Driving in South Korea on a UK Licence — Side Switch, Camera Country & a Required IDP

Two things change at once when a British driver picks up a car in South Korea, and both need conscious effort. The first is the obvious one: Korea drives on the right, the mirror of home. After a lifetime on the left, the slips come at junctions, on slip roads and at roundabouts, so keep your first drive away from the chaos of central Seoul and let the new orientation settle on quiet roads.

The second, and the one that quietly costs visitors money, is enforcement. South Korea has one of the most camera-saturated road networks in the world — fixed cameras, mobile units and long average-speed sections that clock you over whole stretches of motorway. A failed-to-notice overspeed doesn’t get waved off; it’s logged and billed automatically, usually arriving as a charge against your rental weeks later. Korean sat-navs beep a warning at nearly every camera, which tells you how many there are. Treat the posted limits — 50 in town, 80 on rural roads, 110 on expressways — as hard ceilings, and use the speeding fine calculator to see what an overstep would cost.

Before any of that, your paperwork has to be right. Korea accepts the 1949 Geneva Convention IDP specifically, so order that version from the Post Office in the UK and bring it with your photocard licence and passport. Confirm the detail with the driving permit checker, and read the South Korea driving guide for the city-driving and toll specifics.

A few practical notes. The alcohol limit is 0.03 — well under the 0.08 you may know from England — and a failed test can mean a revoked licence, so don’t drink and drive at all. Road signs carry English alongside hangeul on major routes, but minor roads and parking signs often don’t, so download an offline map and a translation app. City driving is assertive and lane discipline loose. Fuel is around €1.42 a litre, the emergency number is 112, and the car must carry a warning triangle.