DVSA Data
Automatic Driving Tests Now Make Up 29.5% of UK Car Tests
Automatic cars now account for close to three in ten car driving tests in Great Britain. DVSA's 2025-26 figures show 589,483 automatic tests out of 1,998,621 in total, or 29.5%. A year earlier the share was 26.1%, and in 2015-16 it was 7.5%. The same tables suggest that automatic tests are passed less often than manual ones at almost every centre, though the data cannot say why.
A steady climb
The number of automatic tests rose by 22.9% between 2024-25 and 2025-26, while all car tests rose by 8.6%. That pushes the share up by about three percentage points in a year. Looking back, it was 12.7% in 2019-20, 19.2% in 2022-23 and 23.4% in 2023-24. In every year shown in the chart below, the share is higher than the year before.
None of this says what is driving the change. The DVSA tables only count tests, not the reasons people choose an automatic.
Lower pass rates for automatic tests
The pass rate for automatic tests was 44.6% in 2025-26, against 50.0% for all car tests. Taking automatic tests away from the total leaves a manual pass rate of about 52.3%. That is a gap of 7.7 points. The automatic rate has risen from 39.5% in 2019-20 and 43.9% in 2024-25, but the manual rate rose as well, so the gap has not closed: by the same arithmetic it was 7.4 points in 2019-20 and 6.5 in 2024-25.
It would be easy to read this as automatic tests being harder. That does not look like the right conclusion. The people who choose automatic may differ from the rest in age, in how many hours they have had, or in where they live, and the data does not separate those effects. It is better read as a description of what happened than as an explanation.
It varies a lot by centre
To compare centres sensibly, we looked only at the 259 centres with at least 200 automatic tests and at least 200 other tests in 2025-26. Automatic tests are concentrated in London. The five highest shares were Goodmayes (54.1% of its 21,374 tests), Erith (52.4%), Hendon (52.2%), Mill Hill (51.2%) and Pinner (50.0%). The lowest were Skipton (10.2%), Northwich (12.7%) and Irvine (12.9%).
In 258 of those 259 centres, the automatic pass rate was below the pass rate for everything else. The median gap was 8.0 points. The single exception was Aberystwyth, where automatic candidates passed at 61.2% against 54.0% for the rest, on a small base of 232 automatic tests.
The size of the gap differs more than the direction. At Hendon the two rates are 51.0% and 51.8%, almost level. At Goodmayes they are 41.5% and 46.2%. At Wolverhampton they are 27.2% for automatic tests and 38.2% for the rest, one of the widest differences in the set.
Reading this as a learner or instructor
For anyone choosing between automatic and manual, the national figures are a starting point, but the centre-level picture is different enough that it may be worth looking at the numbers for the centre you are likely to use. Our stats page collects the DVSA tables.
DriveSidekick publishes free practice routes for more than 250 UK test centres, which you can browse in the routes hub. Centre pages show pass rates too, including Goodmayes and Wolverhampton.
Look up your test centre's pass rate
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Data: DVSA, Driving test and theory test data: cars (gov.uk), tables updated 25 June 2026. Figures are for DVSA-delivered car tests. The manual pass rate and the gaps are our own calculation (all tests minus automatic tests), and centre comparisons exclude centres with fewer than 200 automatic or 200 other tests. Centres with a single examiner are omitted by DVSA.