I’m writing this in the hopes that it may help out other folks moving to France who want to be able to drive. My perspective is that of a United States emigré to France from a state that doesn’t have a license exchange agreement with France (if yours does, consider yourelf lucky!), so things may be a bit different if you’re coming from somewhere else. And as with most things, your mileage may vary!

Can You Drive in France with Your U.S. License?

The answer is “Yes, but…”

You can drive on your U.S. license for 12 months from the entry date on your long-term visa; and, of course, you must be insured. But once those twelve months are up, if you don’t yet have your permis de conduire, you MUST NOT DRIVE. I’ve seen folks on Facebook say, “Well, technically it’s illegal, but we still drive…”

Folks saying this haven’t studied for or taken the theoretical exam and so have no clue how stiff some of the penalties for various violations can be. If you get busted driving after that 12 months is up, the government can confiscate your vehicle (not just impound it for a while; take it altogether) and send you to prison. On top of that, if you’re driving illegally and are in an accident, your insurance coverage will be void and you’ll have personal financial liability for the accident.

Please, if you go beyond the 12 month period, just stop driving until you have your French permit! It’s just not worth the risk.

Get Started Right Away

I can’t emphasize this enough: once you’ve arrived in France and unpacked your bags, get started on your driving permit! Even if you’re fortunate enough to come from a state that has a drivers license exchange with France, which I’m not going to cover here, the process can still take weeks or even months (very few administrative processes in France go quickly).

If you’re fortunate enough to be able to do a license exchange, please, please, PLEASE take some time to really study le code de la route using one of the many options available for self-training (my personal favorite is Ornikar, which is only €2.99 at the time of this writing for a month’s worth of access to their excellent online training materials), and I’d go so far as to strongly recommend you actually take the written exam and pass it as a real knowledge check. There are some very significant differences between what you’re used to from the U.S. and the laws here in France that can put you or others in danger if you don’t understand them, and le code has a ton of information that you really should know when you’re out on the road here.

If you’re like me and have to go through the entire process that the French do in order to get your French driving permit, the process can easily take six months or more. That’s not to say it’s always going to take that long, but this is not at all atypical. This is due primarily to the overall training and testing system being a) very challenging and b) unable to cope with the demand. While you can take the theoretical exam (le code de la route) any time at many locations, the backlog at many driving schools for driver training can easily run into months due to a general shortage of instructors. For example, I popped into our local driving school here in our small town in early June, only to find out that they were booked out until October for new students. Yikes!

You really have to go through a driving school, because they’re the ones that submit you for a test slot in the system. And that’s the second major bottleneck: in most departments, the typical waiting time for a test slot is two or three months, and the school won’t submit you until the instructor thinks you’re ready to take the test.

So when you combine the potential lag in getting training plus the lag for a test spot, three months is probably extremely optimistic; six months is probably about average; and a year is easily possible.

Another reason to start early, which I’ll cover in a bit more detail below, is that it gives you the benefit of being able to practice on your own after getting some time in with your instructor. That would’ve been a huge help to me if I’d had that option!

Again, START RIGHT AWAY.

It’s Not Cheap

Getting a license in France will likely cost you at least a thousand euros and quite likely more. French folks going through the system require a minimum of 20 hours of dual instruction, but there’s no set requirement for foreigners who already have a license from their home country; your instructor calls the shots on when you’re ready; schools don’t want to submit candidates who aren’t likely to pass, as I believe that impacts the allocation of exam slots to the school. Again, figure a minimum of a grand, but don’t be surprised if you wind up needing to spend more than that. And if you fail a test, you’ll almost certainly have to do at least 5 to 10 more hours before the school will submit you again.

Get Your NEPH

With all that out of the way, let’s get to it! The first major step in getting your French driving permit is obtaining your NEPH, or Numéro d’Enregistrement Préfectoral Harmonisé. This is a unique ID that is essential to the process, and you can obtain your NEPH through ANTS (now France Titres; the French Government loves acronyms!). ANTS = Agence Nationale des Titres Sécurisés, which is the agency responsible for all things vehicle related. It’s pretty easy to do, just follow the steps on the ANTS site. The license class for a typical car is “B,” which is my focus here, and of course there are other classes for different types of vehicles.

“Le Code”

There are two hurdles to obtain your permis de conduire: the test on French driving regulations (le code de la route) and the on-road test (la pratique). I will warn you now, my friend: THESE TESTS ARE DIFFICULT. If you expect to just waltz in and pass these like you might have done whenever you took your written and practical tests in the States, you are likely in for a shock.

Let’s take le code de la route first. This is a 40 question multiple choice test, and you have to get a minimum of 35 correct. It’s administered using a digital tablet and comprises a mix of video sequences (as if you’re driving in a given scenario) and still-frame scenes with accompanying questions. You have 30 seconds, if I recall, for each question; you can advance to the next question faster if you wish, but when the 30 seconds are up it moves on automatically and you can’t go back. You must have all the correct answers marked for each scene, and any answers you leave blank are counted as wrong. The tests are administered in French, although there are a few schools that provide support for other languages like English, and can be taken at a variety of locations, including many La Poste offices. The cost per test is €30, and you can take it as many times as you need, whenever you want, once you have your NEPH; you don’t need to do this through a driving school.

“That doesn’t sound so hard,” you say.

I know, right? But here’s the fun part. First, the multiple choice questions are structured such that one or more than one answer may be correct, and you must get them ALL correct for a given question to get credit. While I don’t believe any of the hundreds of questions I studied and took were “trick” questions, there were quite a few that if you really didn’t know the answer, you couldn’t just guess your way through it. The test does indicate if there’s one or more than one response required, however, so that does help.

Again, though, you really have to know the material, and there’s a LOT. The printed Rousseau guide is almost three quarters of an inch thick. It took me three times to pass the test in French (and my French isn’t very good yet), and I did that by going through oodles of practice examples provided by Ornikar (a nation-wide auto school), making notes of the things I got wrong, reviewing, learning key vocabulary and concepts, then practice testing. There are different approaches, of course, but that worked for me.

But the thing with le code is that it’s essentially “school learning” – if you keep at it, you’re going to pass, and failing a couple/few times is perfectly normal.

La Pratique

Before diving into my experience with the practical test, I wanted to make the point that you can do le code and la pratique simultaneously if you want. You do NOT have to pass the written test before starting your driving training, but you can’t receive your license until you pass both. Personally, I recommend studying for le code before you start driving lessons, because it is essential that you understand the rules of the road. What does a given sign mean (there are LOTS of them)? Who has priority in an unmarked roundabout? What the heck is priorité à droite? There are tons of things that studying le code will give you that. you can apply directly to your driving training.

Now, to clarify, there are two types of practical exams (le code is the same for both): automatic and manual. Someone who is qualified to drive manual can also drive an automatic; if you’re only qualified on automatic, you can’t drive a manual. I wanted to qualify on manual so if I needed to rent a car somewhere and they didn’t have automatics available (manual shift vehicles still dominate the market) or I didn’t want to pay the upcharge, I could do so. Having said that, going the automatic-only route would be significantly easier! If you have driven a stick before, like I have, although without formal training, you can likely look forward to having to relearn it; the examiners expect things to be done in a certain way and will deduct points (or even terminate your test – flunk!) if you don’t. You can’t just wing it.

So, “la pratique” is a 32-minute long exam that begins with 5 minutes of “installation,” where you seat yourself in the car and adjust the seat and mirrors, etc., and receive an initial brief from the examiner. The second segment is 10 minutes on the road. Segment three is five minutes where you’ll perform one of six possible maneuvers (most often either parallel parking to the right or backing into a straight or slanted parking spot), likely do a 3-point turn somewhere, then answer a set of three questions (yes, in French!), worth a point each, chosen from a list of 100 sets based on the last two digits of the odometer. The first question is typically something like, “Show the light that indicates a battery problem.” The second question is typically related to the first, like “What might cause the battery to run down?” The third question is safety-related, and has a huge range of possibilities (and is, IMHO, the hardest). And, of course, all of this is in French; there’s no translation provided for or allowed (although the reality is that instructors have a bit of leeway here if they choose to use some English or even allow your instructor to help). The instructor will also give you some commentary, like “Make sure to signal” or similar; these aren’t “I’m deducting points!” things, but just gentle reminders to help you; they know you’re under a lot of stress. Then you have another 10 minutes of driving, and a final two minutes back at the test center, which often times is a designated public parking lot, where the examiner debriefs you. The driving segments include time on the freeway, in-town, in tight residential and/or business areas, possibly a parking lot, and some time en autonomie where you’ll be told the name of a town, for example, and have to follow the signs for a while in that direction. Each testing center has multiple routes the examiner can choose from (Villepinte has 10), but you won’t know which one, and they can vary significantly in difficulty. The examiner rates you on several categories, and you have to get 20 out of 31 points to pass. And in case you were wondering, no, you can’t use your own car for the test; la pratique is only done with a dual-control vehicle provided by the driving school. Also, the examiner will NOT tell you what your score was after the test. You will receive those results via email in the next day or so, same as with the results for le code.

In addition to losing points for various things, there are a host of “sudden death” pitfalls that can result in immediate termination of the test. For example, if you come up to a roundabout when no traffic is coming and you stop, you’re done. If you enter a parking lot in anything but first gear (in a manual), you’re done. If at any time the examiner has to either touch the dual control pedals or the steering wheel, which means you’ve made some sort of major safety violation, you’re done. Granted, whether to actually axe you is up to the examiner (I’ve heard accounts of folks passing after making some of these mistakes), but if the examiner has concerns about your ability to drive safely, they’re obliged to flunk you. There are a LOT of these “sudden death” things, certainly more than I know of, and I suspect these probably account for most of the failures.

One thing to keep in mind, though, is that the examiner is NOT trying to fail you. They’re trying to make sure that you’re competent and focus on safety while on the road.

Again, I will reiterate: THIS IS NOT AN EASY TEST. The pass rate across all departments in France ranges from around 55 to 71%, meaning that a third to nearly half of candidates fail. The reason it is difficult isn’t that you’re expected to drive an F1 car through hairpin turns at 200 km/hr, it’s because the examiners are looking for you to be a safe driver who demonstrates safe driving habits and conducts themselves in a safe manner. SAFETY is everything.

Training For The Driving Test

I know this seems flipped around, but I wanted to give you an idea of what’s expected for the test before we dive into the training. Again, I can only speak from my own experience and yours will no doubt be different! A great deal depends on your instructor, your background, how well you and your instructor can communicate (outside of the few schools specializing in non-French-speaking patrons, don’t expect the instructors to know much English), etc.

I took Ornikar’s accelerated permit program to sidestep the many-months-wait for an exam, because I waited too long to start (not realizing how long the process could take!), which was further delayed by a family emergency that set me back a few more months and past my 12 month limit for driving on my U.S. license. The program was great and I loved my instructor (Mohamed D. – awesome guy!), but I will admit without shame or reservation that, for me, the training was HARD, probably one of the most challenging things I’ve ever done. The reasons were that 1) I had 40 years of ingrained habits, many of which were bad, and no formal training on manual transmissions (I had to completely relearn it); 2) it was a LOT of information to absorb without any time to practice on my own and at my own pace; and 3) it was mostly in French. Trying to keep up with an instructor’s input in French while you’re trying to use newly-learned techniques for shifting as you enter a 3-lane roundabout and have to remember which lane to enter, whether to signal or not, when to shift to the center lane, then to the right lane, exiting safely, etc., can be a bit overwhelming! 🤣 And I’ll again confess without shame that there were a few times where I was so frustrated with myself (not my instructor, mind you) that I was near to tears. I’m not saying you’ll have a similar experience, but just to emphasize that this simply isn’t the walk in the park that most exams are in the U.S.

I did the training in the middle two weeks of August in Noisy-le-Grand and Torcy, which are a bit east of Paris, then tested at Villepinte, which isn’t too far from Charles de Gaulle; so this also entailed the additional expense of transportation and hotel stays. I trained there because the Ornikar accelerated permit program is only available in a few major cities, and the Ornikar coordinator paired me up with Mohamed because he’s successfully trained other foreigners who don’t know a lot of French, and that’s his area of operation. I understood enough that we spoke French most of the time, but he used ChatGPT to translate things back and forth as needed after we’d pulled off the road, and used a whiteboard to draw things out for illustration, which is immensely helpful. The good news about the timing was that there was very little traffic, as everyone was off on vacation, although they returned by the week of the test! Fortunately, that didn’t cause me any difficulties.

Anyway, the first hour is an evaluation so the instructor can get an idea of where you’re at, then they devise a training plan to get you ready for the test. As I said before, this is going to be a very individual thing. I required more hours than many people probably would, because I had so many bad habits and in my early 60s things don’t come to me as easily as they once did. Again, however, please don’t fall into the mental trap of “I’ll only need a few hours” that you might hear. Just let those expectations fall to the wayside and let it be what it’s going to be. Remember, the instructor determines when you’re ready, not you.

After that, and this is no surprise, the instructor trains you on what you need to know to pass the test. Again, there’s a LOT. It’s not rocket science, but attention to detail. For example, one of the biggest gotchas is priorité à droite. This essentially means that, unless there is other signage or markings on the road to the contrary, the traffic on your right has priority. The sticky bit of this rule is that it applies even when a smaller street empties onto a bigger one. In every state I’ve driven in, unless otherwise marked, if you’re driving down a straightaway, the traffic coming from a street to your right has to yield right of way to you. In France, it’s not that way. You can be on a major two-way street and come to a small street on the right…and drivers coming from there have right of way unless otherwise marked! And these things can be sneaky, especially in neighborhoods: you can literally turn a corner and right there, hidden behind some parked cars on the right, is a priorité à droite intersection, and it’s your responsibility to be prepared to stop.

Another one of the super-fun things is roundabouts. France has thousands of them, literally more than any other country! There are two major types, the giratoire and smaller point-rond, and giratoires can have lights or not, and points-ronds can have right of way to traffic in the circle (if marked by signage) or to traffic entering the circle (if not marked). These families of roundabouts can range from huge multi-lane affairs to tiny circles in a patch of pavement in a tight neighborhood. The funny thing is, before I studied le code I couldn’t understand the signals people made when entering roundabouts; it was like watching a cricket match! Some would signal right, some would signal left, and some wouldn’t signal at all. There didn’t seem to be any sense to it because, like with cricket, I didn’t know the rules.

Of course, now I know that if you’re taking the 1st/right exit, you get in the right lane and put your right signal on before you enter, keep it on as you stay to the right, then exit. If taking the 2nd/”straight across” exit (think of entering the roundabout/giratroire at 6 o’clock and exiting at 12), you get in the right lane and stay there but do NOT signal until you pass the first exit; then you signal right and exit. If you’re taking the third or later exit (9 o’clock through a reverse/u-turn the way you came), you get in the left lane, signal left before you enter, go immediately to the left/innermost lane until the exit before where you want to exit, then shift to the right lane (and this has to be done in multiple steps for giratroires with 3 or more lanes), then exit. All, of course, with proper checking of your mirrors, blind spots, and signaling! And if you have no idea which exit to take, you stay in the right lane so you can more easily see the signs, then signal after the exit before yours to let people know you’re bailing out.

There’s all kinds of stuff like this and OODLES of signage that you need to understand to drive safely and avoid what can sometimes be very heavy fines.

Anyway, the driving training is where all this comes together, and as I mentioned, there are times when it might be overwhelming; if that happens, just have your instructor pull off somewhere and take a little break. But this is, again, another reason why it is hugely beneficial to get started early; you can take an hour or two of instruction, then practice on your own, then go back for the next round where your instructor can evaluate how you did and show you more things. I really wish I’d had that option, as it would’ve made things far less stressful; it was really exhausting to be in the car three or four hours almost every weekday for those two-plus weeks.

Speaking of stress, I cannot emphasize this enough: the thing most likely to sink you during the driving test is being nervous or lacking confidence. When your instructor submits you for an exam slot, you’ll be ready for it. But it’s up to you to find your zen when it’s test time. For me, I was really nervous the morning of the test and didn’t do so well during the final prep drives, which I figured would be the case. But during lunch I found a great spot that was really peaceful and I let out all the stress and did well on the test (26/31). Find your zen!

Once You’ve Passed

First, congratulations! Passing the tests for a French driving permit is something to be proud of! You should receive an email from the French Interior Ministry with a link and login to access your results. If you passed, there’s a certificate you must print out that, together with a photo ID (such as your passport or carte de sejour), will act as a temporary license for up to four months. In the meantime, you have to actually submit a request for your license – the government doesn’t just send it to you! You’ll have to gather up the typical documentation and go back to the ANTS site and request that your permit be created; the site indicates you can also request your driving school request it. It’s not complicated, just follow the steps.

Now, before you charge off, keep this in mind, because this is important: now matter how many years you’ve driven in the U.S., your new permis de conduire français is probationary for three years.

What this means:

1. You start off with 6 points on your license. Assuming you make no point infractions, that will increase by 2 points each of the next three years to a maximum of 12. If you lose one or more points in a given year, you won’t get the 2 additional points for that year.
2. You have to put le disque A – a fairly large sticker with a white circle having a red “A” in the center – on the back left of your vehicle where it’s clearly visible and doesn’t block any of your lights, etc., during your probationary period. These are available at many grocery stores and I’m sure other places (I picked up mine at our local LeClerc).
3. Your speed is limited to 110 km/hr on 130km/hr autoroutes; 100 on dual-lane divided highways (normally 110); and 80 on other roads outside of built-up areas (typically the max on these roads tops out at 90). I just wrote these down on a sticky note and stuck it on the dashboard where it’s easy to see but not blocking anything.

And there you have it! I hope this helped give you an idea of what you have to loo forward to – and best of luck!