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Taking a Selfie While Driving: One in Four Young Drivers Did It, Study Shows

Back in 1839, Robert Cornelius took the world's first selfie. Fast-forward 165 years or so and #selfie first appears on Flickr in the year 2004. The stupidness has gotten way out of hand in 2013, when the Oxford Dictionary added the word selfie. These days, the phenomenon is also affecting our behavior the steering wheel according to a recent Ford study.
Man taking a selfie while driving 1 photo
Photo: Ford
This excessively extrovert way of telling your online buddies that you're bored out of your mind and don't feel good in your skin without random people giving you random thumbs up on Facebook is very annoying for most of us normal people. Moreover, a recent study has revealed that one in four young European drivers have taken selfies while driving.

Isn't it enough of handful to commute daily through clogged up traffic and bad drivers? Taking a selfie while doing many miles per hour is not cool, dear youngsters, but extremely dangerous and feeble-minded. Out of the 7,000 teenage drivers and smartphone users surveyed, the results hint that British drivers were the most likely to take selfies while at the wheel. Germany, France, Romania, Italy, Spain and Belgium follow closely with a high rate of 18 to 24-year-old drivers taking selfies on the move.

The study also revealed two very curious things: young male drivers appear to be the most likely to ignore the risks and nearly all drivers surveyed agreed the activity is highly dangerous and could result in a vehicle crash. Snapping a selfie while driving could distract a driver for 14 seconds, while checking social media distracts for as much as 20 seconds. That's long enough to travel the length of 5 football pitches if the speedometer shows 60 mph (96 kilometers per hour).

“Taking a selfie has for many young people quickly become an integral part of everyday life – but it’s the last thing you should be doing behind the wheel of a car,” said Jim Graham, manager of the Ford Driving Skills for Life programme. “It is deeply worrying that so many young drivers admit to taking a photo while driving and we will be doing all we can to highlight the potential dangers through driver education.”
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About the author: Mircea Panait
Mircea Panait profile photo

After a 1:43 scale model of a Ferrari 250 GTO sparked Mircea's interest for cars when he was a kid, an early internship at Top Gear sealed his career path. He's most interested in muscle cars and American trucks, but he takes a passing interest in quirky kei cars as well.
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