You may have heard that teenage drivers have the highest fatal accident rates. You may also have heard that teens get into serious accidents, even those that don’t lead to fatalities, more than any other age group. This is why they have to go through extensive driver’s training and that’s why they have such high insurance rates.

It is true that those first few months with a driver’s license are often the worst for new drivers. They are most likely to make mistakes and cause accidents. They’re still learning how to drive and gaining experience, and their odds of causing a crash will decrease as they get older and gain more experience.

In fact, the decline in accidents can be fairly dramatic. According to one study, crash rates fall by roughly 26% in the first half of a year that someone is driving. By a full year, the accident rate has dropped by 45%.

They don’t yet understand the risks

It’s not all just about experience, however. In some cases, teens will drive poorly when they first get a license because they simply don’t understand the risks yet. Everything is theoretical. They know that accidents can technically happen, but they haven’t experienced one. Plus, brain development doesn’t end until around 26 years old. Teens are simply not in a mental space to fully grasp the ramifications of their actions or the true odds that they could cause a crash.

Unfortunately, this means that a lot of drivers are going to make critical errors on the road while they’re learning, and they’re going to cause accidents. These accidents are going to injure or even take the lives of other people on the road. If something like this happens to you, you may need to look into your rights to seek financial compensation.