New report on distracted driving should scare you!

grapevine cars, gmc fort worth, dealerships dfw, buick dealer, GMC dealer, used cars dfw, used cars fort worthHere’s the rub on distracted driving from Freeman Grapevine. Texting, Facebooking, Tweeting…you can’t do it. Oh sure, you haven’t killed yourself, or anyone else yet…yet. We’ll guess what, you may one day if the latest statistics are accurate.

The Texas Transportation Institute tested 42 people with ages ranging from 16-54 on an actual closed driving course, the first test of its kind. All other test have been simulated tests.

The drivers were tested on a closed course with barrels and were only allowed to drive as fast 30 miles per hour which may seem slow to us, but the even then the drivers showed that distracted driving is much more dangerous than previously thought.

What the researches found is that drivers had half as much time to react as well as maintain a constant speed and stay in their lanes. Normal response time is one to two seconds. Distracted drives took twice the amount of time to respond. These results are worse than previously thought. And even worse, a driver is 11 times more likely to completely miss flashing lights on the course.  If you think about those results in the real world driving that could mean the distracted driver wouldn’t react in time to avoid causing an accident or even worse, hitting a pedestrian.

Check out this video on the research done:

httpv://youtu.be/Af3aeKlHL3s

Bottom line, please don’t drive and text, email, read, Google or anything that can distract you from your number one priority…driving! The United States government suggests that 25% of all fatal crashes are directly related to distracted driving. Which to me means that they could have potentially been prevented if the person that caused the crash would have just put the cell phone down!  Think of it this way, if you text and drive you could potentially be responsible for taking someone’s life.