With a new survey finding four-in-10 (42 percent) parents of teen drivers don’t talk to their kids about safe driving on a regular basis, Allstate urges teens to flip the script and spearhead this important conversation with their parents and friends during this week’s National Teen Driver Safety Week (Oct. 21 – Oct. 27). Released today to shine a spotlight on how parents view their teens’ driving habits, the survey1 revealed widespread concerns over distractions and speeding — underscoring the importance of empowering young drivers to prioritize roadway safety conversations.
This issue is an especially important one for young people. Whether as passengers or drivers, auto collisions are the No. 1 killer of every single age from 16 to 232. Nonetheless, the Allstate survey revealed parents have a largely rose-colored view of their teens behind the wheel: Two-thirds (68 percent) of parents think their teens are safe drivers, and three-in-four believe their kids rarely engage in unsafe behaviors.
“There’s an opportunity here for youth to take charge of this preventable issue, one that’s killing their peers at an unfortunate rate,” said Ken Rosen, Allstate’s chief claims officer. “Instead of being lectured by parents about how to be a safe driver, challenge yourselves, your friends and your role models to practice roadway safety each and every time they get behind the wheel. The most effective way to change driving behavior is through the positive influence of the people closest to you.”
With only one-third of parents using technology to actively monitor their teens’ driving, the National Teen Driver Safety Week survey also found an opportunity for more families to leverage measurable telematics tools, such as Allstate’s Drivewise®, to provide proof points for safe driving conversations — or to let teens prove to their parents just how safe they are with real-time driving feedback.
Additional highlights from Allstate’s National Teen Driver Safety Week survey include:
- Sixty-nine percent of parents who monitor their teen drivers do so through use of a smartphone app. Fifty-nine percent monitor on a daily basis, and 40 percent monitor weekly.
- The highest teen-driver safety concerns were over phone use (64 percent), exceeding the speed limit (50 percent) and being distracted by surroundings (48 percent) or the radio (44 percent)
- Two-thirds (67 percent) of parents think they were safe drivers when they were teens — mirroring the number of parents who think their teen is safe.
- Nine percent of Americans have a teen driver between the ages of 15 and 18.
The National Teen Driver Safety Week survey is a continuation of Allstate’s Good Driving Starts Young theme, introduced earlier this year alongside the 2018 Allstate America’s Best Drivers Report®3, which ranks the 200 largest cities in America based on collision frequency to determine which have the safest drivers. The 14th annual report launched in August with youth- and teen-focused safe driving education events in bottom-ranked Best Drivers cities Baltimore and Los Angeles.