A new Insurance Institute for Highway Safety study compared smartphone telematics with police reports for almost 17,000 crashes in Connecticut, Illinois, Ohio, and Texas. After excluding passive screen activity such as an untouched navigation display, the data still show a huge gap: phones detected active use before crashes far more often than police documented it.
Well this isn’t wildly new information. Police can only document what they see or is said to them, and people aren’t going to admit they were on their phone while driving. Distracted driving is the single biggest factor associated with causing accidents, and phone use is number 1 in the subcategory.