Have you ever wondered why teen drivers tend to have high insurance premiums? A major part of the reason is that they have such high crash rates. After all, insurance is all about risk assessment and management. Because teens crash more, they’re more likely to cause damage that needs to be covered, so their premiums go up.
But this raises a related question: Why are teens crash rates so high? What are teens doing wrong that other age groups are not?
The role of experience in driving safety
You can actually find a lot of things that teens are doing wrong behind the wheel. They may make more mistakes, they may drive more recklessly, they may get distracted more often or they may simply fail to be defensive drivers.
But all of these mistakes tend to come back to one thing: a lack of experience. Older drivers have more experience, so they make fewer mistakes. Teen drivers lack that experience and only get it by making mistakes and learning from them.
That’s why it’s so hard to improve teen crash rates. You can’t really get teenaged drivers extra experience without putting them on the road, and they’re going to cause accidents and make errors as they learn. It’s no surprise that someone who has been driving for 10 years tends to be better at it than someone who has been driving for just a few months.
What if a teen driver injures you?
You may be an older driver yourself, but the risk of being hit by a teen driver still exists. You can’t avoid it, so be sure you know how to seek compensation for your injuries and losses if it happens.