Social driving can lead to the kinds of distractions that drive up car insurance rates to unbearable levels, one insurer recently warned.
While ‘social driving’ may make you think of chatting up your mates sitting in the passenger seats whilst on the road, the truth is that it’s much more dangerous than that, according to a provider of van insurance quotes and fleet insurance cover. The insurer’s research discovered that as many as 37 per cent of drivers in the UK can’t stand to ignore alerts from their mobile phones while they’re driving and will take their eyes off the road to examine their smart phones, and even worse is that anywhere from 8 per cent to 9 per cent of cheap car insurance customers will actively use their phones to send text messages or use smart phone apps whilst behind the wheel.
Research has also shown that the use of smart phones to engage in social networking while driving is more dangerous than drink driving or getting behind the wheel while under the affects of cannabis. Reaction times can be slowed by as much as 37 per cent while social networking, research studies have found.
It’s not just dashing off a quick text message that motorists are doing, either, as some drivers admitted in the research study that they have not only used their smart phones to snap digital photos while driving but then attaching them to a message through social messaging app Twitter, despite the fact that engaging in such activity could prove to be a fatal distraction.