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Are Automatic Driving Lessons More Expensive?

If you’re at crossroads trying to decide if you want to learn to drive using an automatic or a manual car, this guide will help you make an informed decision.

The vast majority of British drivers aged between 16 and 19 learn in a manual car, with only around 40,000 of the 720,000 driving tests sat per year being taken for an automatic licence.

The average cost of a driving lesson is now £24, and with the DSA (Driving Standards Agency) recommending 47 hours of tuition under the supervision of a professional instructor, the total cost of lessons for a learner will be £1,128. These figures might shoot up to £1,320 for a driver with an auto-only licence.

Automatic driving lessons

Automatic driving lessons are more expensive as the costs of insuring automatic cars is around 43% higher than manual cars of the same class – this is because automatic cars generally cost more to repair. Figures have also shown that having an automatic licence is 11% more expensive than a full manual licence on an auto version of the same vehicle.

There are other advantages of choosing a manual licence over an automatic:

Possessing a manual license entitles the driver to drive and be insured on both automatic and manual vehicles while an ‘auto only’ license limits drivers to automatic cars.

Many young drivers searching for a first car mostly find this to be very useful because it gives them a much wider variety of cheap secondhand vehicles. Fuel consumption is considerably less in a manual car when compared to an automatic. Many older automatics are also very expensive to run when it comes to fuel and repairs.

The cost of driving lessons

However, the cost of driving lessons is not cheap and, inevitably, learning to drive in a manual takes longer due to having to be trained to use the gearbox and the clutch. Automatic lessons are often more expensive than the manual, so it’s worth doing the maths before making your final decision.