Lisa Ehrlich of Olney said she feels a little better when her son takes out his car for a drive these days.

She rather enjoys the "risk level zero" reports her son, 17-year-old Jeremy, received from DriveCam Inc. through the family's participation in a Maryland State Highway Administration grant program that monitors teen drivers.

DriveCam for Families allows researchers to track the impact of parental and professional feedback on young drivers throughout the state. Two cameras records brief video clips, called "events," when behaviors such as sudden braking, swerving, acceleration or a collision take place. Parents can later access the "event" online along with analysis and coaching tips. 

"I've found it to be really comforting to know my eyes are always on him," she said. "I don't know if that's why he's driving safely or if it's just the way he is, but it is comforting for parents."

Four Montgomery County families are participating in the program, according to Christina Sinz of the Washington Metro Region Highway Safety Office, with another four waiting to begin.

"We've heard good things," Sinz said. "The kids are saying, ‘It's not as bad as we thought."

The parents, she said, "really appreciate" the opportunity to assess their children's driving skills.

There is good reason for focusing on the youngest drivers. According to the SHA Web site at www.choosesafetyforlife.com, there have been 551 young driver-related fatal crashes in Maryland in the last five years. One in five teenage drivers has a crash in his first year of driving and the fatality rate for those drivers is about four times that of drivers aged 25 to 69.

Jim Williamson of Clarksburg and his son Mateo, 17, a student at Walter Johnson High School, took a road trip to Ohio after their camera was installed in June, but so far their DriveCam experience has been "uneventful."

"We'd say, ‘I think they got me that time, I think they got me,' but the light never went off," Williamson said of minor driving infractions such as striking a curb. However, he said the camera still had an impact.

"Even though I wasn't the subject it did make me somewhat creepily conscious of my driving habits, like, ‘Oh, I do that?'" Williamson said.

The Ehrlich camera was in place early in June and the first "events" — triggered by "rolling stops" — arrived on their computer early in August. When Lisa told Jeremy, a senior at Col. Zadok Magruder High School in Derwood, he replied "cool" and invited the friends who were featured in the brief clips to view them.

"It only got about 12 seconds of our conversation but it was pretty funny to play back," said Jeremy, who had originally resisted the camera in part out of concern for his peers' reaction.

Lisa Ehrlich was more impressed by the videos. "It's perfect," she said. "It shows the car driving; it shows the different angles…It's very helpful and very on."

DriveCam for Families began in Southern Maryland in summer 2008 and expanded to Montgomery and Baltimore counties in March when not all the 300 cameras were claimed. Sinz said organizers are hoping the grant will be renewed for the fiscal year beginning Oct. 1.

"We are expecting to get more cameras, but we don't know how many or for sure that it will be approved," she said. Debbie Jennings, Calvert County Community Traffic Safety program coordinator, said the program closed with 210 participants and researchers have already collected, rated and grouped more than 17,000 "events" statewide.

"When parents take themselves out of the car it's pretty much cold turkey," said Jennings, whose own teenage daughter drives with a camera. "This is kind of an intermediate step."

Lisa Ehrlich hopes to sign up her younger son Brandon for DriveCam when he begins driving, even if it means paying for the service, and has convinced a friend to put her son on the waiting list as well.

Meanwhile, those in the study made a one-year commitment to documenting their teen drivers' activities.

Soon, Jeremy Ehrlich will move the camera to a 2008 Honda Sonata his parents recently purchased when his older car broke down.

"Probably if he had had many, many events … we wouldn't have gotten as new a car as we did," Lisa Ehrlich said. "I'm proud of him."