AAA Foundation and BMW Of North America Collaborate to Evaluate Effectiveness of Driver Education

WASHINGTON--Nov. 9, 2004--The difficulty in demonstrating effectiveness of driver education has often been cited as a reason for dropping this curriculum from public schools. At the same time, alternate means of delivering driver education have proliferated, through home schooling, driving schools and auto clubs, as well as computer and web-based instruction. Currently, there is no comprehensive set of guidelines for evaluating driver education programs. To help fill this gap, the AAA Foundation for Traffic Safety and BMW of North America, Inc. are co-sponsoring a project to develop evaluation guidelines. Just initiated by Northport Associates, an internationally recognized traffic safety research firm in Ontario, Canada, the project will be conducted over 12 months.

"Traffic crashes are the number one killer of teens, and so it is essential that we place greater emphasis on enhancing the training novice drivers receive," expressed Peter Kissinger, President and CEO, AAA Foundation for Traffic Safety. "Our guidelines will provide scientific methods with which driver education programs can be evaluated and refined for maximum impact. The project report and guidelines should have widespread application throughout North America."

"Although automobiles are getting ever safer, the greatest cause of collisions remains driver error, and one important way to reduce the number of road traffic crashes is driver education," noted Michael McHale, Group Communications Manager, BMW of North America, LLC. "Safety is a top priority at BMW and we are very excited to be working with the AAA Foundation on a project that stands to impact the safety of future generations of drivers."

This project will develop guidelines for how to evaluate initial driver education programs for teens. Providing detail on which variables need to be considered and the best analytic approaches, the guidelines will also cover time frames and sample sizes necessary for rigorous evaluation of driver education programs. These comprehensive guidelines will be developed by assimilating past evaluations and consulting extensively with experts, and will provide a road map of options for how to go about evaluating a driver education program.

Research performed by the AAA Foundation for Traffic Safety can be found at www.aaafoundation.org. The AAA Foundation for Traffic Safety is an independent, publicly funded, 501 (c)(3) charitable research and educational organization established in 1947 by the American Automobile Association. The AAA Foundation's mission is to prevent traffic deaths and injuries by conducting research into their causes and by educating the public and others about strategies to prevent crashes and reduce the impact when they do occur.

BMW of North America, LLC has been present in the United States since 1975. The BMW Group in the United States has grown to include marketing, sales, and financial service organizations for the BMW brand, the MINI brand, and the ROLLS-ROYCE brand of Motor Cars; DesignworksUSA, an industrial design firm in California; a technology office in Silicon Valley and various other operations throughout the country. BMW (US) Holding Corp., the BMW Group's sales headquarters for North, Central and South America, is located in Woodcliff Lake, New Jersey.