The short answer
The cross-country drive is one of the three special drives and covers five teaching units. It trains everything that does not occur in town: higher speeds, overtaking, bends without buildings to read them by, unsignalled junctions and oncoming traffic. It is required regardless of ability and is recorded.
"We drove straight ahead for an hour" is something we hear regularly after a first cross-country drive, usually with a question mark after it. It describes the drive correctly and its purpose wrongly.
Why rural roads specifically
Because what happens there cannot happen in town: speeds at which a mistake leaves no time to correct it, oncoming traffic with no central island between you, bends whose exit you cannot see, and farm vehicles that are suddenly far slower than everything else. The accident figures have said the same thing for years — rural roads are the road type with the worst outcomes.
What those five units train
- Matching speed to what the road is doing, rather than to the sign
- Following distance at 100 km/h — the number town driving never rehearses
- Overtaking: sight, decision, abort. Abort above all
- Unsignalled junctions, often with poor visibility to the left
- Reading a bend: where does my sight end, and how fast may I be to still stop there?
The first time they overtake a tractor. Everything is calm up to that point, and then a decision is due — and most people do not go past on the first attempt. They abort and tuck back in. That is exactly what we want to see. Aborting the first time means understanding that overtaking is a decision, not a reaction to somebody being slow.
Where we go from Düsseldorf
Rural roads towards Neuss and Meerbusch, or south towards Hilden and Monheim, are close to the city. That is why cross-country drives are normally taken as a double lesson: two units back to back, because otherwise the actual driving time disappears into the journey out and back.
Does any drive outside town count?
No. Special drives are recorded as such and billed separately, so a stretch of country road on the way back from the motorway is not a cross-country drive. How the twelve compulsory drives divide up is set out separately.
Special drives come at the end of training, after the basic phase — the order is not arbitrary. The individual rates are on the price page.
What to take away
The five cross-country hours do not train driving in a straight line, they train judgement: how far can I see, how fast may I therefore be, and when do I leave it. That is the skill that decides outcomes on a rural road — and the only one you cannot pick up incidentally in town.