We’ve all had teenage drivers in our household at some point
in time, and managed to survive those perilous times. The first time I saw my son driving down
the street by himself in my car, I have to confess that I felt more than a
little anxiety. Fortunately, Brian managed to get through his teenage driving
years with no incidents – with one exception.
When he was 16, he and some friends went out in his mother’s
station wagon with baseball bats, and decided to do a little “mailbox bashing”
in an area just south of where we lived. An alert neighbor got the license
number, and Brian’s dad (me) forced the boys to apologize to the neighbors and
pay for the damage to the mailboxes.
Things could have been a lot worse than that. The son of one
of our relatives picked up his first DUI when he was 17, while driving his dad’s
car. It cost mom and dad a TON of money in legal fees, and the boy in question
had high insurance rates for many years after that.
Brian’s affinity for mail boxes eventually led to the “MacGyver
bomb” incident – but that’s a tale for another time.
For years, teen drivers have had a disproportionate number of
auto accidents, but age is not the only factor affecting collisions. Here are a
few more:
1. Montana is the nation’s crash-death
capital; its fatal car-accident rate is more than twice as high as those of New
York, Connecticut, and New Jersey, and three times as high as Massachusetts’s
numbers.
2. Males aged 18 to 20 are nearly seven
times more likely to drink than are females aged 18 to 20.
3. Drivers over age 65 are only half
as likely as younger drivers to see pedestrians.
4.
Depressed
young women are 10 percent more likely than other drivers to engage in risky
driving behaviors such as speeding and cellphone use.
5.
Kansas
is home to the nation’s best-prepared drivers; they scored 11 percent higher on
written driving tests than drivers in Washington, D.C., who
are the nation’s worst prepared.
6.
Children
are twice as safe when riding in cars driven by their grandparents as they are
when riding in cars driven by their parents.
7.
Native
Americans are 17 percent more likely to be involved in alcohol-related driving
fatalities than are Caucasians or African Americans, and 12 percent more likely
than Hispanics.
8.
Male
drivers are involved in a whopping 80 percent of motor-vehicle crashes that
kill or seriously injure pedestrians.
9.
Drivers
under the influence of marijuana are more than twice as likely as other drivers
to be involved in motor-vehicle accidents.
10. More than one third of all drivers
tested in New York State and Washington, D.C., failed a written driving test.
If you have a teenage boy, you have every right to be nervous.
The most accident-prone age group,
by a substantial margin, is young men. Indeed, 17 to 21 year-olds are three to
four times more likely to have an accident than 70 year-olds.
If you are the parent of a
teenage driver, technology can definitely be your friend. The article below is
worth reading in its entirely, but the short version is that some Chevrolet models
can be equipped with the Buckle to Drive feature and Teen Driver mode. The most
interesting part of the system is an in-vehicle report card where parents can view how their
teen drove the vehicle. The report card tracks distance driven, maximum speed
traveled, over-speed warnings issued, wide-open throttle events and the number
of times other safety systems were activated, including stability control,
traction control and antilock braking.
By the time our grandson is old enough to drive, auto safety
systems will have advanced to the point that it will be almost impossible for
him to have an accident – and that’s a very good thing.
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