According to the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA), each year up to 100,000 police-reported crashes (about 1.5% of all crashes) involve drowsiness or fatigue as a principal cause, injuring at least 71,000 people, and killing at least 1,500. However, these numbers may likely underestimate the magnitude of drowsy driving crashes because of limitations in existing crash databases. Mounting evidence suggests the true numbers are much higher than these estimates, with studies in the United Kingdom indicating fatigue is a factor in over 15% of crashes. Although numbers and percentages differ, most experts agree that drowsy driving is an important traffic safety issue and the public agrees. In a 2002 NHTSA-sponsored Gallup survey, 95% of the driving population considered drowsy driving by other people to be a threat to their safety. About 37% of respondents reported they had fallen asleep while driving at least once in their life, and 10% of those had done so within the past month. (Author/publisher) Pdf-files also contains AAA-report "Why do people have drowsy driving crashes? : input from drivers who just did", Washington, D.C., 1999, http://www.aaafoundation.org/pdf/sleep.pdf
Abstract