The short answer
Twelve: five country-road drives, four motorway drives and three drives after dark, 45 minutes each. The number is in the driving instruction regulations and applies to every driving school in Germany. It does not depend on how well you drive — even a confident learner does all twelve.
“Can I skip a few, I already drive fine?” — no, and for once that is good news. The special drives are the one part of your training whose size is fixed in advance. Everything else depends on your progress; these twelve do not.
The twelve, one by one
- 5 × country road — outside built-up areas
- 4 × motorway — joining, changing lanes, distance at speed
- 3 × after dark — once dusk has fallen
Each counts as one teaching unit of 45 minutes. In practice country and motorway drives are almost always driven as a double, because getting out of Düsseldorf, onto the motorway and back inside 45 minutes leaves nothing worth doing. The counting is unaffected: two units back to back are two of the twelve.
Why these three
Because they are the three situations city driving never teaches and real life still demands. On a country road, oncoming traffic decides every overtake. On the motorway your whole sense of timing shifts — at 120 km/h the gap that feels right is usually too small. And at night you simply see less, while headlights dazzle you on top of it.
Anyone meeting those three for the first time on their own meets them with nobody in the passenger seat who can step in. That is exactly what the rule is there to prevent.
When they happen
At the end, not the beginning. Special drives assume you can handle the car and move safely through city traffic — otherwise you learn nothing on a motorway, you just hold on. So we schedule them once your practice lessons are far enough along, and place the night drives in the dark half of the year or late in the evening.
In summer
In June it does not get properly dark in Düsseldorf until around 10 pm. Your night drives will be late — that is normal and cannot be brought forward, because “after dark” is a real condition rather than a time of day.
What that means for planning
Twelve compulsory drives are the minimum amount of practice you will definitely have. On top come the practice lessons, whose number follows your progress and which nobody can honestly quote in advance. How the two add up and what it costs is on the prices page — every item listed separately.
Whether you drive them in a manual or an automatic depends on your class: class B in a manual, B78 and B197 in an automatic. The number is the same in every case.