If you’re a 16-year-old kid who lives in Georgia and really wants to drive but go to pieces under pressure or are maybe not really so, um, skilled at driving just yet, then I think we’ve found the upside of this whole Coronavirus mess, just for you: Georgia to get your license. Hot damn, right? Time to get that license right now and figure out the details later!

The says this in Section IX. Drivers’ Services:

That, effective immediately, the provision of Code Section 40-5-27(a) requiring the Department of Driver Services to examine every applicant for a driver’s license with a comprehensive on-the-road driving test is hereby suspended and applicants for a driver’s license shall not be required to complete a comprehensive on-the-road driving test, provided all other requirements outlined in Code Section 4-=5-27 are met.

This freedom from having to prove you actually know what the hell you’re doing behind the wheel of a car will only last as long as the State of Emergency lasts, and nobody really knows how long that will be, so, Georgia teens, best take advantage of this now.

Aspiring driver’s license-havers technically still need to complete 40 hours of supervised driving, and while I’m sure some parents will do that and more, I don’t think I’d really be shocked to find out some parents put in 5 or 6 hours and thought, ah, close enough, and signed off.

The whole point of this is, of course, that maintaining a safe physical distance of six feet would be effectively impossible in a car with a student driver and a testing official.

Unless they start giving driver’s tests in temporarily-unused city buses? Then the student can be up front driving, and the proctor could be safely at the rear! I wonder if they even considered that?

I mean, the parallel parking test would be tricky, but, you know, safety first.