1) A few weeks ago, a 15 year old girl in my neighborhood, learning to drive on a slow side road with her parent in the car, mistook the gas for the break while practicing backing up and ran over three young children putting them in critical condition.
2) A relative of mine was given a new big "safe" vehicle for her 16th birthday. The photos from the event were full of incredible excited smiles.
Three months later, while leaving her part-time "earn your own gas money" job, she met a "cute guy" friend of hers from school who wanted to bum a ride. Foolishly she agreed, on the way to her vehicle, two of her "cute guy"'s friends suddenly showed up asking if they too could bum a ride.
Peer pressure and hormones fully kicked in, they all loaded into the vehicle and started on their way.
On a clear evening, doing about 40 on a paved road with no other traffic, she veered off the road surface, over-corrected getting back on, cut sideways across the road into a field and hit a tree straight on.
She was killed instantly, one of the boys is paralyzed from the neck down and the other two spent a bit of time in critical condition in the hospital.
3) After that happened I thought back to when I was a 16 year old, with a used beater car and what kind of stupid stupid driving I did back then. It was a miracle I survived almost any time I got behind the wheel.
This was even considering that, growing up in a rural area, my parents taught me to drive on the back roads when I was about 11 (in case of an emergency). They had me practice regular driving up until I got my actual license. Even after almost 5 years of sporadic driving lessons, including a minor fender bender in my parent's driveway. Despite passing the driving exam on my first shot with no practice and no studying, I still drove like a damn fool. (and in my state at the time we had to have something like 20 hours of professionally supervised behind the wheel instruction and 20 hours of classroom before being allowed to take the test).
It wasn't until I hit about 20 that I started to drive like a person concerned at all with preserving my lifespan.
Younger American's shouldn't drive. We should get a learners at 18, be required to have a fully licensed person over 25 (or better yet a parental unit) in the car with us until 19, then no passengers at all till we get a real license at 21. It's not just familiarity with alcohol or any of that, young people are just simply not yet fully wired to deal with complex social pressures, impulse control or any of the other kinds of "maturity issues" needed to operate a 2 ton block of iron that can be coaxed to 100mph in under 30 seconds.