[gavia1]

Well for example, in the U.K, neither understeer nor oversteer is taught when learning to drive. Whose fault is that? The 30 million drivers who have never heard of it or practised it, but have otherwise satisfied the legal requirement to drive; or the legislation that mandates the procedures that must be taken to pass a driving test?

[patriot1911]

In The Netherlands, you're not taught those things when learning to drive either. What is taught, is that wet and/or especially cold conditions can cause unsafe road conditions that can lead to loss of control over the vehicle. As a reasonable person, you're supposed to know to adapt to this. This isn't specifically mentioned in the law, but it follows from one of the most basic articles of our traffic law that states that it's "forbidden to act in a way that causes or could cause dangerous road conditions or causes or could cause traffic to be hindered"

[gavia1]

Sure, that is the same here too.

The unfortunate truth is that people are human and humans make mistakes. You could drive to work on the same back road every day. Except one day it's particularly cold and you don't see the ice patch on the sharp right hand corner you've taken 100s of times before. The rear of the car steps out, but you don't know what to do as you have never encountered this before. You panic, naturally stamping on the brakes and end up off the road in a ditch.

The alternative: drivers must complete separate examinations for front wheel drive and rear driven cars, like how automatic and manual are separate licenses.

As part of that drivers must learn how the drivetrain affects how the car breaks traction both under power and under non-power conditions (i.e. coasting), and the appropriate corrections for both.

Let's come back to our scenario. We can assume the driver is operating a front wheel drive vehicle. Instead of slamming on the brakes, the driver has experience of lift off oversteer from their test. They apply 1/4 turn of opposite lock, then unwind the lock. The driver then applies power to the front wheels to straighten the rear.

Thanks to good training and examination driver has successfully avoided ending up the ditch.

[patriot1911]

> The unfortunate truth is that people are human and humans make mistakes.

That's true, it's also going to stay true no matter the amount of training. That isn't to say that I'm advocating against more training, but I think the training is prohibitively more expensive (even in a context where driving isn't as much of a necessity as it is here) for a gain that I perceive to be largely negligible unless linked to stricter training and re-certification in general (which is certainly prohibitively expensive).