Insurance Providers

Nov 12, 2008

A recent survey shows that teens that receive less than eight hours of sleep each night as an average, are doubly likely to say they have fallen asleep at the wheel while driving, (20 percent), than are teens who report getting on the average eight or more hours of sleep per night (10 percent). This information was part of a report of a new Liberty Mutual Insurance and Students Against Destructive Decisions survey. The national survey was made up of 3,580 students representing grades 10, 11, and 12. The study also revealed that fully 36 percent of teens often drive to school in the morning while still drowsy.

The director of Transportation Technical Consulting Services at the Liberty Mutual Research Institute for Safety in Hopkinton, Mass, Dave Melton, said that the new survey acts to remind teens and parents that road safety begins with a good night's sleep.
Director Melton says that survey findings are significant, seeing that 82 percent of teen drivers declare that their main reason for driving is to get to school.

Melton notes that we as parents tend to translate safe teen driving as sober driving, but fatigue should be an equivalent cause for concern. He says that as a group we need to raise awareness of the risk factors that accompany symptoms of drowsy driving in our communities and schools and that we need to make sure our children are getting the rest they need and to see that we provide them with the tools to know what to do if they are driving on the road while they are tired.

The survey also included a broad view of teen driving behavior and listed factors that are likely to affect whether a teen driver falls asleep while driving. Here are examples:

• While results indicate that teen boys (29 percent) are more likely than teen girls (24 percent) to report feeling safe driving alone when they are tired; teen boys (20 percent) are more likely than teen girls (11 percent) to fall asleep while driving.
• Among those teens driving, those who have had a license less than a year, are more likely to fall asleep in the morning (31 percent); while the opposite is true for more experienced teen drivers, since 55 percent of teens who have been licensed for more than a year report that they are most likely to fall asleep at the wheel while driving late at night.