Advanced driving courses teach vehicle dynamics, skid control, proper reactionary techniques to road hazards, proactive hazard evaluation, and so on; they cost $300 here, and you can go all the way to $1500 for driving/racing combined classes. Learner's permit should be 6-12 months with at least 5 hours per week of driving and 100 combined driving hours in a 6 month period or 200 combined driving hours in one year;
I agree that licensing and learning needs to be improved and more involved but I disagree with mandatory waits and hours. All that does is forces people to do pointless busywork or in most cases, fabricate evidence. In Australia we have a mandatory number of hours for learner drivers (differs between states) and this is self recorded in a log book... or as they're better known, lie books.
Some (very few) people do learn to drive in 10 hours, others cant do it in 110 but most are in between. Mandatory waits just force people to sit on their hands. In my state (western Australia) there is a six month wait AFTER you pass your driving test before you're allowed to drive on your own, this means most learners sit around not driving and forgetting what they learned leading to worse novice drivers.
The best thing we can do isn't to make tests harder, rather require students to undergo a number of hours of training from a professional instructor. Teaching defensive driving from the word go will result in better drivers.
If you are going to mandate hours, mandate them after you pass a driving test (sans the mandatory wait). The test proves you know how to handle a car, but not how to handle real life driving situations. The test is useful but cant impart a lot of important skills. By having a student do additional practice after the test an instructor can focus on teaching important parts of roadcraft like courtesy, advanced parking manoeuvres, lane selection and discipline, speed discipline and handling traffic that you just cant test for in an hour or two. Also, but mandating the hours after the test is passed, the learner has more confidence and will stop second guessing themselves as much.
Remember when we used to have Hydrostatic licenses because you didn't pass your driver's test on a manual transmission?
Fortunately we still have this in Western Australia. A C class license is for an ordinary car (less than 8 seats, under 4.5 GVT), if you pass your test in a manual you get a C printed on your license, if you pass it in an Automatic you get CA and it's illegal for you to drive a manual (I've heard of dealers turning people with CA's away from sequential auto's, despite the state considering these being Automatics).
I dropped from 70mph to 20mph in one second today (good tires) because of other idiots on the road.
Are you counting reaction time or just stopping time?
The Project Mu brake pads on my old Honda could stop in that distance easily, but I'd still have to contend with my own reaction time... Which remands me why I need to get some Project Mu's on my Nissan (sadly, my budget does not stretch to Brembo callipers).