Have you ever seen a teenager driving their car with one hand on the wheel and the other hand wrapped around their cell phone with their thumb frantically plunking on their keyboard? It happens all the time. There’s no discipline when it comes to teens and everything has to be taken care of right now. It can’t wait until you get out of the car. Texting while driving is one of the leading causes of teen car accidents in the United States.

The texting-while-driving epidemic is just the tip of the iceberg. The rest of the statistics on teenagers and accidents are just as staggering. According to the Center of Disease Control and Prevention, for all people who get in accidents, there’s a four to one ratio between teenagers and older drivers respectively. That means people from the age of sixteen to nineteen are four times more likely to be the vehicle operator in a car crash than people who are older than them.

Teenage drivers are more likely to drive erratically, follow too closely, drive too fast, fail to negotiate turns and changing lanes, neglect their mirrors, and fail to recognize hazards in the road. They are more likely to drive late hours into the night when most accidents occur and they are more likely to drink alcohol. Hey, don’t get me wrong, you might not be prone to all these pitfalls, but these are the tendencies of teens as a large group. And these numbers show that, as a group, teens show evidence of their lack of control.

Car insurance companies follow the numbers to a tee. They are cared about only one statistic - their profit margin. So when a new teenager driver is looking to get into a new car and need car insurance for it, the car insurance companies automatically place that driver into a high risk category. So getting a new car insured for a teenage driver is more expensive than it is for older drivers with clean records. Car insurance companies won’t need to probe any further into who the teenager is, where they drive, what hours of the day they typically drive, how often they use their car.

Although, auto insurance companies might offer some leniency for teens who reside in low risk areas of the country in cities where basically nothing bad happens. But even then, teenage car insurance is higher than it is for older drivers.