An auto insurance company, namely American Family Insurance, was awarded the 2010 Teen Driving Safety Leadership Award by the National Safety Council for their Teen Safe Driver Program. They were recognized because of their program’s efforts to reduce the rate of teen driving accidents in the country.
Teen Safe Driver program is in partnership with DriveCam Inc., a company that is dedicated to improving driving skills. Since 2007, they have been offering this program to people who have teen auto insurance for free. With safety driving methods from DriveCam, this program puts a video camera in the teen’s vehicle to monitor their driving behavior. The recording will then be evaluated by driving experts and the feedback will be available to the teen’s parents so they can identify and discuss with their children which areas in their driving habits needs development.
According to American Family Insurance, 9,000 families have taken advantage of the program and were able to improve on their teen’s driving skills. Even DriveCam Inc. CEO Brandon Nixon claims that the Teen Safe Driver Program is really effective in saving lives. He said that using the teen video feedback, the Fatality Analysis Reporting System or FARS has statistical information that program was able to save five lives or prevent five deaths than driving without the knowledge taken from the program. Nixon even emphasized that as a result of Teen Safe Driver Program efforts to reduce teen fatalities, teens were able to understand the importance of seatbelts and driving safely thus leading to less 500 teen driving related injuries and 5 deaths from teen driving.
Other auto insurance companies also participated in the battle of educating teens of safer driving. AAA, a car insurance provider, has launched an event informing teenagers of the National Two Second-Turnoff day. The main purpose of the event is to educate teens of its goal that it takes only two seconds to turn of a cell phone. This event also informs teens on the numerous factors of distracted driving. They were informed what things can distract them and get their attention away from the road and more importantly what are the effects if they let themselves be distracted. Other auto insurance companies also have safety programs focusing on teens. Allstate, also an auto insurance provider, has a program that parents and teens participate where they will challenge each other on what are factors in distracted driving so they would be aware on how each factor affects their safety driving skills.
