That prefix certainly comes with baggage. There were a lot of affordable "Volks-" (read as: "for the people") products created by the DAF (German Labour Front) between 1933 and 1945. The more (internationally) known ones are the Volkswagen, Volksempfänger (radio receiver), Volkskühlschrank (refrigerator), Volksgasmaske (gas mask).
On the other hand, the infamous "BILD" tabloid started using that prefix brand again in 2002, with the Volks-PC and has been marketing 200 products with that prefix since and other companies/projects/products followed (like Volks.Fahrrad - which had to rename because of the product proximity to Volkswagen).
Yeah, no shit. I own a bike and hardly ride it because if I ride on the sidewalk I’m screamed at for endangering pedestrians; if I ride in the street lane I’m screamed at and cut off by drivers for going too slow; if I ride in the handful of bike lanes I’m at extreme risk for being cut off by an Uber taxi, Lyft taxi, delivery vehicle, or some random person in a car and they always say “I’ll just be a second you can go around me!!” but if I do then I’m in one of the other two areas and here comes the screaming and the maybe dying.
So if I can’t get there by walking, busing, train, or biking in wide open spaces, I’m just not going because damn, people in cars sure do act entitled to the spaces where I’m supposed to be and think nothing of swinging that two ton block of deadly metal around in ways that may smear their paint but could injure or kill me with little effort.
> I guess the fact that the limits are higher also has some influence on this?
See the other comments on that people definitely go above posted speed limits, but limits are also not necessarily higher.
Cities are 50kph (30mph) with residential areas often at 30kph (20mph), outside of cities the limits are 80-100kph (50-60mph). You get a lot of 100-120kph (60-75mph) sections on the Autobahn where the otherwise _recommended_ speed is 130kph (80mph) which is when BMWs will be overtaking you at twice that speed on the left lane.
> I remember a Dutch engineer telling me that when they increased the speed limits years ago the average speed sunk and it was hypothesized that it was (IIRC) because as the limits became more reasonable more people decided to just follow them.
I'd assume they meant "rate of speeding violations went down" versus "average speed sunk". The problem with measuring the effect of speed limit changes is that so many things change over the timeframe of the measurement - better vehicle safety, change in traffic rate or overall transportation preference (increase of cyclist in the Netherlands)... studies on this topic are manifold and they all seem to come to rather different conclusions.
According to their FAQ they actually want those poor conditions to be present in the corpus.
> We want the audio quality to reflect the audio quality a speech-to-text engine will see in the wild. Thus, we want variety. This teaches the speech-to-text engine to handle various situations—background talking, car noise, fan noise—without errors.
A driver's license in Germany costs 1400+ euros, covering a minimum of 12*90min learning, 12h driving, a written test, and a driving test. If you fail the tests you have to take more hours. Bad drivers pay 3000+ euros until they pass.
This is technically true, but it's very common to take more hours than the absolute minimum. Good driving schools don't send you off to take your practical exam if they don't think you have a good chance to pass.
It has less to do with being a bad driver and more with your learning progress. If you're a bad driver, you shouldn't pass the practical exam no matter how often you take it -- and your driving school shouldn't send you to it in the first place.
Case in point: I paid for a ridiculous number of lessons because I switched instructors halfway through and was full-time self-employed. If I had been able to keep a tighter schedule I could have done it in a fraction of the time. I passed the written and practical exams on the first attempt but what bloated the costs was having up to two week gaps in between driving lessons.
To expand on your summary: it's 12 classes (only two classes that are mandatory, for the rest you just have to show up to ten of them in total, you can go to the same class multiple times) but going to those classes is rarely enough to pass the written exam, so you normally also get a book. As the written exam is a (mostly) multiple-choice test with questions from a well-known pool, there's also software that lets you train the exact pool of questions which your exam will be based on. Many driving schools have you take a simulated exam before they give you the paperwork you need to sign up for the real thing. How long it takes you before you can pass the exam mostly depends on how good you are at rote learning.
The 12h driving consists of various lessons. These include various scenario-based lessons (i.e. driving on the Autobahn, driving at night-time and driving on rural roads). You have to take a specified number of lessons for each scenario. You also have to take a minimum number of regular driving lessons but most people I know have done more than the bare minimum for various reasons. Most driving instructors do these lessons in batches of two per session (as, depending on traffic, you can easily spend half a lesson just getting to the training area and back).
I think this part is different from the US: driving lessons (even the very first one) are generally done in real traffic. Although you often do a few of the early exercises in safe environments, many instructors make you drive there and back. Driving instructors are trained to operate cars from the front passenger seat (which, btw, is called Beifahreritz -- literally "co-driver seat" -- in German) using a second set of pedals and mirrors the training cars are equipped with; so they can always take over and simply grab the steering wheel if necessary.
On the other hand, the infamous "BILD" tabloid started using that prefix brand again in 2002, with the Volks-PC and has been marketing 200 products with that prefix since and other companies/projects/products followed (like Volks.Fahrrad - which had to rename because of the product proximity to Volkswagen).