Monitoring Teen Mistakes Behind The Wheel
This is part two of the CBS Evening News "The Road Ahead" series.
On the road to learning to drive, you could say Kam Kantor hit a rough patch.
But unlike most fender benders, his slide off the road was caught on camera- inside and outside the car, CBS News correspondent Cynthia Bowers reports.
"I was in complete shock after it happened," Kantor says. "It was even scarier watching the tape, I think."
The extra eyes mounted just below the rear view mirror are part of a pilot project that lets hundreds of first-time drivers "see" their mistakes, such as texting while driving, breaking too late or driving too fast.
You might wonder why a teenager would let you put a camera in their car.
Even though this sort of camera is rolling all the time, it's not Big Brother. Its memory only hangs onto what happens immediately before and after some kind of driving event.
And those "events" are e-mailed to mom and dad, who review them with their teen.
"They're seeing what they're doing wrong," says Jim Rader, a parent. "They're working at it. They're worried about making mistakes. They want to do good."
University of Iowa researcher Dan McGeehee says the videos provide a reality check for over-confident beginners.
Watch more of Bowers' interviews with teenage drivers."This really shines a spotlight on their own driving and they can see themselves that they made some mistakes," McGeehee says.
And hopefully they learn from them. McGehee took 25 drivers who fell into two groups, those who drove "well" and rarely triggered the camera (about three times for every thousand miles driven) and those who triggered it a lot (nearly 19 times for every one thousand miles they drove).
But after seeing themselves, the "riskier" drivers improved by nearly 90 percent.
One of those was Kyle Madden.
When he looked at himself on tape, did he think he was a great driver anymore?
"No, I thought I was horrible," Madden says. "Because I always set it off on about every other corner, and I didn't wear my seat-belt a whole lot."
In fact he wasn't wearing it in his first accident. Luckily he didn't get hurt.
But he was wearing it just a couple months later when a truck pulled out right in front of him — and he nearly rolled his car.
Researchers have wired teens cars in Minneapolis now to test the cameras in an urban setting. But at least one insurance company, American Family Insurance, is already on board. It hopes to offer them nationally soon.
Parents are hoping lessons learned from some of America's most eye-opening videos will help get their teenage drivers home safely.