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Distracted driving caused by mobile phone use at the wheel is already recognised as a major issue, and a new study from the Insurance Institute for Highway Safety suggests it is being vastly underreported. The independent safety body, which released the study on Thursday, says mobile phone use immediately before crashes may occur at least 700 percent more often than police reports suggest.

Drawing on anonymised mobile phone data from Cambridge Mobile Telematics, IIHS researchers said that seven percent of drivers involved in single-vehicle crashes and eight percent of drivers involved in two-vehicle crashes were using their phone in the 30 seconds before impact. In contrast, police reports for those same crashes noted mobile phone use less than one percent of the time.

“It’s widely accepted that police reports often fail to capture the role of cellphones in crashes. Many smartphone functions are hard for a witness to see, and drivers are reluctant to admit being distracted,” said IIHS president David Harkey. “Telematics are allowing us to understand the true magnitude of the problem.”

Police officers seldom reach the scene of a crash within seconds of it happening, and are even less likely to witness a crash in real time, which makes it difficult to confirm mobile phone use. So, the underreporting of phone use is not exactly the fault of first responders. Even so, IIHS researchers say the rapidly expanding world of telematics data presents a troubling picture.

The researchers matched crashes logged by safe-driving apps with police-reported crashes across four states between 2021 and 2024, producing a sample of 17,000 crashes. Within that sample, telematics data was able to identify the type of phone interaction involved. Passive use, such as Google Maps navigation, accounted for five percent of all crashes examined, while active manipulation—defined as tapping, swiping, or otherwise interacting with the screen—was also tracked. In two-vehicle crashes, the study found that active manipulation took place within the 30 seconds before nearly four percent of recorded crashes. Hands-free calls and hand-held calls were also detected through telematics data, although these functions did not account for significant crash statistics.

“Navigation apps may have accounted for much of that passive activity. But nearly 25 percent of drivers who participated in a separate IIHS survey admitted to watching a video on their phone while driving at least once in the previous 30 days,” the report said.

IIHS researchers also explained that even when both law enforcement and telematics data identified phone use, they did not always agree on the type of distraction involved; police reports identified the same kind of phone use as telematics in only three of the 17,000 crashes surveyed. Likewise, only certain forms of mobile phone use are illegal in some states, which means law enforcement officers are not always looking for phone use during post-crash investigations. However, 21 states now ban drivers from holding phones altogether, a policy that IIHS research says is effective.