An assessment of the injury accident risk of company drivers and personnel who do work-related driving in privately registered cars was undertaken. A representative sample of the whole population of drivers of cars up to three years old was compared with a sample of drivers from that population who are known to have been involved in an injury accident. The questionnaire include items on annual mileage, amount of driving done for work-related purposes, type of work-related driving, type of vehicle and whether the vehicle was provided by a company. It also included a number of attitudinal and behavioural items found in previous research to be related to accident risk. The company drivers had higher risk scores on eight of the factors investigated than the representative sample of dirvers. Drivers who did more than 80% of their mileage for work were estimated to have an injury accident risk 53% higher than for drivers who do no work mileage; this figure is derived after differences in age, gender, mileage, annual milaege and motorway mileage have been adjusted for statistically. Those drivers who had been involved in accidents had safer scores, possibly because they had been affected by the recent experience of an injury accident. The company drivers doing over 80% of their mileage for work were more likely to drive between 2pm and 5pm, using a hands-free mobile phone, drive while eating or drinking, drive when under time-pressure to reach a destination, drive on long journeys (more than 50 miles) after a full day's work and drive while searching for signs or directions. For the covering abstract see E124157.
Abstract