I have seen bumper stickers cropping up in Colorado saying “Student Driver”. Not only are the drivers clearly not a student driver, even if they were, why put a bumper sticker on your car. If you are really teaching your kid to drive then use a “student driver” magnet while they are driving. I saw a car that had both the sticker and magnet version on his car and that started me thinking, is ‘student driver’ a code like ‘Let’s go Brandon’?
Huh. Never heard of any such code.
We put the magnet on our car when our son was learning to drive. No way would I have put a bumper sticker on the car (we don’t put ANY bumper stickers on our vehicles, really).
Quite possibly the parents simply forgot to remove the magnet when kid was not driving. Dunno about the sticker.
I see these a lot in Maryland too. I think some are on cars owned by driving schools. Obviously, some of the time these cars are going to be driven by someone other than a driving student.
Never heard of any kind of code behind it.
My daughter took driving lessons from an actual driving school. Every car that showed up for her lessons had Student Driver stickers on it.
I’ve seen a lot of these around Chicagoland too and have wondered.
The consensus on Reddit seems to imply it’s mostly for laughs.
Seems likely, the idea is amusing. Another use is possible, If I was going to put a sticker on my car at all I might choose one that motivates other drivers to give my car a wide berth.
I think there’s also a small market for those stickers from Ear, Nose, and Throat doctors who want to advertise their proficiency in bed.
“They call me Baby Driver”
I see them a lot here in Oregon. I figured they were using the stickers to excuse their poor driving.
My impression is that bumper stickers are hard to remove (so the stickers could well have been on there a long time). What’s everyone’s experience with removing bumper stickers?
Took me a second. 
The stickers and/or decals show up approximately how often I’d imagine them showing up for actual student drivers. Perhaps even less. Maybe a lot of people start to drive without such lessons or I just don’t notice the stickers very much.
I have occasionally seen stickers that look like the driver deliberately had it on despite not being a student. But they don’t rise above the noise of legitimate-seeming stickers. So I imagine that most of the stickers are actual student drivers. I could be wrong.
It varies. Some are made of cheap materials, and after a relatively short time outdoors, the sticker material becomes weak and brittle and the adhesive becomes really stubborn, and it’s a major pain in the ass to scrape the plastic off bit by bit and then get the adhesive dissolved and cleaned up. Better quality stickers peel off nicely even after many years and leave minimal adhesive residue.
How do you tell if they are stickers vs. magnets? We had “student driver” magnets when we were teaching our kid and they look just like a bumper sticker.
We used the bumper sticker when my teens were learning to drive. Magnets weren’t a thing yet. Even if they were, there’s no way I’d be taking it on and off every time the kids wanted to drive.
Once, I was parallel parking the car in an extremely difficult, tight spot on a hill with no curb and a steep dropoff, at dusk. I managed to do it in a couple tries - fairly well, I thought. When I got out, there was a man walking his dog, watching me, who said, “New driver, eh?”
It wasn’t until later I realized he was reading aloud the bumper sticker.
This thread makes me want a bumper magnet that says “student passenger.”
A while ago one driving school would have their students practice parallel parking in front of the park by my house. Those cars had “Student Driver” stickers on them, and the ones I’ve seen on the road all seem to have had student drivers in them.
Never seen a magnet one.
It kind of reminds me of the old “Baby on Board” magnets which people did not remove even when there were no kids in the car. And I saw one that was a sticker which was especially stupid.
Kind of a side note: just because someone looks older than their teens does not necessarily mean they aren’t a novice driver. My mother didn’t learn until she was 28.
If I were going to put some sign-type object on my car, I would definitely use a magnet so it could be removed easily if I changed my mind about it. They do sell sheets of magnet material at craft stores and such that one could easily mount a sticker on and cut to shape.
I don’t remember seeing it on any car that I thought wasn’t used for teaching students. The current law incentivizes using a licensed driving school for new drivers so it is far from uncommon.