UK Licence changes relating to PCV & HGV drivers

[anthony263]

Read this last week in our staff room at the depot in Worcester.

As of January the DSA are making some changes to cat A, C, D licences (bike, truck, bus)

The main point,

If you are a qualified truck or bus driver for any number of years (or future) and you trained and took your test in a Automatic they are planning to upgrade your licence to a full manual without any extra training or assessment so long as at a minimum you can drive a manual car.


I would very much like the opinions of my fellow pcv and hgv licence holders especially those of us who passed our tests in an automatic vehicle.

I will confess I have sent a letter to the DVLA asking them to upgrade my pcv licene to a manual but this will only be for when I drive any minibuses with a manual gearbox.

 

[PaxVobiscum]

Speaking as one who held an all types PSV for a number of years, I am not sure this is necessarily a good idea.

I trained on mainly manual crashbox double deckers, and was deemed (and subsequently proved) competent on all the variations of semi- and full automatics, though I will confess that my few encounters with Daimler pre-selects required considerable concentration.

Are there any crash boxes, or at least bus/coach gearboxes with dodgy syncromesh in regular use? If so, someone used to automatics will have some fun starting off from a bus stop on a steep hill.

 

[90019]

I'm not really sure that this is a good idea.

In terms of HGVs, if you've done your test in an automatic (which may increasingly be the case, as suitable training lorries with manual gearboxes are getting trickier to find), and the only experience of manual boxes you have is in a car, how well are you going to cope with a split box?

For buses, a lot of buses are automatics now anyway, and those that are manuals it's usually just a conventional gearbox, so similar enough to that in a car to not be much of an issue. I'm still not for it though.

I have a manual class 2, so my PCV licence was auomatically upgraded to a manual licence despite doing my test in an automatic bus.