It is estimated that driver fatigue is a contributing factor in 15% to 20% of crashes (SWOV, 2019). Consequences of a fatigue related crash are often serious because brakes are used late or not at all, resulting in high impact speed.
This report provides an overview of available data on fatigued driving for EU member states and EFTA countries. Moreover, it provides information related to regulations and enforcement.
In general, data on fatigued driving are scarce and largely limited to self-reported data, since largescale, reliable and objective data based on existing methods are impossible to collect. For this report, data from the ESRA project (survey data) are used.
Based on these self-reported data the following can be:
- The mean percentage of self-reported fatigued driving (during the previous 30 days) in Europe is 23%. For most individual EU countries, the percentage differs less than 5 percentage points from the EU22 mean.
- A higher percentage of males (25%) reported fatigued driving than females (16%).
- Reported fatigued driving decreases with age.
- A European driving time and rest regulation exists for professional drivers only.
- A recent measure to counter fatigued driving is a new EU regulation1 on type approval requirements for motor vehicles, based on which a Driver Drowsiness Monitoring and Attention Warning (DDAW) system is required for all new types of passenger and goods motor vehicles from July 6 2022.
