Is It Time To Raise The Driving Age to 21? (110)

Limit severely the horsepower, and general power/handling of a vehicle someone under a certain age can have.

17 year olds with 5 days experience and a souped-up Mitshibusi do not mix..

Limiting horsepower is a dangerous thing, you need the power for overtaking purposes, You imagine a young 17 year old driving a restricted car like this, he sees an opportunity to overtake a tractor so he goes for it but it takes him longer to overtake in the mean time we have 50 year old joe coming towards him in his BMW, The little 17 year old is history

True.

However, I feel that the scenario in your post could have irregardless of what horsepower the 17 year old had.

Consequently, I still consider SOME type of regulations should be put in place to stop the young guns getting behind the wheels of extremely powerful machines.

its very sad yet again.. I think schools could play a big part in educating young people about the dangers of speeding, driving without experience, drink/drug driving...its not enough to just show them on tv. they need to see first hand what it does to families and survivors of serious accidents. im sure there are lots of family members/survivors out there who would gladly talk to young people in schools as part of a RSA campaigne. The college im attending had a campaigne last year to highlight all the deaths on the roads around kerry. when we drove in the gate that morning there were lots of over turned/badly crashed cars and white crosses at the side of the driveway and all around the front of the college. we later found out that people had actually been killed in some of these cars and each cross was for a road death. hard hitting stuff...

they need to see more of the road saftey adds like that lad who was a footballer and he was in an accident and now he is slightly paralised on his left side he ascutally does one of the road saftey adds on his own

RTE did a recent prime time on road accidents his brother was in teh car with him and killed instantly, more of that on the telly they will think twice

i jsut heard of some nee lae coming in for learner drivers, do the government not get its somethimes the IR-responsible drivers thats are causing the accidents?! not learners!

*new laws oops

The majority of crashes, deaths and injuries on the roads are caused by young people and there is no getting around this fact. The RSA stats show that in 2009 about 40% of road fatalities are people under the age of 25 and I'd say that the amount of serious accidents that are non fatal wouldn't be far off this figure. Tackle this group for better road safety and driver training now and it will hold to them all over the long term as well as lowering road injuries and deaths in the short term.

Yes, there are those outside of this group who are involved in crashes but overall those most at risk need to be dealt with first and these are the ones who are most in need of training and standards to be enforced. After all, we don't see too many over 60's doing handbrake turns in jumped up cars, do we?