No matter how much a parent wants to give a teenager a sense of freedom, monitoring teen driving, particularly in those first couple of years with a license, makes sense.
Very few things in a teen’s life fill parents with both pride and utter terror as watching their newly minted driver pull away from the house for the first time. What could go wrong? Well, everything. However, as a parent, you aren’t as helpless as you may think.
In this age of connectivity, you’ll find an abundance of tools at your fingertips to help you keep track of your teen and his, her, or their driving. Some involve engaging safety nets built into many cars; others simply use GPS technology to track your teen’s location, speed, and so forth.
Nothing can replace you riding shotgun with your teenager behind the wheel. But many of the current technologies for monitoring a teen’s driving are the next best thing.
This is an understatement at best. Actually, the safety record for teens may well be worse than you imagine. There are all sorts of ways to interpret the numbers. However you look at it, teen drivers cause more accidents than almost any other age group per driven mile.
According to Carinsurance.net, most fatal car accidents with a teen at the wheel happen within six months of obtaining a license. Another number from the same firm estimates that out of the 6 million or so car crashes each year, teen drivers are responsible for roughly 500,000 of them.
According to the Insurance Institute for Highway Safety (IIHS), 16- to 17-year-olds are about three times more likely per mile to be in a fatal crash than 20-year-olds. For 16- to 19-year-olds, the crash rate per mile is four times that of 20-year-olds. Carve out the 16 year-olds, and they are 1.5 times more likely to be in a crash than 18 to 19-year-olds.
Only drivers ages 80 years old and above post worst statistics than teens. Yes, it is alarming.
We all had a moment in our lives when we realized we weren’t bulletproof. We may not remember exactly when that moment was, but it certainly wasn’t at age 16. Your 16-year-old leaves the house every day giving little thought to mortality. If your teen does think about the future, it’s probably some form of “the road goes on forever and the party never ends.” Moreover, your young teen, license in hand, doesn’t have a depth of driving experience to draw upon.
This sense of immortality and lack of useful experience conspire to put your teen in harm’s way. There are all sorts of situations with which your teenager may come face to face. Your teen’s undeveloped risk assessment will cause some of them, while your teen’s lack of experience will intensify others.
Today’s new cars, trucks, and SUVs have more safety technology than ever. Any technology that helps the driver is ultimately safety technology. This is true of teen drivers, as well. However, most of the safety/driver-aid features we list below won’t help a teen who doesn’t know how to use them or what that warning alarm means. We recommend sitting down with your teen for a little birds-and-the-bees talk about all of your vehicle’s safety technologies.
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According to Carinsusrance.net, the top causes of teen-driver accidents are running off the road and rear-end incidents. There are some popular safety and driver-aids that address those very causes.
Using radar, lasers, cameras, or some combination of the three, FCW detects vehicles or other objects in front of your car. More sophisticated FCW systems also identify pedestrians, cyclists, and even animals. As an FCW-equipped vehicle closes in on a detected object and FCW senses a potential collision, it issues a warning. That warning may be visual, audible, tactile, or some combination of the three.
Becoming more and more common, FCW pairs with automatic emergency braking (AEB). Using the same combination of sensors, cameras, and lasers, AEB automatically applies the brakes when it deems a collision is imminent. When working with FCW, AEB activates if the driver fails to act on the warning.
According to the IIHS, AEB reduces rear-end crashes by around 50%. IIHS goes on to say that if AEB was universally adopted, it would eliminate 110,000 teen driver rear-end crashes annually.
We believe FCW with AEB will be one of the next safety items the government makes mandatory. However, you can already find this combination even in many economy cars. For example, it’s standard in the 2022 Kia Forte FE for under $20,000. For about the same price, the 2022 Subaru Impreza provides it, as well.
With running off the road listed as a common cause of teen driving accidents, LDW is a seriously affordable feature to help a young driver stay on the straight and narrow path. Using a front-mounted camera, LDW keeps track of where your vehicle is in relation to the right and left lane markers. Approaching too closely to those lane markers on either side provokes a warning, compelling the teen to steer back to the center.
More sophisticated versions will even nudge the vehicle away from the side stripe toward the center of the lane.
The IIHS estimates LDW systems reduce the number of running-off-the-road accidents by 11% each year.
Engineered to alert you when vehicles enter the blind spots on your car’s rear quarter areas, BSM covers the areas your outboard mirrors might miss. Basic BSM systems employ ultrasonic or radar sensors located on either side of a vehicle’s rear bumper. These sensors issue an alert when a vehicle in an adjoining lane approaches the rear of your car. This reduces the likelihood of changing lanes into another car.
More sophisticated systems also use side-mounted cameras to monitor the adjoining lanes. The alerts can take the form of warning lights on your vehicle’s A-pillars, outboard mirrors, or the head-up display if your vehicle is so equipped.
According to IIHS estimates, BSM reduces those lane-change accidents by 14%. BSM is particularly important to young drivers who either don’t know how to effectively use the side mirrors or don’t bother using them at all.
Although none of our sources listed RCTW as a teen lifesaver, it’s a handy warning system when backing out of a parking spot or driveway. Moreover, it’s often paired with blind-spot monitoring.
Using the BSM sensors and cameras, RCTW monitors traffic on the path crossing behind your car when in reverse. If it detects an approaching vehicle, it sounds a warning. More sophisticated RCTW systems also feature automatic rear braking.
Many newer cars have one or more of our must-have safety features. Once found mostly in luxury vehicles, several non-luxury brands now provide a suite of safety/driver aids as standard in many of their models. Many active safety features are available in nearly every new vehicle. Here we list a few of the carmaker safety bundles by name.
Crash-test rating is the process for testing and scoring the safety of a vehicle during a variety of crash scenarios. Nearly every passenger car, light truck, and SUV must submit to crash testing.
The two third-party crash-test organizations we often cite are the IIHS and the government’s NHTSA. Their approaches and testing parameters are vastly different.
NHTSA performs just three tests, scoring each using a system of stars. The best score is 5 stars and the worst, 1 star. The three areas NHTSA tests and scores are frontal crash, side crash, and rollover crash. It scores each test individually and issues an overall score, as well.
A nonprofit organization supported by the automotive insurance companies, IIHS doesn’t only perform crash tests, it also uses other data and qualifiers to issue its annual Top Safety Pick and Top Safety Pick+ awards. Currently, it scores Good, Acceptable, Marginal, or Poor in six testing areas. Those areas are driver’s side small overlap front, passenger-side small-overlap front, moderate-overlap front, side, roof strength, and head restraints & seats.
We recommend that, as parents, you make every attempt to find a vehicle that has 5 stars across all of the government tests and scored Good on all the IIHS tests. Furthermore, give some serious weight to the IIHS Top Safety Pick and Top Safety Pick+ models.
There is no shortage of statistics available to parents who are taking the necessary steps to make their teen drivers safer. In a nutshell, the IIHS sums things up by emphasizing that teen drivers are typically worse at recognizing hazards and controlling the vehicle than experienced drivers. Consequently, teen drivers have more loss-of-control and run-off-the-road crashes. Night driving is also historically hazardous for teenage drivers.
We have pinpointed those and a few other issues affecting the safety of teenage drivers among the Risk Factors above. Once you recognize the major causes of teen crashes and deaths, you can form a strategy for minimizing them. For example, consider night driving. Again, according to the IIHS, roughly 20% of injuries and one-third of deaths among 16- and 17-year-old drivers occur between 9 p.m. and 6 a.m.
Simply restricting your teen’s driving to daylight hours, that is to say, issuing a nighttime driving curfew, eliminates one of the greatest risk factors.
Excessive speed is a factor in 25% of teen-driver fatal crashes. Wouldn’t being able to physically restrict the vehicle’s speed or at least monitor your teen’s speed in real-time help keep the speed down?
Take another look at seatbelts. About 45% of teen-driver fatalities involved a driver that was driving unbuckled. How about programming the car not to start if the seatbelts aren’t engaged?
If these sound like terrific ideas to have but nearly impossible to implement, read on.
There are several apps available for your teen driver’s phone engineered to keep your teenage driver safer while providing you with some peace of mind. They all utilize the teen’s phone’s GPS and are compatible with both Android or Apple IOS devices.
Several car companies partner with parents to keep track of and restrict a teenager’s behavior behind the wheel. In other words, these carmakers are building teen-driver technologies into some or all of their models. Ford introduced its MyKey teen-driver technology in 2009. It was the first such system.
Not every model or trim level qualifies for a carmaker’s teen safeguards, but many of them do.
