We Are Not the Worst Drivers in America - Just 47th
Friday, December 10, 2010
Were are not the worst - just real close and dropping. Results from the sixth annual GMAC Insurance National Drivers Test indicate that roughly 38 million licensed drivers lack basic driving knowledge and RI drivers rank 47th in the US.. A pool of 5,202 survey participants representative of the US Census drawn from all 50 states and the District of Columbia completed 20 questions, taken from actual written Department of Motor Vehicles (DMV) tests.
Key Findings
* If taken today, 18.4 percent of drivers on the road - amounting to roughly 38 million licensed Americans - would not pass a written drivers test exam.
* The national average score was 76.2 percent; a score below 70 percent is considered failing.
* Average test scores in 2010 continue to show a slight trending downward, from 76.6 percent in 2009 to 76.2 percent this year and a drop of almost 2 percent from the national average in 2008 (78.1 percent).
* With Age Comes Wisdom: The older the driver, the higher the test score. Males over 45 earned the highest average score.
* Factoring in margin for error, the average test score was significantly higher among males than females (78.1 percent male versus 74.4 percent female). Females also had a higher failure rate than males (24 percent female versus 18.1 percent male).
Of course, the Northeast had the lowest average test scores (74.9 percent) and had the highest failure rate (25.1 percent).
Nine states in 2010 had average test scores that were 80 percent correct or higher compared with only six states in 2009, but down from a high of 14 states in 2008.
