Gadgetory

now simply put younger drivers have accidents at roughly five times the rate of more experienced drivers let's say their parents generation and booze and speed only account for about half of that so an experiment was done a University of Massachusetts at Amherst to Train young drivers in what they call rap risk awareness and perception training it basically turns peripheral awareness while driving into a crude sort of computer game awarding points if you see what's around you so the research program was trying to aim at getting younger drivers to recognize these threats from many peripheral and lateral areas not just the linear space in front of and behind their car they got the recognition rate of these peripheral hazards up to about 65 percent in young drivers compared to just 37 percent in the untrained ones now old codgers have kind of a similar issue as drivers get older they realize their reactions are slowing and they tend to slow down their driving and increase their gap quite a bit as a result frontal impacts among 70 to 90 year olds go down quite dramatically but side impacts go way up so researchers here got older drivers to for example scan the area around them while they're making a turn not just the area where they're pointing that term here the UMass team got older drivers to side scan at a rate of around 83 percent up from an untrained 44% it helped that this group was real receptive to the input they noted because they were all quite afraid of losing their driving privilege should they have a lot of accidents now this may seem incredibly sort of basic and I admit it is but the more I read about this kind of research the more a simple theme keeps coming up you got to face the driving task as one that is not linear as these lines on the road suggest but that is a 360 scape it's one of the habits that drops away from many classes of drivers old young and perhaps those that are just distracted or bored with the task so it's key that we all bear in mind check the cars three zones what's going on in front of you linear what's going on around you in the sides and what's going on behind you through your mirrors or camera technology these are all areas that it pays to double check