Sponsored by National Highway Traffic Safety Administration and the Virginia Transportation Research Council, Virginia Tech Transportation Institute, Blacksburg, Va in its 100-car Study has come out with a daunting discovery that most car accidents are caused by inattentive drivers.
The project studied 241 drivers in the Washington metropolitan area by installing video cameras, radar antennas, traffic lane trackers, satellite navigation and a sensor system.
This year long research recorded 82 crashes and around 761 near crashes - most of which can be attributed to the driver’s lack of attention - drowsiness, munching a burger, using a cell phone, and fatigue.
The project manager Sheila G. Klauer says:
Some of those videos still scare me, even though I’ve seen them a hundred times by now.
The study also revealed that most of these accidents were avoidable had it not been for the driver’s inattention. Besides that, it also discovered that leased cars were driven more carelessly than personally owned vehicles.
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