What an IDP actually is
An International Driving Permit isn't a separate driving qualification, and it doesn't test anything. It's a standardized translation booklet — a format set out by the 1949 Geneva Convention on Road Traffic (and carried forward under the Vienna Convention framework) so that a police officer in any signatory country can read your existing license's categories and validity dates without a local translator.
It has no legal force on its own. It doesn't certify that you can drive — your home country already did that. It's only ever valid alongside the home license it translates, and it expires when that license does, or after one year, whichever comes first.
Which makes the penalty described throughout this site especially hard to square: the document whose absence costs three months and a mandatory vehicle suspension is, by design, one of the simplest travel documents that exists.
01 · Your name and photo
The permit doesn't collect any new information about you. It reproduces what your home license already says.
02 · Vehicle categories A through E
Motorcycle, passenger car, freight vehicle, and so on — translated into the standardized category letters every signatory country's police recognize, alongside the equivalent text in roughly a dozen languages.
03 · A validity window
Whichever is shorter. No renewal exam, no road test, no medical check beyond whatever your home license already required.
Getting one takes about as long as renewing a library card. Not having one cost three months.