TOP STUDIES

• AAA attributes 330,000 highway injuries annually to cell phones being used while driving.
  
  
• University of Utah researchers determined that motorists on the blood-alcohol threshold of being legally drunk (.08 ppm) drove better than sober cell phone using drivers.
  
  
• Motorists who use cell phones while driving are four times as likely to get into serious crashes where injury is done to themselves, according to a study by the Insurance Institute for Highway Safety in Perth Australia.
  
  
• The New England Journal of Medicine found that the risk of accidents is four times higher when a motorist is using a cell phone.
  
  
• Researchers for the Virginia Tech Transportation Institute and the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) tracked 100 cars and their drivers for a year and concluded that 80% of crashes and 65% of near crashes were the result of driver inattention and that 35% of secondary tasks (source of inattention) was the use of wireless devices.
  
  
• A study from the University of Utah found that motorists who talked on hands-free cell phones were 18 percent slower in braking and took 17 percent longer to regain the speed they lost when they braked. An earlier study by the same researchers found that drivers talking on hands-free cell phones were less likely to recall seeing pedestrians, billboards or other roadside features. A study published in the March 2003 issue of The Journal of Experimental Psychology found that the distraction risk is as high for drivers who use hands-free cell phones, as for drivers who use hand-held devices.
  
  
• Virginia Commonwealth University Center for Public Safety, Crash Investigation Team, noted that the cognitive resources required to carry on a telephone conversation are the same as those required to drive.
  
  
• A study from Carnegie Mellon University utilizing functional magnetic resonance imaging (FMRI) found a 37% reduction in spatial processing in the part of the brain used for the task of driving when the driver was engaged in a cell phone conversation.
  
  
• According to the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration about one in three of all drivers use a cell phone while driving. Other federal studies say the figure is much higher - finding that over 70% of all cell phone users talk on the cell phone while driving.
  
  
• Exxon Mobil adopted a policy banning employees from using cell phones while driving on company time. The rule applies to 88,000 employees and was adopted after Exxon Mobil used its own scientists to research the issue. Many other Fortune 100 companies have adopted similar policies.
  
  
• The Harvard Center for Risk Analysis found that cell phone-talking drivers are responsible for about 6 percent of U.S. car accidents each year, resulting in 2,600 deaths and 330,000 injuries.
  
  
• In the US, there are currently five states that ban the use of handheld cell phones when driving (California, Connecticut, New Jersey, New York and Washington) and six states have a text messaging ban for all drivers (Alaska, California, Louisiana, Minnesota, New Jersey and Washington). Seventeen states restrict all cell phone use by novice drivers.
  
  
• As many as 40 countries restrict or prohibit the use of cell phones while driving.
  
  
• American motorists log about a billion minutes daily in calls, about 40 percent of all cell phone business.
  
  
• In the United States over 190 million people used cell phones as of June 2005, compared with approximately 4.3 million in 1990, according to the Cellular Telecommunications & Internet Association.