Why we need self-driving cars
The [product being advertised] survey, which involved 2034 participants, found that 11 per cent of drivers admitted to having sex while driving. Men were three times more likely to admit to participating in sexual activity than women .
Firstly, a little skepticism would be appropriate here. Isn’t it just possible there’s something wrong with the survey? If you go and search for the press release, you find
This online survey is not based on a probability sample and therefore no estimate of theoretical sampling error can be calculated.
which is not encouraging. Also, the breakdown by age in the press release says the proportion who have ‘participated in sexual activity’ while driving is even higher, 17%, among 18-44 year olds. And flirting with a driver in a different car is apparently less common than having it off with a passenger in the same car.
I suppose I could just have led a very sheltered life. But if these figures are accurate you’d expect the AA to have noticed and to have a slightly different list of the top ten driving distractions. And surely it would be hard to have missed the salacious headlines whenever one of these couples caused an accident, which 5% of them report having done.
I’m not sure if it’s encouraging or discouraging that this is a Fairfax story, not something from the Daily Mail.
Thomas Lumley (@tslumley) is Professor of Biostatistics at the University of Auckland. His research interests include semiparametric models, survey sampling, statistical computing, foundations of statistics, and whatever methodological problems his medical collaborators come up with. He also blogs at Biased and Inefficient See all posts by Thomas Lumley »