As much as I am about to embark on a meandering journey of stating the obvious, I will start by hypocritically berating someone else for doing the same, writes insurance blogger Richard Craig.

Simon Best, a spokesman for the Institute of Advanced Motorists, has whispered in the ear of a reporter for the Transport Research Laboratory’s website that young drivers, especially male ones, cause the most accidents. As if this wasn’t enough, he then goes on to offer the revelatory nugget that new drivers improve their skills via a process of trial and error.

While I am not sure that these two snippets of hot gossip really qualify for the Google News listings, they are based on good intentions. IAM are launching a scheme (well, holding an event) to espouse the virtues of ongoing driver education in the drive to cut the numbers of those injured in road accidents.

“After passing the driving test there is currently no requirement to take any further driver-development training. In road safety terms, this confines 17 to 25-year-old drivers – who suffer (proportionally) the greatest number of deaths and injuries – to improvement by trial and error,” says Mr Best.

Without wishing to sound as though I am over-simplifying the issue: is that not what every new driver does, regardless of age or sex? I doubt, however, that we’d get 62-year-old rookie Maureen from Stockport wrapping her Micra around a lamppost while trying to demonstrate to her friend Rosemary how fast she was able capable of hustling it down a B-road to the bridge club.

I feel that Mr Best may be opting for an approach verging on the disingenuous. After all, is not his organisation that extracts a healthy membership fee from punters wishing to take their vehicular training further?

An unknown wit once coined the epigram: ‘Education is the answer to ignorance. Is ignorance the problem?’

To this I would proffer a succinct ‘no.’

We all know the real reasons young men drive beyond their capabilities: I was one myself not so long ago. Had I come to grief, I would have been unable to argue, as I was being extracted from a hedge along with several pieces of bodywork and possibly a limb or two, that I “didn’t know driving quickly can do this”.

Santander tell us the truth (unusual for a multinational bank) when they reveal that three out of every ten young men to whom they spoke in a survey admitted that they had narrowly avoided causing a crash due to becoming ‘sidetracked’ behind the wheel, which is a polite way of saying they were:

• Showing off to their mates
• Showing off to a girl/some girls
• Showing off to their mates/a girl/some girls simultaneously
• Checking a text from a girl
• Leering at passing girl
• Attempting to engage a lower gear in order to make loud engine noise with view to impressing girl
• Trying to turn up the stereo

A better way of educating young drivers, as sexist as this sounds, would be to line up a series of beautiful women and make them each break the news to the new license-holders that loud exhausts, huge alloy wheels, garish fiberglass appendages and, above all, excess speed, do not ignite even the faintest spark of desire within them. That should bring the collective hormonal fatuity down a peg or two.

But there remains the problem of peer pressure: anyone who has watched The Inbetweeners on Channel 4 will know that the initiation ceremony for a first-time driver and their asthmatic new transport is to thrash the life out of the poor thing to see how fast it can go, egged on by their cavalier friends whose flippancy stems from the fact that, while they might die, at least they won’t have to explain to their parents why their Fiesta is missing its front end. As a previous endorser of this approach, I cannot explain why this happens, or why driving quickly, which is easily undertaken by anyone with operational arms and legs, is allegedly so impressive to young men. It just is.

When novice riders gain their motorcycle license, they can ride anything they want, no matter how behemothic, as long as its power output does not exceed 33bhp. This can be achieved with the fitment of restrictor kits that choke the mighty engine’s airways until they are running at a fraction of their true efficiency. Any rider found to be transgressing this regulation runs the risk of having their new license swiftly dispatched back to the DVLA for a few years’ safekeeping.

This fundamentalist approach takes the elements of bravado and ostentatiousness out of the equation altogether and throws them into the waste paper basket: you can’t show off if your steed cannot top 12mph.

One cannot help but feel that it is only a matter of time before the same rules apply to cars.