This Is the Country Where It Is Most Stressful to Learn to Drive

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By Douglas A. McIntyre Published
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This Is the Country Where It Is Most Stressful to Learn to Drive

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In most states, people can get a driver’s permit when they turn 16 and a driver’s license several months later. On the way to obtaining a permit, people need education about how a car operates and the basics of the rules of the road.

Some public high schools have courses in driver’s education. People also can pay to learn how to drive at a “driving school.” Once that process is over, states generally require both a written test and a road test. According to CBS, about 40% of people fail tests the first time they take them.

Based on accident rates, driver’s education has a limited benefit. A study by AAA reports that drivers under 17 have the most accidents per 100 million miles driven. That is followed by drivers ages 18 and 19.

According to a new study by online driver’s education resource Zutobi, the amount of stress that people experience when they learn how to drive varies considerably from country to country. For the Most Stressful Country to Be a Learner Driver study, researchers assumed that learning how to drive can be stressful. The primary question driving the study’s results was, “But where do learner drivers have things the toughest?”
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The data used to determine the country where it is toughest to become a driver included traffic congestion from TomTom, road traffic deaths from the World Bank and the number of registered vehicles per 100,000 people and road quality from the World Economic Forum’s Global Competitiveness Report.

On a scale of 1 to 10, the lower the number, the harder it is for people learning how to drive.

The country where learning to drive is most stressful is Romania, with a score of 5.87. This is primarily because of poor highway infrastructure and traffic congestion. Its traffic deaths figures were also relatively high.

These are the 20 countries where it is most stressful to learn how to drive:

Country Overall Score Deaths per 100K
Romania 4.87 10
Malaysia 5.07 23
Philippines 5.30 12
Bulgaria 5.35 9
Russia 5.35 12
Greece 5.52 8
Poland 5.65 9
Argentina 5.76 14
New Zealand 5.97 10
Italy 6.09 5
Mexico 6.14 13
Czech Republic 6.21 6
Saudi Arabia 6.27 36
Latvia 6.40 8
Hungary 6.42 8
Slovakia 6.47 6
Estonia 6.48 5
Ireland 6.52 3
Iceland 6.52 2
United States 6.62 13

Click here to see which state has the worst highways in America.
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Photo of Douglas A. McIntyre
About the Author Douglas A. McIntyre →

Douglas A. McIntyre is the co-founder, chief executive officer and editor in chief of 24/7 Wall St. and 24/7 Tempo. He has held these jobs since 2006.

McIntyre has written thousands of articles for 24/7 Wall St. He is an expert on corporate finance, the automotive industry, media companies and international finance. He has edited articles on national demographics, sports, personal income and travel.

His work has been quoted or mentioned in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, Los Angeles Times, The Washington Post, NBC News, Time, The New Yorker, HuffPost USA Today, Business Insider, Yahoo, AOL, MarketWatch, The Atlantic, Bloomberg, New York Post, Chicago Tribune, Forbes, The Guardian and many other major publications. McIntyre has been a guest on CNBC, the BBC and television and radio stations across the country.

A magna cum laude graduate of Harvard College, McIntyre also was president of The Harvard Advocate. Founded in 1866, the Advocate is the oldest college publication in the United States.

TheStreet.com, Comps.com and Edgar Online are some of the public companies for which McIntyre served on the board of directors. He was a Vicinity Corporation board member when the company was sold to Microsoft in 2002. He served on the audit committees of some of these companies.

McIntyre has been the CEO of FutureSource, a provider of trading terminals and news to commodities and futures traders. He was president of Switchboard, the online phone directory company. He served as chairman and CEO of On2 Technologies, the video compression company that provided video compression software for Adobe’s Flash. Google bought On2 in 2009.

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