Category - Bad Drivers

Another case of teenage deaths in a car driven by a teenage driver.

There is no suggestion that speed limits were being broken, but going too fast for the conditions is definitely implied – possibly along with juvenile naïvete.

Update: And he (Aaron Simpson) got off with the charge of careless driving. The verdict has the approval of the parents of the deceased teenagers.

I’m in no position to judge, so I won’t. All I will say is that thousands of people drive the same route daily and don’t spin off the road or collide with other vehicles.

Teenagers have somehow got to start accepting – or be forced to accept from their currently ineffectual parents – that speed and bravado are dangerous… even when you’re not technically breaking the law.

This case is just one version of the script which is played out almost daily, and which sends young drivers’ insurance premiums sky-high, as well as wrecking the lives of families and friends.

Young people simply have more accidents because they’re inexperienced drivers who believe  – and are allowed to believe – the exact opposite.

I wrote the other day about Euan Tennant – a learner and student who had only taken 10 lessons, bought a fast sports car, managed to rack up 1,500 miles in “a few weeks”, and who ended up in an accident which killed his girlfriend. The police said that they believed excessive speed was the cause.

I’ve also written somewhere recently about the dubious Scottish justice system – even more dubious than the English one in some cases.

Well, Tennant has been cleared!

This gives an absolutely clear message to anyone else out there with a juvenile mind and inflated sense of masculinity, who feels like buying a pratmobile when they are only just out of nappies.

You should read that most recent article. The words of the dead girl’s family make poignant reading. They can only be congratulated for holding in check the obvious words that any sane person would want to use if they weren’t constrained in some way.

The jury found that the charges of causing death by careless driving and going at excessive speed were not proven.

This is an old post. But it is still absolutely true.

In a long-overdue update – I didn’t follow the story at the time, but it was visited by a search in 2022 – Tennant was unbelievably cleared of causing his girlfriend’s death!

This story from Edinburgh illustrates clearly the absolute Number One reason many young drivers have accidents, which are often fatal.

Euan Tennant was a learner driver. He had taken “around ten” driving lessons, but never passed his test. He then went out and bought a two-litre sports car.

It was a calculated decision on his part to do this. It wasn’t like he forgot to pass his test. That he overlooked it. He knew full well what he was doing.

He had driven around 1,500 miles in the car with his 22-year old girlfriend as his supervising driver (allegedly – we must assume that she had passed her test more than 3 years previously, and that Tennant was always accompanied when he went out). He reckons she’d never told him to slow down in all that time. This version of the story says that Tennant had only owned the car “for a few weeks”, so he did well to rack up 1,500 miles in such a short time – it can take me 2-3 weeks to do that, and I’m a very heavy user!

On this one trip, Tennant lost control on a bend (the old story), Laura Campbell had to be cut from the wreckage and died a few hours later in hospital.

CCTV footage shows a speeding car, which Tennant admitted “could have been him”. He also admits overtaking another car shortly before the accident. He claims he was not speeding on the bend and that there was “something on the road surface” that made him lose control.

Just for the record, if you’re driving at a safe speed on a bend, you do not lose control and have to have your passengers cut out of the mangled wreck – even if the road does have “something on it”.

The police could find nothing on the road surface, and believe that excessive speed was the cause.

Tennant claims to have been doing 40-45mph when he lost control.

The case is ongoing, but the fact that a juvenile mind is prepared to behave in such a juvenile way – with such appalling results – is precisely why young people have accidents. It isn’t their training. It is their attitudes.

Tennant is expressing all sorts of remorse.

The fact is: he made the decision to buy a sports car with sound mind clear conscience, and hopelessly inadequate driving skills knowing he was still a beginner. And now he needs to face the music.

EDIT: And this is why young drivers will continue to have fatal crashes, because there’s no deterrent. Tennant was cleared on the grounds that the case against him was not proven. I take back a lot of what I’ve said about Scottish law making better decisions than the law in England.

I’d just point out that Laura Campbell is still dead. And Tennant was still highly inexperienced, and driving a car hopelessly too fast for his poor driving skills.

Laura’s parents understandably feel “let down” by the verdict.

The Boston Standard reports that the borough’s young drivers face “one of the highest risks of being injured in car crashes in the country”.

Let’s just get things straight here. The figures do not mean that your chances of having an accident increase just by moving to Boston – it’s the higher proportion of teenagers brought up there only having a single helix in their DNA that is to blame.

Yet again, the real problem is being shoved under the carpet. The reason Boston teenagers are having more accidents is that they are bigger prats than in other places. Someone needs to be dealing with that – not trying to blame it on statistics that they don’t really understand.

“Experts” are trying to suggest that poor public transport and long distances from home to school are to blame. But this argument is based on totally separate “statistics” designed to dumb things down. It would appear that if you live in Boston, it’s a 3 mile round trip even to go to the toilet, and you need a passport to go to school because you have to move through several international borders!

Let’s do what the Boston Standard didn’t do, and actually read the report, which you can access here.

Instead of adopting the Boston Standard’s selective and scaremongering approach, lets list ALL the factors the report identified.

Analysis has identified a number of common factors present in young driver collisions, including the following:

• They tend to drive older cars with less crash protection
• There are often three or more casualties in their collisions
• Their collisions often occur at night and at weekends
• Their collisions often occur on wet roads
• Their collisions often occur on minor roads in rural areas with a 60mph speed limit
• Their collisions are often single vehicle so involve no other road user
• They often occur on bends, particularly on rural roads
• Their vehicle often skids, and in some cases then overturns
• Their vehicle often leaves the road, and in many cases hits a roadside object or enters a ditch

Summarising, you can say that young drivers drive bangers filled with their mates, and mostly at night (a progression from arseing about on skateboards and BMX bikes outside the chippie). Since they’re usually travelling at speed, their accidents occur on wet roads and bends – particularly on roads where it is possible to put your foot down – which results in the car skidding and overturning, and often hitting objects off the road (i.e. trees and posts).

The Boston Standard appears to have only seen the one about rural roads and taken it out of context with the others.

The report notes:

Nationally, the research found that young drivers who are from rural areas are significantly overrepresented within the collision statistics compared to their urban counterparts.

So, young drivers in rural areas DO have more accidents overall. When you look at the report’s bar chart for the three areas it has identified – urban, town, and rural – you see that there is a progression from the first category up to the third. Basically, in places where you can’t drive fast, you stand less chance of hurting yourself than you do in places where you CAN drive fast. It’s bloody obvious.

The report further discovers that there is no difference between the different areas for drivers 30 and over. Tellingly, it uses the term “mature adults”. Now we’re getting to the nitty-gritty of the cause.

The report then adds:

It would therefore suggest that rural roads themselves are not responsible for the increased collision involvement of rural young drivers.

The Boston Standard and it’s “experts” are talking rubbish, then, when they try to sweep the problem under the rug.

The report continues:

There is very little difference between young and older drivers for the speed limit of the road on which they were involved in collisions.

Quite. It is inappropriate speed that is the issue. Inappropriate for the situation, and inappropriate for the driver’s skills (or lack thereof).

The report says:

The mileage data shows that rural residents have 31% higher annual average mileage than their urban counterparts. For adult drivers, this does not lead to a higher collision risk… Young rural drivers, however, are 37% more likely to be involved in a collision than urban young drivers.

This is just stating the obvious. The longer you’re in the car driving it, the more likely you are to have an accident if you’re already in a higher risk group.

But what shoots all of this out of the water is the risk map included in the report. Some of the most rural areas – and ones with the most winding and out-of-the-way roads – such as ALL of Scotland, and large parts of the northern areas have risk indices that are around the the norm (100). The peaks correspond generally to very specific areas of well-known idiot-country. The lowest indices relate to exclusively urban areas – the report makes that clear,

The report concludes that younger drivers are at risk, particularly on rural roads. That has been known for years. The report also concludes that it isn’t the roads themselves that are the problem. It is specifically younger drivers, for whom the risks increase the more rural their driving areas are. It states clearly:

…this would imply that there is something about rurality and young drivers (through inexperience and/or attitude) that leads to increased collision risk.

THIS IS PRECISELY THE PROBLEM.

It must be obvious that since you cannot create experience out of nothing, then care is needed while it is being acquired. Young drivers simply do not exercise care – they have appalling attitudes on the road. And they are clearly less likely to do so in certain areas – Boston might have come out in the top risk group, but there are plenty of considerably more rural locations which didn’t.

Looking at my own region, I note that Mansfield and Bassetlaw feature well above the norm. And yet Nottingham – which I can assure you has it’s fair share of complete prats – is right down at the bottom (i.e. the good) end. The numbers don’t seem to prove anything when you consider that detail.