In all industrialized countries road accidents are the most common cause of death of young people between the ages of 16 and 25. In view of this, the necessity to introduce additional measures aimed at reducing the number of accidents is undisputed.

In papers published on the subject one can find both univariate and multivariate approaches to­wards explaining the increased accident-proneness of young road users. All agree that the youth­fulness factor plays a much more important part in the cause of accidents than the inexpe­rience factor. The increased threat to young people becomes more understandable if one looks more clo­sely at their development-specific motivational backgrounds. One is dealing with an espe­cially dif­ficult phase in their lives, during which it is necessary for them to release tensions and discover their own limits. Driving a car represents an opportunity to react to such a state of tension and to find out how far one can go. However, in multivariate approaches various authors came to the conclusion that not all young people are vulnerable to the same extent, but that there are certain groups that are especially at risk. These groups are characterized by a special type of life­style.

Experience with various driver training systems in other countries led to the judgement that a pre­ventive approach that is applied selectively (i.e. measures that are not aimed at all new drivers but only become effective if the law is broken) have not proved satisfactory. For the second phase of acquiring a driving licence, in particular, it seems appropriate to link training to the imposition of conditions, i.e. on the one hand to arrange for the process of gaining experience that follows the driving test to be accompanied by restrictions and conditions and, on the other, to deliberately set in motion learning processes and enable active experience formation. Practical instruction units that only deal with purely technical behaviour – overcoming danger – have been shown to have negative effects on risk-taking behaviour because they are followed by a greater feeling of safety, causing risky behaviour to become more frequent...

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