Not that we haven’t heard of distracted driving and its implications on numerous occasions, but it appears governments and drivers are still not taking it as seriously as it really is. The Washington-based charitable organization AAA Foundation for Traffic Safety has just released a terrifying video compilation of young drivers who get really close to causing accidents as they are using their phones while driving.
The key to this video is not really the fact that these youngsters were filmed while being distracted, but the way they filmed it. There are two dash cameras doing the job. While one is sitting on the dashboard and pointed at the driver, the other one is outside and shows the way the car goes off trail.
According to AAA’s press release you can consult below, the video analysis finds that distraction was a factor in nearly 6 out of 10 moderate-to-severe teen crashes, which is four times as many as official estimates based on police reports. The organization put up quite a struggle to come up with the two-minutes clip. Researchers have analyzed the six seconds leading up to a crash in nearly 1,700 videos of teen drivers taken from in-vehicle event recorders.
As we all have already figured out, distracting driving is a lot more dangerous than people think. However, the results showed that it was a factor in 58 percent of all crashes studied, including 89 percent of road-departure crashes and 76 percent of rear-end crashes.
NHTSA's numbers are far away from the real deal
In other words, it’s a lot bigger than what NHTSA previously has estimated, since the Government’s authority estimated that distraction is a factor in only 14 percent of all teen driver crashes.
And it’s no just that test that found the situation to be quite critical, official numbers are quite eloquent too. Statistics show that teen have the highest crash rate of any group in the United States.
About 963,000 drivers aged 16-19 were involved in police-reported crashes in 2013, which is the most recent year of available data. Tragically, these crashes resulted in 383,000 injuries and 2,865 deaths.
Google News