The Red Monkey

Obvious: Survey says nearly one-in-five motorists “unfit” to drive

by Jeremy Korzeniewski (RSS feed) on May 28th 2010 at 3:58PM

How many bad drivers can you spot every day on your drive to work? Five? Ten? All of them? We feel your pain, and apparently the alarming truth is that one-in-five motorists – which, for those interesting in the gory details, equals roughly 38 million Americans – are unfit to drive on our nation’s highways.

This data is according to a test administered by GMAC Insurance that asked motorists 20 questions taken straight from your local DMV’s written driving test. About 20 percent of currently licensed drivers would have failed the test, and the average score of 76.2 percent is down slightly from that of 2009.

Some interesting factoids: Male drivers scored better than females on both average scores (78.1 percent male versus 74.4 percent female) and failure rates (24 percent female versus 18.1 percent male). New Yorkers ranked dead last (70 percent average score) and Kansas drivers ranked highest (82.3 percent average score). Want to know more? (Perhaps not…). If so, click here for a further breakdown from our friends at TheDetroitBureau.com.

[Source: TheDetroitBureau.com | Image: timsamoff C.C. 2.0]