The competitions put on by fire and rescue teams, usually at a weekend round the back of the firestation, are intriguing. Each team of firefighters, its hydraulic cutting gear laid out like a surgeon’s instruments, is presented with a wrecked car containing a dummy. The stopwatch starts. The teams sprint across and with deceptive ease snip through the twisted frame and slide out the “victim”. The judges declare who has performed fastest and most safely; the odd child may cheer for his father; and the winners go on to compete nationally and internationally.

Little known and largely taken for granted, fire and rescue officers spend many hours honing their car crash skills.They’ve had to, for car crashes now outnumber fires. I once asked a firefighter on a winning team whether he drove home more slowly after he had attended a bad crash. Did his skills oppress him; did the danger haunt him? He shrugged. “You slow down for a bit. If the victims are youngsters, you maybe go slow a bit longer.”

We can assume that his supper quite often grows cold these days. Everyone, except the young, is concerned about the increasing carnage on the roads, especially involving young people. Last week the radical Chief Constable of North Wales, Richard Brunstrom, was moved to hold up a horrific picture of a decapitated motorcyclist at a road safety presentation. The three worst areas for accidents involving young drivers are Wales, London and Scotland; of the three Scotland is the worst. Latest statistics from north of the Border show that young drivers and their passengers are being killed at a rate of nearly three a week, and the figure for fatalities is nearly 40 per cent up on 2005 (when there were 93 deaths), the last full year for which statistics are available.

Within Scotland, the Grampian area is the deadliest region. Here, on the remote, windy roads between Aberdeen and Inverness, a toxic mix of boredom, machismo and affluence born of farming, fishing and oil means that the pinnacle of life – and all too often death – is a Subaru Impreza WRX. Little wonder that Alex Salmond, the SNP leader, campaigning in his Gordon constituency, has been wielding P-plates for the cameras at every opportunity – an endorsement of the Pass Plus course.

Pass Plus, God love it, is a civil servant’s response, and as sexy as driving the old man’s Astra. Its six “modules” cover driving in town, on rural roads and motorways, at night and in all weathers; worthy, but anathema to the petrolheads for whom a P-Plate, an admission of inexperience, is like a mark of leprosy.

So what do we do? Go all authoritarian? It’s a pressing issue, especially for those of us who have teenagers learning to drive. We could stiffen the Ltest and and bring in any number of restrictions. We could raise the driving age to 18. We could limit the number, and age, of passengers young drivers may carry; ban them from driving at night; ban music in their cars; even set them different speed limits from adults.

But there’s a barminess in such action; the same barminess that has led the charity Alcohol Concern to recommend that parents who give alcohol to their under15s, even with a meal at home, should face prosecution. This kind of repression, however well-meaning, is risible and doomed to failure. It may be a logical progression on the way our risk-averse society is developing, but that doesn’t make it realistic.

The old adage stands. Bad law is unenforceable law. Alcohol and motorcars are two of the most powerful pleasures enjoyed by adults. You cannot withold their siren call from people on the brink of adulthood; you can only prepare the teenagers, educate them and, within limits, control supply.

Some sensible things could be achieved. Increasing the price of alcohol would, overnight, achieve more than a thousand ASBOs. Restricting engine size until a driver possesses a certain amount of experience makes similar sense.

All other suggestions for limiting teenage driving would make life impossible for the police. Could they stop all cars in the dark to see who was driving them? Set up road blocks to check if Snow Patrol were playing too loud? Could they deal with the army of resentful young lawbreakers that such legislation would create, especially in rural areas? What of the screaming injustice to careful 17-year-olds, with vital jobs – carers perhaps – who have no alternative means of transport?

The Institute of Advanced Motorists (IAM) has chosen to put its resources firmly in the direction of education, and has just pioneered a radical national scheme, the Young Driver Network. One young man, a self-confessed boy racer from Glasgow, has become an ambassador, talking to and training the drivers at risk. The young listen to the young. As a result, dozens are taking the IAM advanced driving test, learning responsibility, concentration, observation and anticipation. The numbers are small, the concept is huge. Parents have noticed their children have an improved attitude after the advanced test: to life as well as to the road.

A sad byproduct of the fearful culture we inhabit is that we have ceased to trust teenagers in almost any capacity. It is worth remembering that some of the best drivers on the roads are teenagers. They are alert, hawkeyed, sharp-witted, with lightning reaction times. They’re better at driving than a lot of us.

But for as long as we withhold recognition of ability, we increase the chance of alienation and excess speed; and fire and rescue teams will have more tragic reasons to practise those cutting skills.

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