posted in Technology

KayLeadfoot@KayLeadfoot@fedia.io

Study: Police Reports Miss 96% of Active Phone Use Before Crashes

A new Insurance Institute for Highway Safety study compared smartphone telematics with police reports for almost 17,000 crashes in Connecticut, Illinois, Ohio, and Texas. After excluding passive screen activity such as an untouched navigation display, the data still show a huge gap: phones detected active use before crashes far more often than police documented it.

fuelarc.com/tech/study-police-reports-miss-96-of-active-phone-use-before-crashes/
Kairos@LodeMike@lemmy.today

Replying to @⁨KayLeadfoot@fedia.io⁩

From the study

The data — which come from safe-driving apps that drivers voluntarily enroll in — show that cellphone use prior to crashes is undercounted in police reports by a factor of at least 7.

Since police reports do not always record crash times and locations with perfect precision, crashes that occurred within the same 15-minute window and within the same one-mile radius were determined to be a match.

This whole study is worthless. There’s also a whole ton of assertions with zero source.

IIHS-HLDI crash testing and highway safetyStudy shows police reports undercount cellphone use before crashesPolice usually fail to note drivers talking, texting or fiddling with their phones in crash reports, a new IIHS study shows.
Edited ⁨⁨Sep⁩ ⁨3⁩, ⁨2026⁩, ⁨21:46⁩⁩en