Safe Teen Driving Blog

It seems that every state in the country is adopting or introducing new extracurricular driver's education classes for teens. The death toll for teenage drivers is rather high across the country so classes such as the Tire Rack Street Survival are created to address the issue. Do these classes work or are they just another way for some company to make some money? How effective are these classes really?

While many classes like the Tire Rack Street Survival definitely educate young drivers, it is only through constant parental involvement that significant strides can be made in reducing the teenage driver death toll. Of course, these classes may work if more parents made their teens take them! Without the requirement of mandatory classes, not many teens are going to say, on their own, "oh I cannot drive as well as I should, maybe I should take a driver's education safety class." The only way that these classes will make a huge impact on dropping the teenage death tool is mandatory extracurricular driving classes like the Tire Rack Street Survival.

The Tire Rack class does more than just get parents a discount on their liability insurance. This class also teaches by example - behind the wheel of a car as well as the classroom. The material that is covered is real hands-on and you get to experience real world driving situations behind the wheel of your own car. It's a great way to prepare teenagers about accidents and how to easily avoid them. Plus there is no need to adapt to a strange car either. Other advanced driving schools use simulated demonstrations or even a company car equipped to produce certain driving situations.

This class shows teenage drivers in real world time the consequences of their actions behind the wheel. They learn that every action, no matter how small, creates another action and so forth. So teens learn that split second they took to turn on the radio could be all that stands between them and a tombstone. These lessons that are learned should be ones that every teenager with a driver’s permit should have to receive. Unfortunately, this is not the case at all. Therein lies the problem.

In too many states, driver's education has to be taken as an extra-curricular activity. So many times, teens do not even take a class and instead just study for and pass the written portion of the exam. Sure, their driving is evaluated but it is usually in a controlled setting. However, if mandatory classes were modeled after the Tire Rack Street Survival course or others, the overall fate of teenage drivers would be more optimistic.