ACCIDENT rates among teenage drivers could be slashed using in-car technology that warns them when they are driving recklessly.
So says safety engineer Oren Musicant at Ben-Gurion University in Israel, who wanted to know if in-car technology could help reduce the appalling number of teenage deaths on the roads. In the US, for instance, car crashes are the leading cause of death for teenagers, accounting for of all deaths of those aged between 16 and 19 years old.
In March 2008, Staffordshire County Council in the UK trialled in-vehicle data recorders with 50 local teenage drivers over six months. The IVDRs, made by GreenRoad of San Francisco, California, are more commonly used to help truckers drive more safely and with greater fuel efficiency. The IVDR monitors unsafe driving events, such as overly sharp turns, heavy acceleration, hard braking and fast lane-changes. The warning system was switched on halfway through the trial. From that point, red, yellow and green LEDs on the facia of a dashboard-mounted box told the drivers how they were faring.
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Musicant has now analysed the data GreenRoad downloaded on some 18,000 trips that 32 of the Staffordshire teenagers took. He found the number of unsafe driving events undertaken by each driver halved after the warning lights were turned on, he told the recent conference in Stockholm, Sweden.
鈥淭he unsafe driving events undertaken by each driver halved after the warning system was turned on鈥�
Musicant reckons the system could become part of the measures insurance companies mandate for teenage drivers: 鈥淪ome insurance companies already adjust premiums depending on how far you drive 鈥� in pay-as-you-drive programmes. This could be part of such measures, lowering premiums if a teenager uses a risk detector.鈥�
However, teenagers may prefer to have more-familiar kit to carry out such monitoring, says Per-Olof Svensk, an engineer with , a transport-software consultancy in Borlange, Sweden. The accelerometers needed to detect unsafe driving events are becoming available in smartphones, he notes. 鈥淭he phone has a lot of functionality to spare and will do a lot more to assist drivers than merely provide navigation.鈥�
