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The use of a mobile phone while driving a car is asking for an accident and your other examples of a cigarette, sandwich or non-alcoholic drink and even talking to a passenger are not much safer, especially if you are arguing. It is not so much that you take your eyes off the road, that would be bad enough but what you really do is much worse because you take your conscious mind, focus of attention and working memory off the road.

The closest I have ever come to having a crash in over 40 years of driving was while lighting a cigarette. I dropped it and it rolled underneath me painfully burning my bottom, before setting fire to my flimsies and making several holes in my tights as it rolled further underneath me. To mitigate the damage I was forced to raise my backside as I looked for somewhere to safely pull over. Other near misses have been the result of spilling hot coffee, dropping a messy sandwich in my lap, changing tapes and trying to tune in the stereo.

None of these events actually involved my not looking at the road ahead but rather involved taking my attention away from it. Without paying attention, you will only see what you expect to see anything unexpected is completely ignored. You should read the book called 'Did You See The Gorilla?' I can not remember the writer but if you put it into Google it should take you to it; better still catch a rerun of the video on TV. Then you will be able to see for yourself how impossibly hard it is to visually perceive one thing when your attention is focused on [or even divided by] something else, even when both competing objects are directly in front of you and in the same visual field.

One of the most common types of road traffic accident are the 'Looked but failed to see', (LBFTS) type of accident, and you can check the statistics for yourself on these. They have caused so much carnage in fact that Western governments have put millions into funding psychological studies to discover why and how an experienced driver who is looking at the road can fail to see everything from bollards to a marked police car and even 18 wheelers, and with both eyes open and on the road ahead crash into the obstacle.

Strangely enough, it is mainly experienced drivers that have these, which indicates complacency and over-confidence are playing a part. 'LBFTS' accidents are particularly characterized by late occurring minimal skid marks at the scene. The answer, [which any school teacher could probably have told them] is that these drivers

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