During the first six months of solo driving teenagers are 19 times more likely to crash than when being supervised.
Traditional methods of driver education and training have not delivered demonstrable safety benefits but accurately evaluating the effects of driver training interventions is a difficult task. Crashes are rare occurrences and do not provide an accurate measure of driving performance, so better methods are needed.
We used therefore telemetric data trackers to determine how well this technology measured real driving behaviour over a period of 32 weeks.
For each participant we obtained the following dependant variables: distance driven per trip; number of trips; mean speed per trip; maximum speed; number of speeding violations; and large g-forces.
This system seems to be a promising research tool for evaluating driver behaviour.
The map based tracking function allowed events, including crashes to be mapped, replayed and analysed in detail on the internet. It also allowed us to create daily, weekly and monthly reports of important risk-taking behaviour variables (such as speeding, average speed, large g-forces) and could also provide information on risk exposure (driving distance).
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