The latest research indicates that people who text while they drive are significantly impaired:

Study: Drivers who text are 6 times more likely to crash

Drivers who text behind the wheel are six times more likely to crash, and texting is riskier than talking on a cell phone or to a passenger, researchers in Utah report.

When it comes to braking, drivers reading texts reacted far more slowly than while composing them, according to the study of 40 young adults between 19 and 23. And, as many of us know, drivers who text follow closer and weave across lanes.

So what are your actual odd of crashing? Taking the statistics from this page:

Car Crash Stats: There were nearly 6,420,000 auto accidents in the United States in 2005. The financial cost of these crashes is more than 230 Billion dollars. 2.9 million people were injured and 42,636 people killed. About 115 people die every day in vehicle crashes in the United States — one death every 13 minutes.

Taking the simplest possible ratio, assuming 300,000,000 people live in the United States, your odds of dying in a car accident in any given year are about 1 in 7,000. That means that over your lifetime it approaches 1 out of 100.

Using the same ratio, your odds of crashing this year are 1 in 46. If you increase that by a factor of 6, your chances of getting in an accident head toward certainty.

If you would like to see how bad it can get, watch this video showing people in a driving simulator:

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