Legislating vehicle capacity

Allstate ran a full page ad on the back of this weeks Newsweek. I was going to scan it in, but I'm not going to give them the free impressions by posting it online...
They are a big fan of the STANDUP act of 2009, in which we will have our federal government choose and impose the minimum driving age, limit nighttime driving, limit in-car distractions, and caps the number of passengers allowed in the car with young drivers.

Yes. Our federal government shouldn't be worried about economic collapse, health coverage, Iran, China, the loss of our manufacturing base, etc. No. Instead they should worry about how many friends your kid has in their car. Then we should pay cops to enforce these laws.

What made me laugh out loud was one of their prominent statistics in bold:
When states [up the minimum driving age to 17] the number of fatal crashes among 16 year old drivers has fallen by almost 40%.
Someone will HAVE to explain to me how the number of fatalities among 16 year old drivers is reduced by less than half by eliminating 16 year old drivers? And, where are the statistics for 17 year old drivers? I'll bet their fatality rate went up, oh, about 40%.

As you can tell by the last post and this one, I am feeling really nit-picky today. ...
I am sure this is all very reasonable and I wouldn't be surprised if the statistics are reasonable. However, do we really want our government to sit around an legislate how many passengers we can have in our cars based on our age?

THIS is whyipaytaxes.