Inexperienced drivers carrying passengers

The laws regarding young drivers should be much stricter. No passengers for say 2 years. Compulsory P plates. And, like motorbikes, engine sizes should be restricted. We are too afraid of strict laws in this country for fear of offending somebody or other.

It seems a good idea to introduce a law limiting passengers for the first year or until 21. Like all driving laws, it might take a while for young drivers to actually comply but soon it would become accepted.
No-one imagines they might be involved in a tragic crash, but the risk of being stopped or being involved in a minor accident is much more thinkable; in that case the insurance wouldn't pay out for your repairs, & you could lose your licence & those are big deterrents.
It's absolutely not something parents can police.

The problem is that teenage boys tend to be bad at risk assessment and at the same time over confident in their abilities. We had a case locally where a boy crashed his car and killed his girlfriend, He had apparently never understood what might happen to the girl if he crashed.

Georgesgran

It’s a tricky one, isn’t it?
You can’t tar all young drivers with the same brush, just as you can’t with the over ‘70’s?

DD2 met her now best friend working part-time in TopShop. She was amazed to find her friend took 2 hours and 3 buses to get home after her shift, when a 10minute detour by DD2 on her 25minute drive home would drop her BF at her front door.

Sensible youngsters would miss out if driving restrictions were very drastic?

No, of course you cannot say everyone in a specific group needs help but like it or not the number of accidents new inexperienced drivers have is far more than average and too often cars of lads showing off endup with all of them dead.

Fewer insurance claims from young peoplewill also make their insurane costs less.

The same with older people, having to produce an up to date eye test, is a simple thing to do and could save lives, as could a brief cognitive test that would either give an all clear, or lead to amore detailed one, again saves lives.

I would willingly do the eye test and cognition test.

It’s a tricky one, isn’t it?
You can’t tar all young drivers with the same brush, just as you can’t with the over ‘70’s?

DD2 met her now best friend working part-time in TopShop. She was amazed to find her friend took 2 hours and 3 buses to get home after her shift, when a 10minute detour by DD2 on her 25minute drive home would drop her BF at her front door.

Sensible youngsters would miss out if driving restrictions were very drastic?

Witzend

Churchview

The alcohol element is interesting nanna8. Often these accidents occur at night when I wonder if the passengers have been drinking even if the driver is stone cold sober.

I’ve been told that in Sweden, every passenger in a car where the driver has been found to be guilty of drink-driving, will suffer the same penalty as the driver.
Seems an excellent idea to me. Groups of friends on a night out would no longer be happy for one of them to take the risk.

Here the young ones take it in turns to be the non drinking driver. Seems to be a good idea, they take it pretty seriously.

Churchview

The alcohol element is interesting nanna8. Often these accidents occur at night when I wonder if the passengers have been drinking even if the driver is stone cold sober.

I’ve been told that in Sweden, every passenger in a car where the driver has been found to be guilty of drink-driving, will suffer the same penalty as the driver.
Seems an excellent idea to me. Groups of friends on a night out would no longer be happy for one of them to take the risk.

Our girls all learned to drive in the same car and old Peugeot 205, over the years every panel on that car had been replaced or repaired, including the roof, 2nd daughter especially had an affinity for stationary objects, no injuries thankfully

My daughters passed driving tests at 17 and were named drivers with full use of my car. At 18 off to university, we bought them a £1000 banger and covered their first year insurance, they’re 38 and 40 now, independent and still not been in an accident. I don’t expect we could do this now. Roads so much busier and insurance costs would defeat us
Mine are girls. The serious accidents I’ve read about had young men driving

Was that recent J52

Doing that would surely mean that your sons didn’t build up any no claims bonus of their own and should they be unfortunate enough to have a bump that was their fault, your own no claims bonus would be lost (if not protected) and your premiums would definitely rocket?

When DD1 passed her test at 17 in 1996, I remember her insurance being half the price of what we paid for the car.

California also restricts how many passengers young drivers can carry: no passengers under 20 unless an experienced driver is also on board.

Inexperienced doesn’t necessarily mean young though. I have known several new drivers in their 30’s and 40’s who I would not like to be a passenger with.

Grammaretto and Nanna8, we have a similar system.

N sticker for new driver allowed one fully licensed supervisor over age 25, plus one passenger. No driving between midnight and 5am, 0 alcohol tolerance. 12 months before next stage.

L sticker for learner allowed one passenger not including family (so they can drive siblings to and from), 0 alcholol tolerance. 24 months before final driving exam.

So it takes 3 full years to become an unrestricted driver. It has saved countless lives here. All of my children when driving were pulled over by RCMP at some point to check that their passengers were siblings, so they do indeed check.

I can't see how anything other than a change in the law will make a difference. As many have already said, parents cannot control what their young but just-about-adult children do once they are out of the house,

My brother passed his test at 17, and bought himself an old car. He was still in 6th form at that time, but had been working weekends and holidays for many years to earn his own spending money, so it's not as if my parents had any say in the matter, not that I am aware that they were particularly worried about him being on the roads.

He told me recently that (although he was, I think, quite popular already) he never knew he had so many friends until he had the car. Classmates couldn't wait to go out in it with him.

Probably luckily (with hindsight), he had a minor bump in the car not long after he passed his test. I was actually in the car with him when it happen. I like to think that it made him aware of the dangers very early on,

Very sadly though, I too know a family who lost a young adult child in precisely the sort of accident that would not have happened if new, young drivers were not allowed to carry other young passengers, so I can definitely see the reasoning behind calls for a law on that.

A few miles from us, last summer, a 6th former driving school friends home from school, crashed head on with a car. All the school kids were killed and one child in the oncoming car has life changing injuries. The crash has been ascertained to be the young driver’s fault. Sheer inexperience.

Yes there definitely needs to be a law.

When my daughter first passed her test she had a P plate but removed it as she said other drivers behaved aggressively towards her when it was on the car.

There should be a ban on new drivers having more than one passenger for the first year, a P plate should be compulsory, zero alcohol limit.

You can never have no risk and they have to gain experience, the really dangerous mix is a group on a night out, they start fooling around and distract the driver

Shinamae I had in mind all the campaigns about 30 miles an hour saving a life, you are correct of course but it may help.

Another perspective.

I’ve been driving for 50 years, many hundreds of thousands of miles under my belt and have never been in an accident that was caused by me. I put some of that down to not having a passenger if I can possibly avoid it. If I can’t avoid it, I ask them politely to be quiet while I am driving.

Along with hands-free mobile phones, chattering passengers are distracting for everyone. It only takes a split second of poor concentration to have an accident. I see drivers ahead of me and in my rear view mirror carrying on conversations with front seat passengers, turning their head from the road repeatedly to look at their companion while they speak.

Parents with young children in the rear seats are a particular danger, looking around at what they are doing. It’s quite common to see a parent with right hand on the wheel using the left to flail around at whatever is going on in the back.

I was rear-ended by a tailgating women in a Range Rover who did a lot of damage to my last car, I had signalled in plenty of time to turn left but she didn’t even notice me braking to make the turn and crashed into the back of me. She admitted she had been distracted by two crying children in the back seats.

I don’t know what the answer is. Motor vehicles are for getting from A to B but young drivers are not the only people endangering themselves and others.

I worry how bus drivers cope with the babel of noise on their vehicles from umpteen chattering passengers, people shouting into phones or using them to listen to music without earphones, parents using loud phone apps to entertain their children etc. It must be very hard for school bus drivers to concentrate.

Shinamae

Luminance

I think a way to restrict the speed of the car is a far better solution. I believe some insurance companies require installment of a box that tracks speed.

Yes, that’s true but you don’t have to be going at terrific speed to cause a very bad accident

Kids know how to override the box I’m afraid. My daughter is being very strict with her son now he’s passed his test. Prior to that he was banned from getting into a car with one of his peer group. Thankfully he adhered to that because that person wrote their car off ( thankfully no one was hurt) so he realised his mum knew what she was talking about.

They have to have 120 hours driving experience before they get their Ps and 20 hours night driving. My 17 year old granddaughter has about 60 hours so far, she turns 18 in September and is worried she won’t have enough hours. If you wait until you are 21 you can get your license without all those hours but you still have to have P plates.

Luminance

I think a way to restrict the speed of the car is a far better solution. I believe some insurance companies require installment of a box that tracks speed.

Yes, that’s true but you don’t have to be going at terrific speed to cause a very bad accident

I think a way to restrict the speed of the car is a far better solution. I believe some insurance companies require installment of a box that tracks speed.

I have 3 GC in Australia. They live in Canberra, so can’t speak for other states, but they could start learning to drive when they were 16, I think. Theory part done through college, that could be done earlier.

They could learn with parents and driving instructors, had to complete about 100 hours of driving time and reaching certain standards. Then the test was to make sure they were competent in all this.

They couldn’t take a test until they had turned 17, but both GS had passed within a few days of that birthday. GD took a bit longer. I think younger GS has just got rid of his last lot of ‘plates’, he is 21.

The restrictions on having young passengers, other than siblings, for a certain time seems eminently sensible to me.

The Oz system seems so much better than the UK. They didn’t seem to have backlogs for lessons and tests like they do here.

When our DS passed their tests at 18, they drove cars registered in our names. The rule was that they didn’t take the cars out at night, otherwise we’d remove them from the insurance. They complied.

Nanna8, what a great system, it should be adopted in the U.K. If young people had red or green P plates, the general public, i.e. other car users, could see at a glance if they were breaking the law. And surely it would be easier for the police to manage, being something identifiable whilst driving around, they could be pulled over and dealt with. The authorities really need to do something about this.