The first reports on a study that finds that 60% of teen driver wrecks result from distractions.  This is probably not a surprise to any of us.  But the study was noteworthy for me because of the way it was conducted — the AAA Foundation watched nearly 1,700 in-car videos of teen drivers who were involved in wrecks to diagnose what the teens were doing immediately prior to the wreck.  The two biggest factors were talking to others in the car and using a cell phone, either for talking or for texting.  If you click the link, there is a video story that shows some of the video excerpts from the wrecks.  This is certainly something I’m going to make my teen driver watch.  Passing on this type of information should be of what we teach our kids.

The second article is a Wall Street Journal article entitled Better Ways To Teach Teen Drivers.  The story is based on a 2014 study that placed video cameras in parents’ cars to review what they were teaching their kids.  The analysis found that, by and large, teens are being properly taught the mechanics of driving — how to turn, how to control speed, etc.   Unfortunately, the study found that parents did not do a good job of teaching teens accident avoidance — how to recognize hazards, how to avoid those hazards, etc.

The best line in the article was discussing the fact that parents spend a lot of time on things they had trouble with, such as parallel parking.  But as the story noted, “Most people don’t get killed parallel parking.”  Instead, the article encourages parents to spend more time working on hazard recognition and judgment — making left turns into oncoming traffic, how to merge on and off highways at high speed, etc.  The article also encourages you to work with your kid in bad weather conditions, in crowded roads, and the like so that the teens’ first time experiencing these things are not while they are alone.

It pains me to give credit to an insurance company, but State Farm has a teen driving program called Road Trips on its teen driving website, http://teendriving.statefarm.com, that can help you with the process.  The website also has a 3-d video tool that helps kids learn to scan for hazards as they’re driving.

Usage-based insurance policies are already expanding at Allstate and many other insurers. In exchange for allowing the insurance company to install a monitoring device on their vehicles, policyholders receive discounts for safe driving. Allstate’s monitoring device is called Drivewise and was introduced in 2010.

Tom Wilson, Allstate’s CEO, said the expansion of the Drivewise program would allow parents to know where their kids are if they are driving and would also include ways of teaching teenagers better driving skills by giving them a driving score based on certain algorithms. Data collected by the Drivewise device will show up on a user website where parents can look at a “report card” that measures safe driving.

State Farm, another auto insurer, offers online products to promote safe driving, including Road Trips, which gives three-minute tutorials on driving skills, and Road Aware, an online tool that helps teens learn to anticipate road hazards. For U.S. teenagers, traffic collisions are the leading cause of death. After declining steadily for years, deaths of teen drivers increased in the first six months of 2012.

Usage-based policies like Allstate’s Drivewise are becoming more common as technology advances to allow for the collection of more driving data. The technology in question is known as telematics, which refers to a combination of telecommunications and informatics. The devices record data when the car is in use and can allow insurance companies to charge customers only for the time when the policy is in use and to offer discounts on premiums as a reward for safe driving habits. The idea is popular among many consumers, as it can result in lower premiums and has an inherent fairness. Auto insurance agents also welcome the idea as a way to attract consumers in a competitive market.

Insurers’ monitoring devices are a consumer choice, but almost all new cars are also equipped with electronic data recorders, or “black boxes,” that keep track of information like speed, braking, seat belt use and steering. In the event of a crash, the recorders, which are similar to black boxes in airplanes, store data from a few seconds before and after the air bag is deployed, to assist in determining the cause of the accident.. The use of data recorders in automobiles has raised issues of privacy and data ownership that have yet to be resolved.

Bob Briskman is a Chicago vehicle accident attorney with Briskman Briskman & Greenberg. To learn more call 1.877.595.4878 or visit http://www.briskmanandbriskman.com/.

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