One in three young U.K. drivers snap selfies at the wheel, survey finds

Young British drivers are the most likely in Europe to snap a smartphone self-portrait when they should have two eyes on the road and two hands on the wheel.

In a survey of 7,000 smartphone-owning 18-to-24-year-olds across Europe, 50 per cent of all respondents admitted that they had taken a photo while driving, while one in four said that they had taken a selfie.

And while the worrying trend is most prevalent in the U.K., 28 per cent of German and French respondents also said they'd snapped themselves behind the wheel, putting them in joint second place. At the other end of the scale, young Belgian drivers were the least likely to feel the need to take a selfie (17 per cent of respondents).

Away from snapshots, 25 per cent of all respondents claimed to have accessed social media sites while driving. Yet when asked if they thought such activities were dangerous, 95 per cent of all respondents said "yes."

Ford, which commissioned the survey, is more than a little concerned by the findings. It calculates that snapping a selfie takes an average of 14 seconds, while a quick glance at a social media site takes 20 seconds. If a car is traveling at 100 kilometres per hour, that means that every 20 seconds it has covered a distance of 555 meters -- that's a greater distance than five soccer pitches, and all while looking somewhere other than on the road.

In December 2012, before the word ‘selfie' had made its way into the Oxford English Dictionary, Goodyear, in partnership with IPSOS, conducted a similar study, examining the habits of 64,000 young and novice drivers across Europe and in South Africa.

Rather than self-portraits, it found that talking on the phone without a hands-free kit was young drivers' biggest crime -- 44 per cent of all respondents admitted to doing so, with Russian and Swedish drivers (70 per cent) being the most likely and UK drivers (15 per cent) the least likely.

At 14 per cent, UK drivers were also the least likely to text, surf the web or email while driving and South Africans (65 per cent), Turkish (56 per cent) and Swedish (55 per cent) the most likely.