Three months after turning 15, the S.C. teen can move to the intermediate stage, receive a conditional or provisional license, and drive without supervision during daylight. Like 33 other states, South Carolina doesn t restrict the number of passengers who can be in the car with a beginning driver. With a teen at the wheel, having passengers can be fatal. Researchers at Johns Hopkins University reported last summer that teen driver deaths increased with the number of passengers. When inexperience is combined with poor decision-making and peer pressure, you have a mixture that can prove fatal, said Allison Wright of the S.C. Insurance News Service.
Parents know best.
If South Carolina wants its teens to be safer, it should require a minimum amount of supervised practice with a parent or a guardian, experts said. Ten of those hours have to be at night, which offers the trickiest driving conditions. It s not because the parent is an instructive observer or a marvelous driver, said Patricia Waller, a senior highway safety researcher at the University of North Carolina. It s that a young, inexperienced driver will try things with their buddies that they would not dream of doing with their parents. Waller, who helped write the Michigan law when she was director of the University of Michigan Transportation Research Institute, initially guessed parents might only spend 40 hours with their teens.