Ever worry what your teen is doing in the car when you’re not there to monitor their driving habits? If so, a new compilation released by the AAA Foundation for Traffic Safety (below) might keep you up at night. It shows a number of distracted teen drivers, caught on in-vehicle event recorder cams, running off the road and colliding with other vehicles as they fiddle with their phones.
The individual clips come from driver safety company Lytx, provided to AAA for research purposes. In the associated study, the AAA Foundation for Traffic Safety reviewed approximately 1,700 videos of teen crashes to analyze the reasons behind the incidents. It found that driver distraction was the result of 58 percent of all crashes, including 89% of incidents where the vehicle left the road and 76% of rear-end crashes. This information strongly contradicts data from a National Highway Traffic Safety Administration that shows only 14% of teen crashes resulted from driver distraction.
“Access to crash videos has allowed us to better understand the moments leading up to a vehicle impact in a way that was previously impossible,” explains Peter Kissinger, President and CEO of the AAA Foundation for Traffic Safety. “The in-depth analysis provides indisputable evidence that teen drivers are distracted in a much greater percentage of crashes than we previously realized.”
The biggest distraction for teens in the study proved to be other passengers in the car (15% of incidents). Cellphone use followed closely behind as the reason for 12% of crashes, while looking at something in the vehicle caused 10% of crashes. Looking at something outside the vehicle (9%), singing to music (8%), grooming (6%) and reaching for objects (6%) were also cited in the study as risk factors.
The numbers behind the study are worrying enough. But what really caught our attention here at Techlicious was the terrifying raw video from the study. In it, you can see a number of teens running off the road and crashing in real-life events. You might want to take a moment to share it with your teens as a somber wakeup call to the consequences of distracted driving. No matter how important that incoming text message seems, it’s definitely not worth getting into a car accident over. Keep your eyes off the phone and on the road at all times!
[Image credit: AAA/Lytx]
