By John Yoswick
As business bounced back this year in many markets while the shortage of technicians continued hampering the industry’s ability to get work out, it’s understandable that collision repairers may have been preoccupied with what was happening within their shop. Here’s our annual look at some of the headlines you may have missed in recent months.
Speeding, distracted driving still elevated
One potential reason for the record level of the average backlog of work that shops reported this year is that speeding and distracted driving levels that spiked in the early days of the pandemic haven’t fully waned even as the roadways have refilled with vehicles.
Cambridge Mobile Telematics (CMT), which provides the technology for most of the largest U.S. auto insurance telematics programs, analyzed data from 300 million vehicle trips (totaling 89 million driving hours) from January of 2019 through July of this year. CMT sees distraction — as measured by an active driver engaged with a cell phone, scrolling or clicking — on more than 35 percent of trips. Distracted driving minutes per hour increased …
