Teen driving statistics

Teen driving expert Timothy Smith shares poignant statistics of teen deaths due to driving incidents. Hear what he has to say about trying to reduce these accidents.
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Teen driving statistics

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Well, as parents we're all concerned about how to reduce the incidence of our teens becoming involved in car crashes, and rightly so. Because car crashes kill more teens than guns, drugs, alcohol and suicide combined. What's important to remember is that while most car crashes is unintentional, very few accidents - they're preventable, they're driver errors. So an accident is when a meteor falls on your car. When your son or daughter crashes into the car in front of them because that driver stopped or because the roads are slippery, that's no accident, that's driver error and is preventable. Now, professional racers can go 200 miles an hour around the track, 200x with 30 other drivers and mostly avoid a crash which seems mind boggling since in every city in every day there's lots of crashes at low speed. And the reason they can do that is because they're highly trained. They've been trained to anticipate and react correctly to hundreds of different predictable situations to stay alive on the track. So same thing with your teen, so the more highly trained they are, the less likely they are to get involved in a car crash. So if you accept that most crashes are preventable and you understand the risk associated with it and how to reduce it, you're going to go a long way towards crash proofing your kids. Car crashes are caused by our reactions to a series of situations encountered on the road. And the degree to which you and your teen work together to reduce that, will really go a long way in keeping them crash proof.
TEEN, Responsibilities, Driving

Teen driving expert Timothy Smith shares poignant statistics of teen deaths due to driving incidents. Hear what he has to say about trying to reduce these accidents.

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Expert Bio

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Timothy Smith

Author & Teen Driving Expert

Timothy Smith is a healthcare executive living in the Chicago area with his wife and three children.   He got involved with teen driving several years ago when a number of teenagers were killed in multiple crashes near his home, virtually all due to driver error.   His search for information to help his teens avoid car crashes yielded little of value, so he became a certified driving instructor, got trained and licensed to race cars, took defensive driving courses and ended up writing Crashproof Your Kids: Make Your Teen A Safer, Smarter Driver.  He is also Chairman of Aegis Mobility, a software company which has developed technology to manage and reduce cell phone use while driving. 

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