In 2025, 44 percent of the theory tests for a car license in Germany ended in failure. In the practical test, the share was 37 percent. The figures count first attempts and repeat attempts together. In 2024 the failure rate was 45 percent in theory and also 37 percent in practice.
studies
Applications Without Names
In November 2010, the Federal Anti-Discrimination Agency started a pilot project with companies, public authorities and municipalities. Applications arrived without the applicant’s name, photo and similar details. Invitations to interview were to be made ausschließlich aufgrund der Qualifikation, solely on the basis of qualification. The study that went with the pilot found positive effects. According to press reports, the participating companies saw no additional benefit in the method. The German employers’ federation rejects it. The town of Celle still uses it.
Punish Transgressions, Not Errors
Michael Frese, a business psychologist at Leuphana University in Lüneburg, puts the rule this way: Fehler sollte man nicht bestrafen, Übertretungen hingegen schon. Mistakes should not be punished, but transgressions should. In a study published in 2005 with three colleagues, he found that a culture of managing errors was linked to better company performance. The finding held in a second study, using data on changes in profitability from 47 German organizations. A 2018 article in the Austrian newspaper Die Presse sums up the research on error culture in one sentence: Theorie und Praxis liegen weit auseinander. Theory and practice lie far apart.
A Ranking Nobody Can Trace
German media often repeat that Germany ranks 60th of 61 countries for error culture. The comparison is attributed to the psychologist Michael Frese. The figure appears in articles from 2016 to 2026, but the articles do not name the study, its year or what exactly it measured. They describe the measure as tolerance of mistakes or as error culture. They also disagree on the details. One says Germany shares last place with Singapore. Others say only Singapore scored lower. The number is widely repeated, but its source is hard to find.
Managers Who Keep Their Mistakes to Themselves
In 2023 the consulting firm EY published a Fehlerkulturreport, an error culture report. It surveyed 200 managers and 800 employees in finance, the car industry, mechanical engineering and transport. Of the managers, 64 percent said that in the past two years they had not admitted their own mistakes, or had admitted them only in part. Of these, 68 percent feared it would harm their careers.
Root cause: communication
American accident investigation keeps arriving at the same answer. The NTSB on Tenerife and United 173, hospital sentinel event reviews, military after-action reports, engineering failure analyses. The finding is rarely that nobody knew. It is that somebody knew and it did not travel.
Groupthink
Irving Janis coined the term in 1972, studying American foreign policy disasters including the Bay of Pigs. His argument was that cohesive groups suppress dissent in order to preserve agreement, and the suppression is usually invisible to everyone in the room.
An American psychologist named the failure mode in which a team stops exchanging information while believing it still is.
Median tenure
The Bureau of Labor Statistics reports that in January 2024 the median American wage and salary worker had been with their current employer for 3.9 years — the lowest since 2002. For workers aged 25 to 34 it was 2.7 years, and twenty-two percent had been in post a year or less. Half the workforce leaves within four years. Whatever they learned goes with them, and the organization is left with whatever it happened to write down.
The golden hour
American trauma medicine is built around the idea that the first hour after serious injury determines survival. R Adams Cowley in Baltimore made it doctrine, and the US trauma system — helicopters, designated trauma centres, rapid transport — was designed around it.
Researchers have since questioned whether sixty minutes is a meaningful threshold. The system it produced is real regardless, and it was built on the premise that speed is the treatment.
Class participation
American schools grade it, from elementary through university, and it appears on the syllabus as a percentage. A student who has understood everything and said nothing receives a lower mark than one who spoke up and was partly wrong.