ABSTRACT
Cars are becoming filled with more and more distractions. Once, the bored driver was restricted to talking to his passengers; then the radio came along, and the driver could entertain himself either by listening to it or by twiddling its knobs in a desperate attempt to find something worth listening to. In the case of the epidemiological studies, which attempt to relate accident rates to phone use, there is always the problem of inferring causality: perhaps the kind of people who converse on a mobile phone while driving are the sort who are more likely to have an accident anyway. There are indeed some indications that phone-use is most prevalent among young male drivers, with less extensive driving experience. However, even when these factors are compensated for statistically, links between elevated accident rates and phone-use remain.
