Obesity: Where is it Driving Us?

Dreamstime.com_1633348 Michael Brown

Driver behavior and driver health can have a serious impact on the lives of drivers, their passengers and the motorists and pedestrians around them. I’ll bet most of you have never considered that obese people are not as safe behind the wheel.

There are two reasons for this.

1. Car Design

Crash test dummies represent people of average weight. Most car designs are not sympathetic to larger frames and leave obese drivers in more critical condition following an accident.

Obese people have a body structure different than the standard used in designing cars, and their interactions with safety features, such as seat belts and air bags, most often do not occur as intended.

A seatbelt works best when the belt rests close to the bone in your shoulder and in your pelvis, tight across the collarbone and low across the hip. The seatbelt holds obese drivers (and passengers) slightly differently and might not apply restrictions the same way on hips and shoulders as it does for a normal weight individual. Additionally, if the seatbelt isn’t long enough, the person isn’t going to wear it, which is an increased risk. Often, obese drivers fail to use a seat belt at all.

2. Health Issues

People who are obese often have other underlying health issues that contribute to them doing poorly if they have an accident. It’s no wonder, then, that as obesity is rampant, so too is medically diagnosed obstructive sleep apnea, a chronic disorder that interrupts sleep and causes extreme daytime sleepiness and fatigue. In the year 2000 alone (as per a study published in 2012 in the Journal of Transportation Safety & Security) 800,000 obese drivers in America with Obstructive Sleep Apnea were involved in illness-related car accidents.

Studies have shown that obese drivers are 80% more likely to die in a car accident than non-obese drivers. And a study from the UC Berkeley’s Safe Transportation and Research Education Center (SafeTREC), showed that obese drivers are more likely to die from traffic collision-related injuries than non-obese occupants involved in the same collision.

In addition to sleep apnea, there are other obesity-related medical issues to worry about: diabetic neuropathy can in no small measure affect a person’s driving skills; and an obesity-increased risk of spontaneous cardiac attack or stroke while driving can have catastrophic results.

While the impact of obesity on driving performance can be complex, it’s true that certain factors associated with obesity can potentially affect reaction time and overall driving ability. Obese individuals may experience reduced mobility, cardiovascular issues, and potentially lower cognitive function, which could impact their ability to react quickly to changing road conditions. 

One final thought:

If you hesitate to let your children be passengers in the car of a morbidly obese driver — especially one with sleep apnea, cardiac issues or diabetes — you are NOT being overcautious.

And if you don’t hesitate, perhaps you should.