The problem can be stated simply. If you take your eyes off the road, you will not see the other vehicle coming toward you. This makes you a danger to other road users. The group most likely to fall into this trap are young drivers. Not only are they the least experienced behind the wheel. They are also the ones with the most peer pressure to reply to the text message or answer the cell phone call immediately. The evidence cannot be more clear. Looking at all the different ways in which teens die through disease and accidents, crashes in motor-vehicles are the leading cause of death. The government estimates that, in 2009, about 5,500 people were killed and more than half-a-million injured because one of the drivers was distracted.

In a perfect world, this would be resolved by a discussion at home. As a parent, you would sit down with your children and explain the risks. The statistics are available on the internet to back up your warnings. Your children would nod their heads wisely and swear by all they hold holy not to continue this dangerous practice. Except this would not work in most families. What teens say to their parents is not how they act when they are outside the home. So now comes the hard choice. Do you sit back and rely on prayer every time they drive off into the wild blue yonder, or do you take positive steps? First, a little law: it’s a criminal offense to operate any transmitter that will block or jam wireless communications. So you would face big fines if you were found jamming mobile phone signals. But it’s probably not an offense if you instal equipment in your vehicle that acts as a passive block to the signal. The reason for the distinction is that if you created a cone of silence around your vehicle by transmitting a signal to jam all the cell towers, you would cut off all the other users in your area. While this might make the roads safer, it would seriously inconvenience everyone else. More importantly, it might interfere with emergency calls for the police and ambulance. So passive shielding is probably legal because it does not interfere with any other vehicle or person on the sidewalk. Taking this simple step means you no longer have trust issues with your teen (until he or she works out how to turn it off or get round the shielding, e.g. by putting an antenna outside the vehicle).

More intrusive are the camera systems now offered by some insurers. In return for allowing active monitoring of the way in which your teens drive, they get cheaper premium rates. So if your teen signs up for a policy and agrees not to text or use the cell phone, enforcement just became easier. Similarly, if there’s agreement limiting the number of passengers, you have it on disk. Yes this is cheap car insurance for your teen courtesy of Big Brother, but it’s also helping to keep him or her alive. Statistics show a remarkable improvement in driving when teens know the cameras are watching. So this all comes back to your door the next time you are looking for car insurance quotes. How far do you want to go?

Car insurance is a topic that may be quite confusing for those who aren’t very familiar with it. All those peculiarities and things that only experts are supposed to know can give a headache to a typical newbie. And of all different aspects of insurance for vehicles one of the most confusing is probably the one connected with genders. If you didn’t know, male and female drivers are charged differently even when buying from the same insurance providers and using the same policies with identical coverage options included. Sure, it may sound discriminatory and sexist at first, but let’s take a closer look in order to understand why is that so in the first place.

One very important thing you should know about just any kind of insurance is that companies providing it are all about calculating and assessing risks. Risk is an integral part of the insurance industry and lies at its core because insurance itself is a tool for managing risks. In case of insuring your car the risk being managed is the financial liability you would end up with in case of an accident. So the main interest of the insurance company would be analyzing how it’s likely for you to end up in an accident and how much it will cost them to cover all the damage caused by this situation. And in order to do so they may use the most awkward factors that the car owner would never guess being connected to risk, yet which in fact help the companies determine the risk to a certain degree. So it happens that gender of the car owner helps the insurance company to determine how it is likely for a particular driver to have an accident. But how it is possible?

It’s very simple really. Despite the common belief that women are worse drivers than men statistics prove male drivers wrong about this misconception. Fact is that women tend to have far less accidents than men and the overall damage resulted from such accidents is usually less than in case of male drivers. Women tend to take less risks on the road and even if they may be driving not as proficiently as some men they still file less claims. Some of you may argue that there are less women on the road in general and that’s the reason for the lower number of accidents involving female drivers. But even if taking the comparative ratio of claims filed per driver, women are still ahead with less accidents per capita.

What this means from the customer point of view is that female drivers usually get more competitive auto insurance quotes than men just because they are women and make part of a low risk group of drivers. Same as with different age groups, there still may be female drivers who file a lot of claims like teen drivers who are good behind the wheel. However because of the overall statistics men don’t get the advantage when it comes to auto insurance rates like women do. And that’s a fact you only have to deal with.