Quick, random fact here: back in 2000, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention logged the numbers of live births, and found that August was the month with the most live births by more than 10,000 babies.
Fast forward to today, a little under a week from the end of August, 16 years later. That’s a lot of new drivers flooding onto the roadways. Ahead of this, Chevrolet decided back in June to run a survey through Harris Poll of 638 parents with children ages 13-17, asking what the parents are worried about their children doing.
A little worryingly, the top answer with 55% was driving without adult supervision. This actually beat out academic performance (53%), drugs and alcohol (52%), and sex (49%).
Disappointingly, “Rock n’ Roll” failed to make the list
Photo: ©General Motors
This survey was really way less of a scientific study and way more a way of promoting its Teen Driver Technology, which provides parents with a way of checking on their teen’s driving habits while not in the car, while also giving the parent the power to limit radio volume and reminding the teen driver of things like buckling their seatbelt and not speeding.
In addition, should the vehicle have any of Chevy’s long list of active safety systems like Side Blind Zone Alert or Automatic Braking, Teen Driver activates these features and makes them impossible to manually turn off.
This poll is accompanied by a new ad from Chevrolet, featuring perhaps the best-dressed (minus that kid in the black t-shirt—seriously, dude, get it together) and most blasé teen drivers they had on hand.
Of course, this isn’t one of those “Real People, Not Actors” commercials, so there is no reason to think that these teens are really rampaging around the roads, making sudden lane changes while headbanging and bumping into other cars while parking halfway out of fairly tight spaces (setting aside our misgivings over whether or not the “real people” aren’t actors anyway for the moment). Plus, 600 people is hardly representative of parents of teenagers—if you look back at the CDC spreadsheet, it shows that a whole 4 million children were born in 2000, making for millions parents of new 16-year-olds this year alone.
On the other hand, I have watched a teen driver scoot back and forth while attempting to parallel park before eventually leaving the car a good foot and a half in the road, so whether or not the survey has any strong meaning, I think we can all think of at least one person who we would have preferred to have been in a car that could keep an eye on them.
News Source: CDC
The News Wheel is a digital auto magazine providing readers with a fresh perspective on the latest car news. We’re located in the heart of America (Dayton, Ohio) and our goal is to deliver an entertaining and informative perspective on what’s trending in the automotive world. See more articles from The News Wheel.