Overview
- Unfallforscher Siegfried Brockmann warned on Tuesday that smartphone use while driving is rising sharply among young drivers and that this group often underestimates how dangerous short glances at a screen can be.
- Volunteer checks by the Auto Club Europa between April and July 2026 found clear illegal phone use in 3.3 percent of vehicles on average with a hotspot in Stuttgart registering 17.9 percent, while several locations showed no detected violations.
- Experts say reading or typing is hard to prove from routine checks, so official police statistics understate the true scale of phone-related distraction.
- The Allianz Zentrum für Technik presented model analyses showing distraction may cause about 30 percent of crashes and that moving many controls onto touchscreens raises the risk by forcing drivers to look away from traffic.
- The debate now centers on whether to raise fines or instead increase detection and change car design, with pilots of overhead ‘phone cameras’ and calls for physical switches and better voice controls being proposed while no nationwide law changes have been adopted.