Many companies with “solutions” claim results, but none are backed up by results of controlled studies done by independent traffic safety researchers like DriveCam is. Making it easy and effective for parents to stay engaged is key to success – and hard to achieve. DriveCam has delivered this feedback program to thousands of families, in which we’ve seen a 70% reduction in teen involvement serious collisions and over 80% reduction in fatalities and injuries.
University of Maryland
Here is a graph of risky driving by week as reported by researchers at the University of Maryland. 200 families with teen drivers were randomly assigned to three groups who drove for over one year. The green and blue lines show how, after four weeks of no feedback, initiating feedback enabled parents in those “treatment groups” to rapidly motivate their teens to drive much more safely. The red line shows how teens in the “control group” kept driving poorly – until their parents starting receiving feedback after six months, at which point their risk dropped quickly. Feedback was turned off at six months for one of the treatment groups, and the blue line shows how the risk of those teens crept back up without feedback.
University of Iowa
Researchers at the University of Iowa studied the effect of DriveCam video feedback in a group of 25 families with teen drivers. A “baseline” period was first established using DriveCam video event recorders with feedback turned off – then they measured how much behavior changed when feedback was turned on. The riskiest drivers in the study reduced their unsafe driving by 88% – in just a little more than a month of coaching and feedback. The study logged more than 180,000 miles of driving.
Additional Studies Under Way
Additional studies funded by the NIH and CDC are in process, the results from which we expect will provide additional validation and understanding of the powerful protective effects that parents can have when objective, third-party feedback enables them to stay connected with their teens’ driving.