About the project
Made by someone who had to pass the Swiss practical exam and could not find a single place to rehearse it on the real ground — so he built one.
Why it exists
I came to the Swiss practical exam the way many people do: an experienced driver, a foreign licence to exchange, one attempt at the control drive and a date on a letter. I did what anyone would do — I looked for a way to prepare on the actual places where the exams are driven. There was nothing. The apps on the market prepare for the theory; for the practical exam there were driving lessons at about CHF 100 a lesson, forum threads, and a vague idea that the examiner “likes” a certain roundabout. Not one simulator of the examination ground itself, not for Cossonay, not for anywhere in Switzerland.
That was exactly the thing I was missing. I knew how to drive; what I did not know was this ground — which roundabout has the hidden give-way, where the 30 zone begins, at which junction the command “à droite” comes in the middle of a hill. So I set out to survey it and make it drivable, first for myself and then for anyone who is in the same seat. If one candidate in two fails at the first attempt, the missing piece is not the driving. It is the ground.
What you get from it
You arrive knowing the place. The examiner’s streets, roundabouts and junctions are laid out from above on the national aerial map, metre by metre, and you have driven them before the day — the way a local would.
You have heard the command before it comes. At every stop a real photograph of the road ahead, the examiner’s command in the language of your canton, and the seconds already running. You learn to answer while the road keeps coming, which is the only way it ever happens in the car.
You see the correct drive, not just the correct answer. After your answer the right sequence plays out on the ground: the mirror before the brake, the look before the turn, the indicator at the right metre, the speed the bend allows — on the wheel, the mirrors and the pedals, with the rule behind it.
You know what to work on. Drive the route as an exam and get a verdict: a score, your strong and weak families of situations — roundabouts, priority, speed, signs — and the advice that follows. Drive it again next week and watch the weak ones turn.
You can do it anywhere, any time. On a phone, standing in the train, the night before; on a computer at the desk. No installation, no lesson to book, no instructor’s hour to pay for the tenth repetition of the same roundabout.
Where the data comes from
| Source | What it gives | Licence |
|---|---|---|
| swisstopo | the national map and the aerial photography the ground is drawn on | free geodata, ©swisstopo |
| OpenStreetMap | the road network, speed limits, signs and junctions | ODbL |
| KartaView, Mapillary | photographs taken from the road, credited to their authors | CC BY-SA 4.0 |
| Fedlex | the road-traffic law and ordinances: LCR 741.01, OCR 741.11, OSR 741.21 | official texts, unprotected |
Photographs are distributed unmodified: the file we ship is the file we received. In the drive the frame is cropped to the window; the whole frame opens on a button. Nothing is burned into the pixels. Each photograph is credited to the person who took it. Google Street View is not used: its terms forbid extraction and derivative works.
How a rule gets in
No driving rule enters this product until the article has been read in the federal text and entered by hand. That is not a slogan — the build refuses to compile a situation that cites a law reference nobody has read. Every correction you see on the ground carries its article.