If you've ever wondered who's driving like a bonehead up ahead, it could be a teen who's behind the wheel, steering with one hand and sending a text message with the other. According to a study from AAA and Seventeen magazine, cited by this USA Today article, almost half of teens surveyed admitted that they send text messages from the driver's seat. (The researchers interviewed about 1,000 teen drivers in the United States to compile the data.)
That dovetails with a study published Tuesday about teen cell phone habits, which commonly include texting from the classroom, movie theater and dinner table. It would seem high-school kids are cut from the cloth of the text-crazy adult in this parody video about the "CrackBerry." In the Disney Mobile/Harris Interactive study, 44 percent of U.S. teens said that text messaging is their primary form of communication.
At this rate, it won't be long before one-handed texting joins parallel parking on the driver's test.