Accident Avoidance Training for Teens

Your teen is 16. He or she has spent hours yawning in the driver’s ed classroom, and scaring you to death on the roads while learning to drive. They pass the test. They have a license—and now your nightmares begin. Although we’re making safer cars, they do not drive themselves. Can your teen handle an emergency situation, swerve to avoid a deer and not go out of control? Probably not. That’s where accident avoidance training could bridge the gap, and help ease your worries.

BSR @ Summit Point
One of the premier accident avoidance schools is BSR housed at the Summit Point Automotive Research Center (SPARC) near Charles Town, WV. The facility provides training for military personnel, state department employees, and police officers. It also offers an accident avoidance course for new teenage drivers, and the payback for students and their parents has been astounding.


Bill Scott, SPARC’s owner, just released six years of data in an ongoing study that is the first scientific look at the benefits of accident avoidance training. The study shows that untrained drivers have about double the likelihood of both being in an accident, and in one severe enough that a vehicle has to be towed from the scene; and are about 2.5 times more likely to be in an injury accident or one involving multiple vehicles.

Control Group
The study employs a valid control group of untrained drivers, official driving histories and statistical confirmation. The study followed 469 first-time drivers for five years—the most vulnerable years in a young driver’s life on the road. A group of about 48 first-time drivers from Jefferson County, WV high schools are given a free Accident Avoidance class. Teens sign up on a first come first serve basis for the class. The students who miss the cut act as a control group.

In 2000, with the cooperation of the West Virginia Department of Transportation, the Sheriff’s Department, and the State Troopers, Scott began to follow the first teens’ driving records for five years. Each year a new group of students was added to the study. Scott has a doctorate in geophysics from Yale University and was a fellow at the Carnegie Institute before spinning off from academe to become a road-racing driver and owner of Summit Point Raceway. In the ‘70s, he began an anti-terrorist driving school for state department employees at BSR, Summit Point’s training division, that included an accident avoidance segment. He began getting letters from graduates of the program thanking him not only for avoiding terrorists, but for avoiding accidents on the highway.


“I started thinking, when our kids and grandkids hit 16 our greatest fear is that they will be killed or injured in an automobile accident. And the statistics say this is a distinct possibility (5000 teens die every year in motor vehicle crashes). We remember our own crazy youthful stunts on the highway and, even if we escaped unscathed, most remember a contemporary who did not.”

Class Time, Track Time
The teens spend a full day at the facility with one and half hours in the classroom and six and a half hours driving at speed with an instructor in the front seat and two teens in the back seat. Instructors take the students out of their comfort zone to see how they react to stress. Instructors maintain control in the vehicles at all times and assist when a student faces trouble.