Kraft's Body Shop

Driver's Education Classes Will Not Teach Your Kids Everything

Every year, we hear about teenagers who get into serious and even fatal car accidents and we're obviously horrified and perplexed about them. If you have any young drivers in your house, whether you live here in Santa Cruz, CA or anywhere else in the U.S. you know that this is one of your worst fears. That's why all of us at Kraft's Body Shop want you to know the facts about teenage accidents and how they are caused.

Statistics strongly support the fact that adolescents don't get into car accidents because they are ignorant about the rudimentary rules of the road or safe driving techniques.  Instead, studies prove that teenagers get into crashes due primarily to things such as inexperience, and taking unnecessary risks. For example, peer pressure is a major factor when it comes to teens doing anything, let alone driving. In a recent National Highway Transportation Safety Administration (NHTSA) study, adolescents were 2.5 times more likely to participate in any type of possibly hazardous behavior when driving with a teenage peer as opposed to driving solo. The likelihood of something dire happening increases three-fold when traveling with multiple passengers in the vehicle.

Teaching your teenagers how to drive is closely connected to many other things they should know in life—such as responsibility, honesty and accountability, just to name a few. Traditionally, many experts believed that valuable driver's education and training could significantly reduce high crash rates of inexperienced drivers 15-18 years of age. But, several in-depth studies of driver's instruction have not shown a decrease in accident rates among teenage drivers who have participated in driver's education programs in the past.

A more wide-ranging program that has led to better results overall is called the Graduated Driver Licensing (GDL) system that offers rookie drivers a more complete experience while under adult scrutiny and security by progressively introducing more potentially perilous driving conditions. In actuality. multiple studies report that GDL systems reduce the number of 16- and 17-year-old-driver crashes significantly.

Once the classroom and behind-the-wheel instruction is complete, the learning should not stop there. As a parent, it's essential that you take a proactive role in keeping your teens safe and injury-free while driving on the busy roads of CA, and all over this country. Safe driving is something that doesn't stop when teenagers hit the safe of 20, because we should always be continually refreshing and re-learning good driving habits that we can use for the rest of our adult lives. ​

Sources: NHTSA, USA Today and SafeKids