Teach our kids to drive safer
Crash rate of young drivers
Traffic crashes are the single greatest killer of 15 to 24 year olds in OECD countries. And the situation appears to be no better in other, non-OECD countries (source: European Road Safety Observatory). Young people worldwide are far more likely to be victims of road accidents than people in any other age group. More than 67.500 persons aged 16-24 years old were killed in traffic accidents, in 14 European Union countries within the decade 1997 - 2006. Young people are at twice the risk of being killed in a road accident than people of other age groups in Europe. For the United States, crash rate for 16 to 19 year-olds is 2.7 times higher than drivers of all ages (source: California Department of Motor Vehicles). In Europe, young males account for more than 89% of the overall fatalities of young people.
Increased accident involvement of young drivers
Learning to drive demands a lot of practice before expert levels are reached. Vehicle handling skills are relatively easy to master in only a few hours. However, skills such as anticipation of potentially hazardous traffic situations require years of practice. The driving task is partly determined by the demands of the road environment, such as road design, the presence and manoeuvres of other road users, and traffic rules. However, the complexity of the driving task is very much under the driver's control also, because of his personal choices on driving speeds, following distances, and position. These choices may lead to either small or large safety margins, and are based on personal estimates about the ability to handle these traffic situations. In making these choices, inexperienced drivers in particular need to aim at large safety margins in order to compensate for their lack of experience. In reality however, young inexperienced drivers tend to choose for safety margins which are too small. To a large extent, this phenomenon is a consequence of the fact that this age group tends to overestimate its skills and to underestimate the complexity of the traffic situation. This is particularly the case for young males (source SWOV/ERSO).
Reduce accident rate in novice drivers
It is an established fact that driving simulators, during novice driver training, may greatly enhance safe driving. A large scale study, performed in the US (Source: R. Wade Allen, George D. Park, Marcia L. Cook, Dary Fiorentino, 2007), has shown that accident rate during the two year period after getting the licence, is reduced to 34% of the national average accident rate of novice drivers in the United States. A driving simulator can definitely improve driver training and result in safer drivers and resulted in a reduction of accident rate of 66% for novice drivers. The effects are largest when a wide field-of-view simulator is used with real-word image sizing, as in our ST Software Jentig 50 systems.
The curriculum in the ST Software simulators is richer in content compared to the simulators used in that study, so the benefits may be even larger.
The added value of a simulator depends on both:
- the level of driver training in the respective country: when the training infrastructure in a specific country is less developed and especially in countries with high traffic fatalities caused by suboptimal driver training, the benefits of simulators can be very large.
- the quality of the simulator and the curriculum. The better the simulator and especially the curriculum, the larger the benefits.
We hope the information you will find in the description of our training method (the Load Reduction Method) convinces you of the quality of our simulator and curriculum.