“Do as I say, not as I do.” Plenty of parents and other adults have long been criticized for delivering this argument to youngsters. Now, it appears that teenage drivers are adopting that same illogical stand when it comes to texting and driving and other high-risk driving.

According to a recent national survey conducted by State Farm and Harris Interactive, teenagers riding in a car are actively discouraging the driver from texting while driving. But when they’re behind the wheel themselves, it’s a different story.

While in passenger mode, 78 percent of surveyed teens claimed they “spoke up and pointed out a driver’s distracted behavior.” Having done so, 84 percent insisted that the driver listened to their objection and ceased the distracting activity.

State Farm cites the comments of an 18-year-old Pennsylvania driver, Navea Frazier. “When I’m in a car with my friends,” Frazier reported, I say, ‘Hey, don’t do that. I’ll text for you.’ I’m the designated texter. And they always stop driving distracted.”

Of the 16 percent of teens who chose not to point out the troubling behavior, nearly half said, “they felt the driver could handle the distraction.”

Most distressing is the response from 34 percent of the surveyed teens: While they might ask friends or others not to text and drive, they continue to engage in texting themselves when behind the wheel. “Research tells us that texting while driving can be just as dangerous as drinking and driving,” says Chris Mullen, State Farm’s director of technology research. Teens need to “understand that no one can handle driving distracted.” More...

Age matters when it comes to licensing drivers. “If every state adopted all five components of the toughest young driver laws in the nation, more than 500 lives could be saved” each year. In addition, more than 9,500 collisions could be prevented.

These promising predictions stem from a new analysis by the Insurance Institute for Highway Safety (IIHS) and Highway Loss Data Institute (HLDI). Both research groups serve the insurance industry.

A new online calculator, available at iihs.org/gdl, claims to show the safety gains that individual states might achieve by altering their driver-licensing regulations as they pertain to young drivers.

The five key components cited as risky are:

• Permit age
• Practice driving hours
• Licensing age
• Night Driving restrictions
• Teen Passenger restrictions

Which states have the most desirable standards already? IIHS considers the current “best practices” to be: More...

Experience pays major dividends in safe driving, according to a recent study conducted for the AAA Foundation for Traffic Safety. Teenage drivers, analysts discovered, are about 50 percent more likely to experience a collision in their first month of unsupervised driving, than they are after their entire first year behind the wheel on their own. They’re also nearly twice as likely to crash early in their driving “career” as they would be after two full years of driving experience.

In this analysis of crashes involving new drivers in North Carolina, three common driving errors accounted for 57 percent of crashes n which new teen drivers (actively driving for a month or less) were at least partially responsible:

Certain types of crashes were found to be more likely to occur during the first few months of driving, but then they tapered off rapidly with additional experience. Those incidents appeared to reflect the teenager’s initial inexperience, which was alleviated by rapid learning in subsequent months. Crash types that declined at a slower rate appeared to result from continued failure to master certain specific driving skills. More...

Ford’s new MyKey Do Not Disturb technology allows parents to block their teens from receiving incoming phone calls and deters text messaging while driving. It debuts in the Ford Explorer in early 2012. MyKey already has a “No belts, no tunes” feature that mutes the audio system until front occupants buckle up.

Giving a new and sinister meaning to the term “hot wheels,” London’s Daily Telegraph reports that some Japanese car dealers are selling radioactive vehicles bought from motorists who lived close to the Fukushima Dai-Ichi nuclear power plant, which suffered a massive radiation leak in the wake of an earthquake and tsunami in March.

What a difference a year makes. Chrysler Group reported a third-quarter profit of  $212 million, compared to a loss of $84 million a year ago. Chrysler credited new and upgraded models for the boost in earnings.

Set your DVR for National Geographic Channel’s Ultimate Factories, which will be showing the making of the BMW X3 crossover at the company’s South Carolina plant. It’s a follow-up to an earlier show about the making of the Z4 roadster.

Formula 1 will have two races in the U.S. soon. The Circuit of the Americas in Texas will be joined by a street circuit laid out along the Hudson River in Weehawken, New Jersey, and West New York. The Texas track is scheduled to be up and running next year, while the New Jersey GP is set for June of 2013.

The next generation of the Dodge Viper has been spotted during testing. It’s rumored to have an 8.7-liter V-10 engine, which would make it the largest ever offered in a Chrysler production car.

Chrysler had a good time in the Lone Star State this week. The Dodge Durango was named “Full-Size SUV of Texas” by the Texas Automotive Writers Association. TAWA members spent two days driving the newest crossover and sport-utility vehicles before making their choice. They also named the 2012 Jeep Grand Cherokee “SUV of Texas.”

Honda will debut two all-new models, the 2012 CR-V and 2013 Fit EV, at the Los Angeles Auto Show on November 16. The fourth-generation CR-V will showcase new exterior and interior styling, improved fuel economy, and added technology features. The all-electric zero-emissions Fit EV concept vehicle debuted at last year's Los Angeles Auto Show, and the production model will be revealed this year.

While parents are still buying cars for their teenage children, they’re cutting back on costs. That’s the message delivered by a survey of 600 American parents with children under 18, conducted for Allstate Insurance.

Three out of five parents whose teen children had a driver’s license said the current “economic downturn” has caused them to curtail expenses for youngsters’ driving. The same response was given by 46 percent of all parents surveyed. Car expenses that are being cut back include not only purchase price, but the cost of fuel, maintenance, and so forth.

Lower-income households, logically enough, are even more likely to exercise restraint when it comes to teen driving. Some 72 percent of parents in households earning less than $30,000 per year say they’re saving or spending less. Barely one-third of parents who make more than $75,000 admitted to cutting back.

Among parents of teens with licenses,73 percent said their child had his or her own automobile. Another 8 percent reported that the child shares a car with a sibling. Comparing the present with the past, only 48 percent of those parents had a personal car when they were young (or shared one with siblings).

Willingness to pay the full price of a car, without expecting the youngster to contribute, appears to escalate as a child approaches driving age. Only 27 percent of all parents said they believe in paying in full. Yet, of parents who already had a child with a license, 46 percent expressed willingness to pay the entire price. Parents who paid for their own car when young are more likely to believe that their own children should contribute to the cost.

Just over half of parents said they would pay all or most of the cost of inspections and registration fees, and 45 percent would cover the cost of insurance. Nearly as many (44 percent) would pay for general vehicle maintenance, but only 17 percent expressed willingness to pay for all or most of the gasoline consumed by their child’s automobile.

What kind of car are they buying for youngsters? Among all parents, 57 percent said they would spend $5,000 or less. More than three-fourths of parents said safety is their top priority, while 18 percent cited reliability and a mere 1 percent ranked fuel-efficiency as the primary attribute.

Of parents whose children already had cars, 94 percent said that vehicle had been purchased secondhand, and was an average of 9.3 years old. That’s just about the same average age as the parents’ first automobile.

How did you learn to drive? High-school driver’s education classes? Private lessons on the street? From a parent or relative?

Judging by a Harris Interactive poll commissioned by InsuranceQuotes.com, fathers have been the dominant source of driving instruction. Of the 2,232 licensed drivers surveyed, 32 percent of men and 26 percent said they’d learned how to drive from their Dads. When considering only drivers between the ages of 18 and 34, Dad was the primary driving teacher for 38 percent of men and 31 percent of women. Mom had served as the main instructor for 21 percent of men and a substantial 28 percent of women.

A few decades back, it seemed as if nearly every high school offered driver’s ed in some form. Today, because of cutbacks in school funding, driver-education programs are less common than in the past. Of all the licensed drivers over 18 who were polled, though, 25 percent of men and 21 percent of women recalled having learned to drive at a school-operated program.

Of those who learned elsewhere, men were far less likely to enroll in private driving classes. Only 6 percent of men had taken that route during their learning years, while 12 percent of women had a private driving instructor to teach the basics.

Not everyone was taught at all, in the usual sense. No fewer than 13 percent of men and 5 percent of women said they were “self-taught drivers.” Presumably, they’d learned or observed the rudiments of driving from someone, but had no organized program of instruction and, essentially, learned primarily through experience.

“Fathers and mothers have a big burden ... when it comes to teaching their kids to drive,” says John Egan, managing editor of InsuranceQuotes.com. That instruction “affects what kind of drivers their kids will be for years to come.”

Specific recommendations that can help parents teach their teens to drive properly may be seen at http://www.insurancequotes.com/learning-how-to-drive. “Parents need to take the job seriously,” adds Anne Marie Hayes, president of the Teens Learn to Drive Foundation. “It could be the most important thing they do.”

One interesting side statistic from the survey: Of the 2,410 adults ages 18 and older who were surveyed online regarding past driving instruction, 2,232 were now licensed drivers–which means 7.4 percent were not.

Also read: Teen Driver Survival Tips: A Pro Driver/Dad Guide to Teen Driving and Instruction and Top 10 Driving Tips.