Distracted driving and the phone

Distracted driving is anything that takes your attention away from the road. Texting, talking on the phone, typing into a map and eating all count.

The three kinds of distraction

• Visual. Your eyes leave the road.
• Manual. Your hands leave the wheel.
• Cognitive. Your mind leaves the drive.

Texting takes your eyes, your hands and your mind off driving.

How often it ends in a crash

Distracted driving makes a crash more likely. Nine people in the U.S. are killed each day in crashes reported to involve a distracted driver, about 3,000 a year. In 2019, over 3,100 people were killed and about 424,000 were injured in those crashes. About one in five of the people killed were outside a vehicle, walking or riding a bike.

Teen and young drivers

Teen and young adult drivers face the most risk. In fatal 2019 crashes involving a distracted driver, drivers aged 15 to 20 were more often the distracted one than drivers 21 and older. In a 2019 survey, 39% of high school students who drove had texted or emailed while driving in the past 30 days. Each teen or young adult passenger in the car raises the crash risk for a new driver without an adult along.

What helps

• Drivers. Turn on your phone's driving mode, or use an app that limits phone use while the car moves. Put the phone where you can't reach it, such as the glove box or a bag on the back seat.
• Passengers. Speak up when the driver is distracted, and offer to handle the map.
• Parents. Set clear rules and consequences for phones in the car, and follow the same rules yourself, with your eyes on the road and your hands on the wheel.

An annotated example

What to do next

Turn on your phone's driving focus or do-not-disturb mode, and set the route before you start the car. If there's a teen driver at home, agree on the rules for phones in the car.