Let's see.... where to start....
National Teen Driving Statistics
Motor vehicle crashes are the leading cause of death for teenagers.
16 year-olds have higher crash rates than drivers of any other age.
16-year-olds are three times more likely to die in a motor vehicle crash than the average of all drivers.
3,490 drivers age 15-20 died in car crashes in 2006, up slightly from 2005.
Drivers age 15-20 accounted for 12.9 percent of all the drivers involved in fatal crashes and 16 percent of all the drivers involved in police-reported crashes in 2006.
The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) estimates the economic impact of auto accidents involving 15-20 year old drivers is over $40 billion.
A recent report by AAA estimates the cost of crashes involving 15-17 year olds to be $34 billion.
Graduated drivers license programs appear to be making a difference. Fatal crashes involving 15- to 20-year olds in 2005 were down 6.5 percent from 7,979 in 1995, to the lowest level in ten years.
Fewer 16-year-olds are driving. In 2006 only 30 percent of 16-year-olds had their driver's licenses compared to 40% in 1998 according to the Federal Highway Administration.
According to a 2005 survey of 1,000 people ages 15 and 17, conducted by the Allstate Foundation
More than half (56 percent) of young drivers use cell phones while driving,
69 percent said that they speed to keep up with traffic
64 percent said they speed to go through a yellow light.
47 percent said that passengers sometimes distract them.
Nearly half said they believed that most crashes involving teens result from drunk driving.
31 percent of teen drivers killed in 2006 had been drinking, according to NHTSA. 25 percent had a blood alcohol concentration of .08 or higher.
Statistics show that 16 and 17-year-old driver death rates increase with each additional passenger (IIHS).
http://www.rmiia.org/Auto/Teens/Teen_Driving_Statistics.htm
Read everything on the page below:
http://www.census.gov/compendia/statab/cats/transportation/motor_vehicle_accidents_and_fatalities.html
Car Accident are the Leading Cause for Teens
The World Health Organization released a report in April 2007 stating that fatal automobile accidents are the leading cause of deaths among teens and young adults between the ages of 10 and 24 worldwide. The organization promoted a long list of suggestions such as safer roads and vehicles, helmet laws, prosecution of speeders and drunk drivers and better education for drivers and pedestrians. Some of the more interesting but troubling findings from the WHO report and United States Center for Disease Control and Prevention note that fatal auto accidents are the leading cause of accidents between ages 10 and 24 worldwide.
Approximately 30% of all auto accident fatalities involve individuals under age 25.
Auto accidents result in annual costs of over $500 billion worldwide in medical care, disability and property damage.
In the United States, about 2 out of every 5 deaths for teens are caused by auto accidents.
Drivers between ages 16 and 19 in the United States are four times more likely than older drivers to be involved in an accident. In the United States and Pennsylvania, drunk driving is the leading criminal cause of death. There were approximately 17,000 victims of drunk driving accidents last year. Approximately 40% of all motor vehicle fatalities are alcohol related. Frequent drunk drivers are responsible for almost 60% of all alcohol related fatalities. In 2007, drivers between the ages of 16 and 20 were involved in 1,719 drunk driving accidents. In 2006 in Pennsylvania, there were 13,616 alcohol-related crashes, with 545 alcohol-related deaths. 78% of the drinking drivers involved in these accidents were male. On an average day in Pennsylvania, 37 alcohol-related crashes occur injuring 29 people and on an average day, 1.5 people were killed in alcohol-related crashes in Pennsylvania. Interesting to note that on the holidays, 15% of all crashes involve alcohol usage. In the United States, alcohol-related motor crashes kill someone every 31 minutes and injure someone every 2 minutes.
Non-commercial drivers age 21 plus are considered legally drunk when their blood alcohol level is .08% or greater. Commercial drivers are considered legally drunk when their blood alcohol concentration is .04% or greater. School bus drivers are legally drunk when their blood alcohol level is .02% or more. Drivers under 21 are considered legally drunk when their blood alcohol concentration is .02% or more. NTSHA, the national highway and transportation safety authority, has reported that there is one fatality every 12 minutes, one injury every 12 seconds and one property damage crash every 8 seconds, with one law enforcement reported crash every 5 seconds. Surprisingly, we are learning that motor vehicle accident fatalities and injuries are on the decrease. However, they still remain an every day occurrence. Despite technological advances and educational efforts by public and private organizations, defective design of a vehicle still plays an essential role in automobile accidents. We rely on automobile manufacturers to make safe automobiles. Unfortunately, this is not always the case. In these situations, a vehicle design defect or flaw can contribute to an accident. For example, an SUV rollover accident, faulty original equipment or aftermarket equipment could be to blame. Insurance industry statistics show that people in all but the heaviest SUV’s have higher death rates in single vehicle accidents, mostly due to vehicle rollover. Rollovers accounted for 36% of all fatal crashes.
We have seen many cases where defective seat belts, even when properly used, may not properly restrain the occupants of the vehicle due to poor manufacturing or design. Such defects or malfunctions include initial unlatching, “inertial unlatching”, which takes place when the seat belt becomes unlatched during a collision. Buckles without a lock for the latch design are more susceptible to inertial unlatching in which the latch plate pulls out of the seat belts buckle. There is another design defect with seat belts known as false latching which occurs when a seatbelt buckle appears to be closed but is not. False latching causes a passenger to become free from the seat belt instead of being properly restrained. A seat belt is considered to be falsely latching if it pulls free at less than 5 lbs. of pull. False latching can cause passenger ejection from the moving vehicle or serious injury when the passenger collides with the interior of the vehicle. Many manufacturers are aware of information in evidence but refuse to make it public regarding seatbelt buckles and unsafe seat belts and have entered into substantial but confidential resolutions of these matters with law firms representing injured passengers caused by the hidden danger or defect.
Seatbelt litigation, as well as defective vehicle, requires expertise and years of experience in automobile crash-worthiness claims. Seatbelt injuries account for more than 1/3 of auto-related fatalities. Additionally, serious injuries may occur when airbags either deploy late, deploy inadvertently or do not deploy at all, meaning that passengers who may have otherwise been unharmed during an accident find themselves victims of serious injuries. Legal cases surrounding airbag injuries, seat belt injuries, and tire-related injuries are extraordinarily difficult to prosecute and require an extensive amount of experience and expense because it often takes multiple experts to determine what the proximate cause of the accident was and how the scientific relationship between the accident and the defect and manufacturing process is related to the injury and/or death. That is why it is crucial to hire a competent and experienced vehicle accident attorney who specializes in product liability cases to represent your interest.
http://www.personalinjurynewsblog.com/personalinjury/car-accident-are-the-leading-cause-for-teens/
Do I need to keep going?!
Tom, save your speeding for drag strips and specific racing-type events. Everyone else, QUIT REINFORCING HIS BAD BEHAVIOR. Yes, believe it or not, I used to be a kid. I owned an '86 Monte Carlo SS back then, and got a total of one speeding tkt in it. Despite that, I went racing on a nasty stretch of highway with another kid at a time of the evening that neither of us should've been driving in, and that guy went off the road, flipped his car, and wound up dead. No "banged and bruised up", no "permanent paralysis", "DEAD". D-E-E-E-A-D.
I still put out flowers on that stretch of road for him every year. Tried to turn myself in to the cops for it for 5 years straight, they wouldn't take me in because they told me it was a "life-long learning experience". Probably why I didn't put up much of a fuss when I sold the Monte.
Those cops weren't kidding. You don't want that on your conscience, or you don't want to wind up paralyzed for life as I heard other guys that raced that back road had happened. LISTEN TO REASON.
