Those who should know haven't a clue. "Over the years we have focused on young male drivers," says Jim Wright, a safety specialist with the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration. They were considered "the real problem."
Wright says the agency is going to have to expand its research because although teenage boys still crash more often than girls, the gap is narrowing. Sixteen-year-old female drivers, for example, were involved nationally in 175 car crashes per 1,000 licensed drivers in 2000, up from 160 crashes in 1990. Boys' involvement declined over the same period, from 216 to 210. There are about as many female as male licensed drivers under 21: 6 million.
Jackie Tayman, left, and Shana Shrader of Clarksville both have had car accidents, though none serious. Nationally female teenagers are crashing cars -- and dying in cars -- at significantly higher rates than a decade ago.
(Juana Arias -- The Washington Post)
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Simple exposure can't explain everything, Wright says. "We need to tease out the subtleties."
Such as attitude and choice of automobile? Gordon Booth says he and his fellow instructors have noticed more young women driving aggressively in cars that are built for power and speed.
Robert Shrader, Shana's father, who sits on Toyota's board of governors of top auto dealerships, says the same thing.
"Girls come in now wanting trucks and SUVs," he says.
If Mom or Dad are paying, the girls usually settle for a Corolla or Honda Accord. But it's their frame of mind that impresses him.
"They say 'I work out, I have an active lifestyle. I need a car that fits me.' It's an assertive, go-getter, renegade personality." Like that of his daughter, her friends and her friends' friends.
Marissa Montanez tells this story about a friend: A junior in high school, the girl had been driving for only a few months, squiring her friends around in a new VW Jetta. One afternoon she talked Montanez into skipping school and riding with her to see the girl's boyfriend.
"As I got in the car, she told me to put my seat belt on, that we were going to go fast," Montanez recalls. "She didn't want to keep her boyfriend waiting."
They escaped down a back road through the countryside. Montanez remembers the Jetta racing up a hill at 100 mph, air whistling through its open sunroof. Cresting over the top, the car flipped several times and landed, right side up, among some trees on the side of the road. Virtually everything flew out of the car on the way down -- ballet shoes, plastic bags, candy wrappers. Only the girls stayed in, buckled up and somehow, not seriously injured.
Despite such scares, these young drivers voice a passion for the freedom their cars provide.
When Tayman was a child, "I'd take chalk and draw a highway on our driveway and go up and down on my bike, pretending I was driving," she recalls. Years later, when she got her older sister's Honda Civic, "I'd drive just to drive."
"It's all about being independent, going out, doing our own thing," Montanez says.
