There Are Some Big Caveats

Phone use before a crash does not automatically make the phone user responsible for the crash.

The researchers didn’t have fault determinations. Someone could be sitting at a red light on a hands-free call and get rammed by a pickup from behind. Activity 29 seconds before impact also tells us a lot less than somebody actively tapping the screen one second before impact.

CMT additionally uses machine learning to estimate whether its user was driving or riding as a passenger. That classification has reportedly exceeded 96 percent accuracy, which is impressive, but leaves some room for error.

So I would not take these numbers and proclaim that 751 crashes were “caused by phones.” The study doesn’t support that. What the study does support, very strongly, is that active phone use immediately before crashes happens a hell of a lot more often than police reports manage to capture.

It always makes me curious how they even obtained this data

What a creepy Orwellian system we've built, to have this kind of information down to seconds. In the next study they'll be including what direction the driver's eyes were pointed in at the time of the crash.

I could’ve sworn there was a study that showed phones are less of a problem than gigantic cars, but that may have been damage/death toll instead of crash rate.

I drive deliveries for a living, my phone gets popped on a dashboard clip and tells me where to drive all day, I can't really use it for anything else. The amount of people I see just driving around texting or looking at their phones down near their knee because they don't want a cop to see is easily over 50%. It's pure insanity. This epidemic includes cops, except they don't even try to hide their phone use. We're cooked.

From the study

The data — which come from safe-driving apps that drivers voluntarily enroll in — show that cellphone use prior to crashes is undercounted in police reports by a factor of at least 7.

Since police reports do not always record crash times and locations with perfect precision, crashes that occurred within the same 15-minute window and within the same one-mile radius were determined to be a match.

This whole study is worthless. There's also a whole ton of assertions with zero source.

I was curious where the telematics came from, and how they could correlate that with specific accidents...

The telematics data came from Cambridge Mobile Telematics, or CMT, which supplies DriveWell technology used by insurance companies, fleets and various safe-driving programs.

DriveWell isn’t necessarily an app you’d recognize by that name. The technology can live inside an insurer’s branded app and automatically detect trips using the phone’s sensors and location data. Depending on the program, it can record speeding, hard braking, aggressive acceleration, phone interaction and likely crashes.

If you’ve ever agreed to let your insurance company watch you drive in exchange for a discount, there’s a decent chance you’ve met this general species of electronic hall monitor.

Bet that 2% discount isn't looking like such a good deal anymore to some people.

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.

Sounds like we should ban cars or phones. Unless you are using it to play music or make a hands free phone call. I guess responding to a text should also be protected but not sending a text except in an emergency like you can't start a text message chain.

It's almost as if having them investigate themselves is a conflict of interest or something.