Study: Extra training helps teens avoid crashes

Dan Carney • E-mail

In the contentious debate of how best to prepare young drivers for the challenges of safe driving, new evidence shows that teaching teenagers how to avoid crashes does in fact make them safer drivers.

It’s an important topic, given that car crashes are the leading cause of death for teenagers. And the debate about how to deal with it mirrors the dispute over the best approach to sex education for teens.

To date, the safety establishment — in the form of the Insurance Institute for Highway Safety, the American Academy of Pediatrics and others — essentially has preached abstinence, arguing that teenagers should avoid driving unsupervised until they are more mature.

Some have even argued that offering advanced driver training to young drivers — teaching them to swerve through courses lined with plastic cones and slide cars over sprinkler-soaked roads — is dangerous.

“This type of training may have an unintended negative benefit of making young drivers overconfident,” said Anne McCartt, vice president for research at the insurance institute. The propensity to take risk “has more to do with attitude and thrill-seeking rather than skills,” she added.

But experts in driver training say it is unrealistic to expect teens to refrain from driving unsupervised. And now they have data to show that teaching better skills can help keep them safe.

“Looking at the accidents that take place when the driver has a chance to react to the emergency, trained students have a powerful advantage over untrained drivers,” said Bill Scott, a retired racing driver who is president of Summit Point Automotive Research Center, or SPARC, in Summit Point, W.Va.

SPARC, recently compiled a report that showed untrained young drivers suffered 36 percent more crashes and 75 percent more multicar crashes than drivers who had been through their course. The study followed about 300 students, about half of them with special training, over a five-year span from age 16 to 21.

The school, which also trains law enforcement, military and diplomatic drivers in defensive driving techniques, also found that untrained students experienced 63 percent more crashes that were considered avoidable, meaning that the driver had the opportunity to react to an adverse situation. And untrained young drivers experiences 185 percent more of the "accident avoidance" crashes involving more than one car.

Fortunately, most of the crashes were relatively minor, so the study found the reduction in injuries was comparatively small, with untrained drivers suffering only 3 percent more crashes that resulted in injuries. The untrained drivers were blamed for 31 percent more of the avoidable type of crashes that resulted in injuries.

McCartt, of the insurance institute, said the SPARC study examined too small a group to be definitive. Although the report doesn’t prove teen driver education and training helps prevent crashes, she said, a larger-scale study might. “We would welcome the opportunity to set up a rigorous investigation,” she said.

Opponents of teen driver training base much of their opposition on the only large-scale government-funded research program into the topic, which was conducted 25 years ago and may have had flaws in its execution, said Ray Ochs, director of training systems for the Motorcycle Safety Foundation, a group that provides similar skill training for thousands of motorcycle riders every year.

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