it opened earlier
2) Use a web browser extension
There are several web browser extensions that you can install to automatically refresh the web browser and alert you when a booking becomes available.
- Limit how often the extension automatically refreshes. If it’s too frequent, you will probably get blocked from accessing the DVSA website for a period of time.
- The web browser extensions are really only semi-automatic. You will need to constantly keep an eye on it, making sure it hasn’t been blocked or some issue has occurred. You’ll also need to quickly make the booking once a slot has been found by the browser extension.
3) Use a third-party test booking service
There are loads of websites and apps that you can register with and pay a fee for them to book a practical driving test for you. They usually work by checking for cancelled driving tests and booking you in.
After many months of unsuccessfully trying to book a test directly through the DVSA website, I ended up using one of the test booking services. They managed to get a test booked in about 5 weeks after I started using their service.
- By using a third-party booking website, you are becoming part of the problem. These 3rd party services use bots to automatically get bookings. This is partly what is swamping the DVSA booking system.
- Based on what I’ve read online, many third-party booking services turn out to be scams. If you decide to use one, make sure you pay by credit card or PayPal so you’ll have the option of getting your money back if it is fraudulent.
- The 3rd party booking services will ask you various questions about your availability. Keep your options as broad as possible. For example, don’t limit yourself to just one test centre or a narrow set of dates. The broader the options, the quicker they will find you a test date.
4) Book through your driving instructor
Apparently, driving instructors have a login to the DVSA website, which allows them to book tests. However, the driving instructor I spoke to said he could only book tests the same way as everyone else.
Why Is Booking A Practical Driving Test Through The DVSA So Difficult
From what I’ve read, two main issues make booking a practical test so difficult:
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Ongoing backlog from the COVID days, which has probably given rise to the second problem
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Third party booking services are using bots to snap up slots and then reselling them at a premium.
I would have thought fixing the bot issue would actually be very simple, by including some verification checks about the person making the booking and better technical methods to stop the bots.
Conclusion
For the time being, booking a practical driving test in many areas is going to continue to be very difficult. It does look like the DVSA is going to do something about the problem – How we’re dealing with bots and the reselling of driving tests . But who knows when and how effective it will be.
Annoyingly, the only way I found to get a test booked fast(ish) is to use one of the third-party booking services.
