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Driving simulators offer a safe alternative to on-road driving for the evaluation of performance. In addition, simulated drives allow for controlled manipulations of traffic situations producing a more consistent and objective assessment experience and outcome measure of crash risk. Yet, few simulator protocols have been validated for their ability to assess driving performance under conditions that result in actual collisions. This paper presents results from a new Simulated Driving Assessment (SDA), a 35- to-40-minute simulated assessment delivered on a Real-Time® simulator. The SDA was developed to represent typical scenarios in which teens crash, based on analyses from the National Motor Vehicle Crash Causation Survey (NMVCCS). A new metric, failure to brake, was calculated for the 7 potential rear-end scenarios included in the SDA and examined according two constructs: experience and skill.

Data presented in this paper demonstrated that the landscape for child occupant protection - the children and their restraints, vehicles, and crashes - is changing rapidly. Children are not small adults but are rather rapidly growing, developing, and changing and so too are their restraint needs. The past several years witnessed a growing awareness of these biomechanical challenges with the emergence of increased use of size-appropriate restraints for children under age 9 years and differences in patterns of injury by age. Vehicles involved in crashes with children reflect the trend overall: less passenger vans and cars and more light trucks, the majority of which are equipped with second generation air bags. The majority of crashes occurred on roads with posted speed limits below 45 miles per hour. The age group of particular concern is the newly driving teenage years (16-19) in which the crash and fatality rates are the highest among all age groups.