There's different levels of black ice. I guess I had a lot of experience and even hit black ice and used my skills to avoid problems but this one time I crested a hill and then entire downhill portion had just frozen from shoulder to shoulder. I wasn't speeding and I had winter tires but the only thing that would have saved me is studs. The car started to drift on the crested highway and my wife even had enough time to ask "Are we going to crash" and I replied yes - and we did! It was a weird feeling having ZERO input - steering wheel - acceleration - brake - nothing.
The point is to learn when & where black ice might be, and slow your speed before you get to that spot. And more generally, drive at speeds appropriate for conditions, even outside of black ice.
Black ice tends to have pretty specific weather conditions and locations (bridges, valley shapes, etc); the newspaper headline shows up at the same time of the year, every year, and sometimes mentions the same location.
Last I checked, training for slippery conditions was part of the mandatory driver education for getting a license in Finland, so "new driver" is a relatively poor excuse for that over there.
(The annual rear-ending fest seems to mostly cater to the "I've driven this route to work for years" audience.)
Indeed, there are certainly more accidents than new drivers. Likewise, in the pacific northwest, first rain after summer is a perpetual learning experience. But you've got me curious: do drivers experience slippery conditions before they get their license or are they merely lectured about them?
Yes. "Hazard recognition" is a separate 8-hour block of education that includes slippery conditions and darkness, and is done "on the track", not in a classroom. As far as I know e.g. the moose evasion maneuver is still part of that, and you'll be in a tailspin at least a couple of times during that day.
Before you get to that, you'll have completed minimum 4 h classroom safety training, 10 h driving with instructor, and whatever amount of theory training gets you to pass the theory test (generally two calendar months studying on the side of being in high school).
Slippery conditions aren't really hard to find in Finland. I think the black ice phenomena is really more about distracted driving.
Wow, that sounds amazing. Growing up in Seattle, the skills we got drilled on were "backing around a corner" and "parallel parking". The latter of which is always appreciated wherever I go... the former is uniformly met with bafflement. Later in life, I would learn that cherry blossoms are the prettiest form of black ice -- thankfully, that happened after I taught myself to recover a tailspin in a snowy parking lot.
To add some anecdotes on the content of that 8 hours:
In the dark, how far ahead can you see a pedestrian without reflector / with reflector at waist level / with reflector at knee level, with/without high beams. How much is that in seconds while driving at inner city / street / highway speeds.
I remember an icy bend of the road, and they told us find the maximum speed we can have at a marked line before the bend, and still make that corner staying inside our lane. So, obviously, you'd spin out a couple of times trying to find the threshold. The implied lesson was that the max speed was much lower than most thought it would be.
Same thing with the moose evasion: What's the highest speed at which you can still successfully brake, let go of brakes, swerve to one side, miss moose marker, re-orient with road, and start braking again (in real life: not go in a ditch / hit a pole, come to a controlled stop).
And after people had gotten a few rounds of "getting the feel for it" on the challenges, they gave us a minimum approach speed for each, and you had to avoid a crash from that speed to pass for the day.
