Driving age - Your Views

[VPSwow]

Well you may or may not know that the government are trying to/ have passed the law to change driving upto 18. But now they want to move it to 21.

Do you think this is fair?

Views please

[Hazza]

Its been comfirmed that the drivers age is staying at 17 - Which I think is fair.
Well, this is the last I heard. 21 is wayyyyyyyyy out of proportion.

[-Eyeless-]

NO WAI of course it is not fair, it is completely the opposite. In america in most places you can drive at 16, and you can drive extremely powerful cars. Here we can drive at 17 (soon to be 18 no doubt Relative to if they decide to change it) and you always see us, even most rich people with crappy cars, safer cars than those that most american teens drive.

And in contrast to other laws like smoking drinking etc, it is just an excessive abuse of power and control over our youth!

</rant>

[Hazza]

From Yahoo!;

The upshot was that some politicians had suggested it be changed from 17 to 18 but no-one had really taken any real interest in changing it.

The outcome was that if it was to be changed a law change would be required and it would take several years to put into place, so for the forseeable future it's staying at 17.

As it states - If the age does go up it won't be any time soon.

[VPSwow]

Its not just that though, they are wanted people to have a longer theory which will take more training and 100 hours of driving experience before been able to take your test. This may take a few months more than before and is just silly.

Im confused at the moment though because all over the web from fairly reliable sources are all different "facts" on changing the driving age. One says it will be staying 17 and a few saying it will be moved up before october 2009.

[Starburst..x]

Well I think having the driving age at seventeen is good, because your seen as a "young adult" so why not get the advantages of being one? and by the time your driving test comes around your on your way to being eighteen (give or take six months lol).
However I can see where the government are coming from because the amount of people I've seen who have passed, and the majority of them being boys (sorry!) start to get cocky and arrogant just because they've passed, but I think it could be a good idea of perhaps limiting engine size until a certain age, so for instance you can only drive upto a 1.2 a no larger because at 17 do your really need to drive around in anything larger? and you can get quite a lot of power out of a 1.2 especially if its only a relatively small car. They do it with motorbikes so maybe it should be the same with cars?

[lAscend]

I think it should stay at 17 there isnt really any point in changing the law as you get loads of young drivers who are either underage or don't have a license or insurance, all they are trying to do is reduce the amount of younger drivers because we are more likely to have an accident.

Its a bit more like trying to catch people with cannabis, they will never stop that from trading on the streets no matter what power the government have over it.

[Metric1]

Wow, I think 18 is old. The legal age is 16 over here.

[GommeInc]

Changing it to 21 means loads of other driving laws need changing, like renting vehicles etc. 17 is reasonable, learner drivers are in the middle of college study making it easier for them to learn, if it was 18 they'll have to learn at university and if that's not the case, then the difference between maturity ages doesn't really differ. Is this because of under 21 accidents? I think that number was slowly falling the last time I heard :S

[MissAlice]

There are changes but not to the age. Take a look at this

http://learningtodrive.dsa.gov.uk/pages/faqs