STORY:
MIKE MUNRO: This driver is in mortal danger not wearing a seatbelt and falling asleep at the wheel. He was lucky he survived. In another car, a taxi driver's life is now being threatened. This extraordinary footage represents a revolution in video surveillance captured from more than 30,000 vehicles. Big Brother has arrived on our roads. It's called Drive Cam, an audiovisual black box that captures dangerous and deadly driving with two cameras, pointing forward and back. And software recording vehicle speed and other critical information. It was invented by a young Australian high school drop-out, Gary Raynor, who was motivated by the death of Princess Diana.
GARY RAYNOR: Nobody knew how it happened. And I thought, "That's incredible. If only there was a camera there would be no more mystery about who was implicated and how it happened."
MAN: Oh, you son of a bitch! Oh, my God! Holy shit!
MIKE MUNRO: How does it actually work?
GARY RAYNOR: Well, think of it like a video camera that's always rolling, except that it forgets everything that's more than 15 seconds old, just is erased. And then, if something unusual happens, like you swerve or you put your brakes on hard or make a sudden manoeuvre... Gee. Okay. Need the brakes.
MIKE MUNRO: And the camera would have been activated?
GARY RAYNOR: It's automatically recording. The camera knows from the G4 sensors that something unusual's happened. And then it goes backwards in time 15 seconds earlier, keeps all of that, keeps going for an extra 15 seconds later, so you have the whole 30 seconds surrounding the event.
WOMAN SCREAMS
MIKE MUNRO: In the sue first, ask questions later United States...
MAN: Please let me out, please let me out.
MIKE MUNRO: commercial fleets claim up to a 70 percent reduction in accidents. With a camera on board, drivers are less likely to take risks, which leads Gary Raynor to make this optimistic prediction about the group of drivers most at risk on our roads teenagers.
GARY RAYNOR: Drive Cam has been proven in the fleet market to reduce accidents by 50 percent to 70 percent, which I believe would be a 50 percent to 70 percent reduction in deaths as well. Now, if we can duplicate that with teenage drivers, and I absolutely expect that we can, we can be talking about hundreds or even thousands of lives saved per year.
MIKE MUNRO: So, in effect, he's making a highly controversial claim, that these cameras could be as effective a safety device as seatbelts and airbags.
PROFESSOR MARK STEVENSON, THE GEORGE INSTITUTE: We know, for example, seatbelts reduce fatalities by up to 60 percent. And there's been an enormous amount of research in that area. To claim it's more effective than those two interventions alone I think is ludicrous.
MIKE MUNRO: More of this debate later, but the startling facts are that each year about 350 young Australians, aged between 17 and 25, die on our roads. Another 5500 are seriously injured. During their first few months, new drivers die at four times the rate of experienced drivers. Every week another family has to confront this awful reality. In May, on Queensland's Gold Coast, a car full of six teenagers ploughed into an oncoming four-wheel drive, killing two of them, 15-year-old Matt Fraser and 16-year-old Arkie Hevas.
KATE: She had so much things going for her. Sometimes you wish, "Wow, couldn't it have been me? I prefer her to be here."
MIKE MUNRO: Do you?
KATE: Yep, I do sometimes. She was just so special to everyone.
ALANA: I'm just so thankful that I still have, like Zoe and Kate here. It's just so hard sometimes, you just can't sleep because you just think about it. There's nothing you can do. It's just really, really hard.
MIKE MUNRO: Alana, Luke, Kate and Zoe are four teenagers struggling to accept life without their best friends.
ALANA: Just think, "Nah, I'm a teenager, I'm young, I'm not gonna die, nothing's going to happen to me." And you just think nothing will ever happen to you until something like this happens and then you realise young people do die and it just affects everyone.
MIKE MUNRO: The crash occurred late at night. The car was overloaded, the driver inexperienced and speeding. An all too typical scenario for kids on our roads. How many here have been involved in any way in a car crash? So we're talking about almost half. How bad was your accident?
GIRL: It wasn't too bad. I was by myself. I just fell asleep at the wheel. But I was going too fast in the rain, basically.
MIKE MUNRO: You were very lucky then.
GIRL: I was very lucky.
MIKE MUNRO: So on Queensland's Gold Coast, 60 Minutes assembled a group of young drivers to trial the camera technology. Matt, what sort of a driver do you think you are?
MATT: Typical. Typical male driver.
MIKE MUNRO: Is that good or bad?
MATT: Probably bad actually, 'cause thinks it's fun to speed maybe. Just do burnouts. Just go fast, really.
MIKE MUNRO: Have you had any accidents?
MATT: Yep. Two.
MAN: Are you nervous about the trial?
GIRL: Not really. I think it might actually make me drive safer.
MIKE MUNRO: Forty cameras were installed, giving a bird's-eye view of the driving habits of those most at risk and putting to test the key claim that the camera could be a life saver. Who here thinks the camera device will make a big difference to their driving?
GIRL: No, I reckon it's gonna, it's basically somebody watching you, something recording what you're doing, so you're not going to go fast around corners, you're not going to do stupid things and burnouts on purpose. You actually really try.
YOUNG MAN: I think it's kind of a two-edged sword really, because you've got the aspect of there's always something watching you. But most teenagers love that. There's an audience, really. Someone's watching me do burnouts, someone's watching me fly around this corner. Whoopee! Excellent! Isn't that dangerous?
YOUNG MAN: Yeah, definitely. Definitely. pause
MIKE MUNRO: Over the past two months, the triggered cameras captured these young Australians driving like we've never seen our kids drive before. Saying one thing ... did you learn from them?
MATT: Um, yeah, I've slowed down a lot more now and paying a lot more attention.
MIKE MUNRO: doing another. Speeding, drag racing, running red lights, disobeying the rules and making serious mistakes.
GIRL: This is the panic button. I'm not laughing. Oh, my God!
MIKE MUNRO: Placing their own lives and others at risk.
GIRL: I don't want to die.
BOY: Neither do I.
MIKE MUNRO: What is it about our young people that makes them more likely to die on our roads?
GENE CORBETT: Purely and simply, a lack of education. We seem to have this mentality, three to five one-hour lessons is enough to teach them to do the most complex activity they'll undertake for the rest of their life.
GENE CORBETT: You obviously feel confident in your ability to throw the car through like that but you took so many unnecessary risks. That if one variable that you didn't anticipate had have crept into that, it would have been an accident.
MIKE MUNRO: It was driving instructor Gene Corbett's job to counsel the kids on where they went wrong. Cameras revealed many dangerous flaws in their driving, but that's no surprise speed and inexperience are the big killers. And it's not as if there aren't any solutions either. Last year we reported how P-plate curfews and passenger restrictions in New Zealand have resulted in a dramatic reduction in the road toll. They've been proposed here for more than 20 years. And experts like Professor Mark Stevenson say these laws, rather than in-car cameras, are the answer.
PROFESSOR MARK STEVENSON: The research at this stage around the world suggests that with graduated licensing, where the components of passenger restrictions and night driving restrictions are implemented in that, that you can achieve up to a 30 percent reduction in serious injuries. Now, that's the best evidence we've got at this stage.
MIKE MUNRO: If curfews and passenger restrictions are so successful, why haven't governments introduced them?
PROFESSOR MARK STEVENSON: It's a moot point. It's, I think, politically unpalatable for a number of the governments.
MIKE MUNRO: Probably because young drivers vote too?
PROFESSOR MARK STEVENSON: Certainly.
MIKE MUNRO: So content to lose young lives, but don't want to lose any votes it's a sad indictment really, isn't it?
PROFESSOR MARK STEVENSON: It certainly is.
MIKE MUNRO: This is yet another one of those roadside memorials we see all over Australia. And so many of them are dedications to teenagers, just like this one, who have been lost on our roads. And whether cameras are the answer or not is a long way off from being proved. But if nothing else, they reveal just how much our young people are still in harm's way. Just like young Angela, running through a stop sign to drag race her boyfriend.
GENE CORBETT: If you saw other drivers driving like this, what would be your perception of their driving?
ANGELA: They are stupid.
GENE CORBETT: Even though you were driving exactly the same way?
ANGELA: Yep.
MIKE MUNRO: And Dean, recklessly speeding down a freeway on-ramp.
GENE CORBETT: There was nowhere to go. One variable introduced to this, you would either run into what was there or you hit the other side wall. The point I'm trying to make is you've set yourself up in such a way, and made decisions that mean the car's at the limit of adhesion, with your brother in the passenger seat...
MIKE MUNRO: You've learned from it not to put your younger brother's life at risk?
DEAN: That was a once off and I stand by the fact that he wasn't at risk.
MIKE MUNRO: The driving instructor thought he was?
DEAN: Of course, he did. He thinks I'm always at risk. My brother, he was enjoying it. I had control of the car despite what was being said.
MIKE MUNRO: So with the 40 young drivers with cameras in their cars, 20 you gave tuition to, 20 you didn't. What was the outcome?
GENE CORBETT: The drivers that received the tuition would have dropped their event triggers by about 80 percent. So that drivers that were coming in with 20, 25 events per week, were getting down to one to two. There were only two drivers in the group that were receiving tuition that didn't have a demonstrated improvement.
MIKE MUNRO: If anything, what this experiment has revealed is that, often without realising it, young Australians are a danger to themselves and others on the road. Some tough lessons have been learned.
GIRL ON MOBILE PHONE: Hold on, I've got to turn a corner, wait a second. I can't believe I did that, I was such a dickhead.
MIKE MUNRO: Why did you need the video to tell you how bad you were?
GIRL: I don't know. I guess you just don't think about it. You need something like that to make you realise how important the stupid things you do are, how they can actually affect your life.
MIKE MUNRO: Or take it?
GIRL: Yeah.
KATE: You just think, we'll never see her kids. And we won't grow up together.
ALANA: We always had dreams that we were going to be each other's bridesmaids. And travelling around the world together.
MIKE MUNRO: But you're all convinced that, if any good has come out of this, you'll all be better drivers?
GIRLS: Yep. Definitely. More aware of everything.
KATE: There's always a consequence.
MIKE MUNRO: How do you mean?
KATE: Everyone's actions, it can always end up someone hurting someone or losing a really good friend. It can change the world, basically, in your eyes.
MIKE MUNRO: This driver is in mortal danger not wearing a seatbelt and falling asleep at the wheel. He was lucky he survived. In another car, a taxi driver's life is now being threatened. This extraordinary footage represents a revolution in video surveillance captured from more than 30,000 vehicles. Big Brother has arrived on our roads. It's called Drive Cam, an audiovisual black box that captures dangerous and deadly driving with two cameras, pointing forward and back. And software recording vehicle speed and other critical information. It was invented by a young Australian high school drop-out, Gary Raynor, who was motivated by the death of Princess Diana.
GARY RAYNOR: Nobody knew how it happened. And I thought, "That's incredible. If only there was a camera there would be no more mystery about who was implicated and how it happened."
MAN: Oh, you son of a bitch! Oh, my God! Holy shit!
MIKE MUNRO: How does it actually work?
GARY RAYNOR: Well, think of it like a video camera that's always rolling, except that it forgets everything that's more than 15 seconds old, just is erased. And then, if something unusual happens, like you swerve or you put your brakes on hard or make a sudden manoeuvre... Gee. Okay. Need the brakes.
MIKE MUNRO: And the camera would have been activated?
GARY RAYNOR: It's automatically recording. The camera knows from the G4 sensors that something unusual's happened. And then it goes backwards in time 15 seconds earlier, keeps all of that, keeps going for an extra 15 seconds later, so you have the whole 30 seconds surrounding the event.
WOMAN SCREAMS
MIKE MUNRO: In the sue first, ask questions later United States...
MAN: Please let me out, please let me out.
MIKE MUNRO: commercial fleets claim up to a 70 percent reduction in accidents. With a camera on board, drivers are less likely to take risks, which leads Gary Raynor to make this optimistic prediction about the group of drivers most at risk on our roads teenagers.
GARY RAYNOR: Drive Cam has been proven in the fleet market to reduce accidents by 50 percent to 70 percent, which I believe would be a 50 percent to 70 percent reduction in deaths as well. Now, if we can duplicate that with teenage drivers, and I absolutely expect that we can, we can be talking about hundreds or even thousands of lives saved per year.
MIKE MUNRO: So, in effect, he's making a highly controversial claim, that these cameras could be as effective a safety device as seatbelts and airbags.
PROFESSOR MARK STEVENSON, THE GEORGE INSTITUTE: We know, for example, seatbelts reduce fatalities by up to 60 percent. And there's been an enormous amount of research in that area. To claim it's more effective than those two interventions alone I think is ludicrous.
MIKE MUNRO: More of this debate later, but the startling facts are that each year about 350 young Australians, aged between 17 and 25, die on our roads. Another 5500 are seriously injured. During their first few months, new drivers die at four times the rate of experienced drivers. Every week another family has to confront this awful reality. In May, on Queensland's Gold Coast, a car full of six teenagers ploughed into an oncoming four-wheel drive, killing two of them, 15-year-old Matt Fraser and 16-year-old Arkie Hevas.
KATE: She had so much things going for her. Sometimes you wish, "Wow, couldn't it have been me? I prefer her to be here."
MIKE MUNRO: Do you?
KATE: Yep, I do sometimes. She was just so special to everyone.
ALANA: I'm just so thankful that I still have, like Zoe and Kate here. It's just so hard sometimes, you just can't sleep because you just think about it. There's nothing you can do. It's just really, really hard.
MIKE MUNRO: Alana, Luke, Kate and Zoe are four teenagers struggling to accept life without their best friends.
ALANA: Just think, "Nah, I'm a teenager, I'm young, I'm not gonna die, nothing's going to happen to me." And you just think nothing will ever happen to you until something like this happens and then you realise young people do die and it just affects everyone.
MIKE MUNRO: The crash occurred late at night. The car was overloaded, the driver inexperienced and speeding. An all too typical scenario for kids on our roads. How many here have been involved in any way in a car crash? So we're talking about almost half. How bad was your accident?
GIRL: It wasn't too bad. I was by myself. I just fell asleep at the wheel. But I was going too fast in the rain, basically.
MIKE MUNRO: You were very lucky then.
GIRL: I was very lucky.
MIKE MUNRO: So on Queensland's Gold Coast, 60 Minutes assembled a group of young drivers to trial the camera technology. Matt, what sort of a driver do you think you are?
MATT: Typical. Typical male driver.
MIKE MUNRO: Is that good or bad?
MATT: Probably bad actually, 'cause thinks it's fun to speed maybe. Just do burnouts. Just go fast, really.
MIKE MUNRO: Have you had any accidents?
MATT: Yep. Two.
MAN: Are you nervous about the trial?
GIRL: Not really. I think it might actually make me drive safer.
MIKE MUNRO: Forty cameras were installed, giving a bird's-eye view of the driving habits of those most at risk and putting to test the key claim that the camera could be a life saver. Who here thinks the camera device will make a big difference to their driving?
GIRL: No, I reckon it's gonna, it's basically somebody watching you, something recording what you're doing, so you're not going to go fast around corners, you're not going to do stupid things and burnouts on purpose. You actually really try.
YOUNG MAN: I think it's kind of a two-edged sword really, because you've got the aspect of there's always something watching you. But most teenagers love that. There's an audience, really. Someone's watching me do burnouts, someone's watching me fly around this corner. Whoopee! Excellent! Isn't that dangerous?
YOUNG MAN: Yeah, definitely. Definitely. pause
MIKE MUNRO: Over the past two months, the triggered cameras captured these young Australians driving like we've never seen our kids drive before. Saying one thing ... did you learn from them?
MATT: Um, yeah, I've slowed down a lot more now and paying a lot more attention.
MIKE MUNRO: doing another. Speeding, drag racing, running red lights, disobeying the rules and making serious mistakes.
GIRL: This is the panic button. I'm not laughing. Oh, my God!
MIKE MUNRO: Placing their own lives and others at risk.
GIRL: I don't want to die.
BOY: Neither do I.
MIKE MUNRO: What is it about our young people that makes them more likely to die on our roads?
GENE CORBETT: Purely and simply, a lack of education. We seem to have this mentality, three to five one-hour lessons is enough to teach them to do the most complex activity they'll undertake for the rest of their life.
GENE CORBETT: You obviously feel confident in your ability to throw the car through like that but you took so many unnecessary risks. That if one variable that you didn't anticipate had have crept into that, it would have been an accident.
MIKE MUNRO: It was driving instructor Gene Corbett's job to counsel the kids on where they went wrong. Cameras revealed many dangerous flaws in their driving, but that's no surprise speed and inexperience are the big killers. And it's not as if there aren't any solutions either. Last year we reported how P-plate curfews and passenger restrictions in New Zealand have resulted in a dramatic reduction in the road toll. They've been proposed here for more than 20 years. And experts like Professor Mark Stevenson say these laws, rather than in-car cameras, are the answer.
PROFESSOR MARK STEVENSON: The research at this stage around the world suggests that with graduated licensing, where the components of passenger restrictions and night driving restrictions are implemented in that, that you can achieve up to a 30 percent reduction in serious injuries. Now, that's the best evidence we've got at this stage.
MIKE MUNRO: If curfews and passenger restrictions are so successful, why haven't governments introduced them?
PROFESSOR MARK STEVENSON: It's a moot point. It's, I think, politically unpalatable for a number of the governments.
MIKE MUNRO: Probably because young drivers vote too?
PROFESSOR MARK STEVENSON: Certainly.
MIKE MUNRO: So content to lose young lives, but don't want to lose any votes it's a sad indictment really, isn't it?
PROFESSOR MARK STEVENSON: It certainly is.
MIKE MUNRO: This is yet another one of those roadside memorials we see all over Australia. And so many of them are dedications to teenagers, just like this one, who have been lost on our roads. And whether cameras are the answer or not is a long way off from being proved. But if nothing else, they reveal just how much our young people are still in harm's way. Just like young Angela, running through a stop sign to drag race her boyfriend.
GENE CORBETT: If you saw other drivers driving like this, what would be your perception of their driving?
ANGELA: They are stupid.
GENE CORBETT: Even though you were driving exactly the same way?
ANGELA: Yep.
MIKE MUNRO: And Dean, recklessly speeding down a freeway on-ramp.
GENE CORBETT: There was nowhere to go. One variable introduced to this, you would either run into what was there or you hit the other side wall. The point I'm trying to make is you've set yourself up in such a way, and made decisions that mean the car's at the limit of adhesion, with your brother in the passenger seat...
MIKE MUNRO: You've learned from it not to put your younger brother's life at risk?
DEAN: That was a once off and I stand by the fact that he wasn't at risk.
MIKE MUNRO: The driving instructor thought he was?
DEAN: Of course, he did. He thinks I'm always at risk. My brother, he was enjoying it. I had control of the car despite what was being said.
MIKE MUNRO: So with the 40 young drivers with cameras in their cars, 20 you gave tuition to, 20 you didn't. What was the outcome?
GENE CORBETT: The drivers that received the tuition would have dropped their event triggers by about 80 percent. So that drivers that were coming in with 20, 25 events per week, were getting down to one to two. There were only two drivers in the group that were receiving tuition that didn't have a demonstrated improvement.
MIKE MUNRO: If anything, what this experiment has revealed is that, often without realising it, young Australians are a danger to themselves and others on the road. Some tough lessons have been learned.
GIRL ON MOBILE PHONE: Hold on, I've got to turn a corner, wait a second. I can't believe I did that, I was such a dickhead.
MIKE MUNRO: Why did you need the video to tell you how bad you were?
GIRL: I don't know. I guess you just don't think about it. You need something like that to make you realise how important the stupid things you do are, how they can actually affect your life.
MIKE MUNRO: Or take it?
GIRL: Yeah.
KATE: You just think, we'll never see her kids. And we won't grow up together.
ALANA: We always had dreams that we were going to be each other's bridesmaids. And travelling around the world together.
MIKE MUNRO: But you're all convinced that, if any good has come out of this, you'll all be better drivers?
GIRLS: Yep. Definitely. More aware of everything.
KATE: There's always a consequence.
MIKE MUNRO: How do you mean?
KATE: Everyone's actions, it can always end up someone hurting someone or losing a really good friend. It can change the world, basically, in your eyes.