Ford Motor Company Sponsors The Parent’s Supervised Driving Program to Prevent One of the Major Causes of Injuries and Deaths for Teens
Tuesday April 8th at 12 PM outside of the downtown Orange County Tax Collector’s office the Department of Highway Safety and Motor Vehicles (FLHSMV), along with the Orange County Tax Collector will announce the launch of a new initiative designed to prevent one of the major causes of death and injury for teens on the road.
The Parent’s Supervised Driving Program and complimentary RoadReadyTM mobile app, sponsored by Ford Motor Company, are designed to optimize the 50 hours of supervised driving required for Florida teens.
“The skills outlined in this guide and app are meant to help teens learn to be better drivers. It is one of the ways Ford works to help teens,” said Steve Kenner, Global Director of Ford’s Automotive Safety Office. “In addition to this program, Ford also offers Driving Skills for Life, which gives teens advanced real world training. Ford also offers MyKey technology, which gives parents options to help encourage safe driving behaviors even when the parents aren’t in the car.”
Exclusive preview of the new program.
Utilizing the sponsorship funds committed by Ford, The Parent’s Supervised Driving Program printed curriculum will provide parents and guardians with an advanced research, sophisticated and free tool to optimize the 50 hours (10 at night) of parental supervised driving required for the 155,000 Florida teens seeking learner licenses annually. The printed guide will be available for Floridians at licensing centers across the state in both English and Spanish versions.
Orange County Tax Collector Scott Randolph says, “We are excited to partner with Ford Motor Company and Safe Roads Alliance in providing resources for parents and guardians of teens who are new to the roads. Last year we saw over 750,000 people come through our doors and we performed over 13,000 road tests. If each driver met the required 50 hours of supervised driving, that would accumulate to 661,770 hours of practice. Providing a guide like The Parent’s Supervised Driving Program to every parent and guardian will ensure that those hours are spent educating teens on life-saving skills for the road. We will have these guides available at every office that performs written and road tests for learner’s permit.”
The Program is available to parents and teens on multiple platforms, beginning with the printed curriculum that is distributed at FLHSMV and County Tax Collector offices when the teen receives their learner license. Parents and teens are also invited to connect with the program online and through social media, as well as the RoadReady mobile app that will help parents and teens log their drive times and track GPS mapped drives. The RoadReady mobile app is currently available free for iPhone from the App StoreSM.
The Parent’s Supervised Driving Program and RoadReady mobile app focus on the role of the parent in the teen driver education process and the Program encourages parents and teens to drive together in a variety of weather conditions and in unfamiliar settings, whether it be on more rural roads or in highway, city and heavy traffic situations. The Program offers an enhanced supervised driving experience and energizes parents and guardians to extend the supervised driving period beyond the state requirement.
Through a public-private partnership supported by Ford Motor Company, FLHSMV and County Tax Collector offices are able to provide this valuable resource to parents of teen drivers at no cost to families or to taxpayers. The sponsorship allows the FLHSMV and County Tax Collector offices to provide parents with a needed resource geared toward skill development, and to help increase the types of circumstances and amount of time that teens drive with their parents prior to driving independently.
“This state–of–the art program was developed by the foremost experts and organizations in highway safety,” stated Jeff Larson, President of Safe Roads Alliance, who worked in partnership with the FLHSMV to develop the Program for the state.
