Lessons To Be Learned From a NM Tragedy

On June 27, 2009, four teens lost their lives in a collision in New Mexico, caused by a drunk driver on the wrong side of the road. Rightfully so, the response has been a call for more efforts to prevent DUI occurrences.

This article gives some details about the crash:

http://tinyurl.com/lzt2wr


What caught my eye in the comments section following the article was the questioning of the role of the parents in potentially avoiding the situation in the first place. The teens were in the first car of a caravan of four vehicles carrying teens to a house party. The time of the collision was around midnight. The driver of the vehicle is listed as sixteen.

Even without the GDL restrictions, a relatively inexperienced driver should not have been on the road with 4 passengers at midnight, with the probability of a return home presumably sometime after 1 or 2 am.

The second thing that caught my eye was the damage to the vehicle:





Clearly, the driver, in a panic situation, swerved to the left to avoid the head-on collision. That is not surprising, but is exactly the wrong thing to do. She obviously also reacted too late, since the oncoming vehicle caught her in the right front quarter.

Had the driver been through our Level 2 simulation training, she would have known that she needed to go to the right, and would have been drilled on the need to get out of the way, rather than stay in lane until it was too late.

Most experts believe that the answer to teen fatalities is further restrictions on teen drivers until they gain sufficient experience and maturity. We train company fleet drivers in defensive driving techniques using this simulator, and about 75% of these experienced (>10 years) drivers either fail to avoid the head-on collision, or subsequently lose control during the avoidance maneuver. Time spent behind the wheel of a vehicle is not the solution.

The value of our simulation training lies in exposure to critical situations, evaluation of initial reaction, and practice of correct response. You simply cannot get that from an online course, in a classroom, or during supervised on-road driving with an instructor.