She was texting. Both hands on the phone. Eyes down. For nearly 20 seconds straight at highway speed.
A Washington woman who wrecked a Turo rental car in August 2025 initially told the vehicle’s owner and Snohomish County sheriff’s deputies that another driver ran her off the road. What she apparently forgot was that the 2013 Nissan Leaf had interior and exterior dashcams, and the 18-year-old owner had told her about them before she ever turned the key. She was even offered the option to disconnect them. She declined.
The footage went viral. Millions watched a nurse practitioner bury her face in her phone while piloting two tons of metal down a rural two-lane road before drifting into a mailbox and coming to rest against someone’s property. Now, in January 2026, she’s suing Turo, Meta, YouTube, and Reddit, claiming she was illegally recorded.
The camera saw everything. And now she wants the courts to unsee it. We’re living through a distracted driving epidemic, and it’s getting worse, not better.
The Numbers
The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration reported 3,275 people killed in distraction-affected crashes in 2023. An estimated 324,819 were injured. Police documented nearly 782,000 distraction-related crashes that year alone, representing 13 percent of all reported collisions.
Those numbers are almost certainly understated. NHTSA’s own analysis suggests the true annual death toll from distracted driving may exceed 10,000, roughly 29 percent of all traffic fatalities, because distraction is notoriously underreported at crash scenes. Dead drivers don’t confess to scrolling Instagram.
The trend lines are moving in the wrong direction. The percentage of drivers observed manipulating handheld electronic devices while driving increased 36 percent between 2014 and 2023, from 2.2 percent to 3.0 percent. Nearly half of American drivers now admit to texting while driving, according to a 2024 survey by The Zebra. That’s a 31 percent increase from just three years earlier.
Among younger drivers, the numbers are even more alarming. 55% of Gen Z and Millennial drivers acknowledge texting while driving, compared to 33% of Boomers. Seven percent of drivers ages 15 to 20 involved in fatal crashes were reported as distracted, the highest proportion of any age group.
For trucking, the stakes are exponentially higher. A fully loaded tractor-trailer at highway speed needs the length of a football field to stop under ideal conditions. At 55 miles per hour, looking down at a phone for five seconds means traveling 306 feet completely blind.
FMCSA research found that commercial motor vehicle drivers who dial a mobile phone while driving are six times more likely to be involved in a safety-critical event, a crash, near-crash, or unintentional lane deviation, than drivers who keep their hands on the wheel.
For CDL Holders, One Violation Can End Everything
Here’s where the conversation gets serious for anyone holding a commercial driver’s license.
Under FMCSA regulations, using a handheld mobile phone while operating a CMV is classified as a serious offense. The first violation carries a fine of up to $2,750 for drivers and up to $11,000 for carriers that allow or require drivers to use handheld devices, but the financial penalties are just the beginning.
A second conviction within three years triggers a mandatory 60-day disqualification. A third or subsequent violation means 120 days on the sidelines. And that’s before we talk about what it does to your CSA scores.
Texting while driving a CMV carries a severity weight of 10 in FMCSA’s Safety Measurement System, the maximum category, equivalent to speeding more than 15 miles per hour over the limit. That violation will follow you in your Pre-employment Screening Program record for years. Every carrier you apply to will see it. Every insurance underwriter pricing your employer’s policy will factor it in.
In an industry where a clean record is currency, a handheld device violation is a self-inflicted wound that never fully heals.
You don’t need to get a citation for the violation to hurt you. A driver vehicle examination report can be issued without a ticket, and those CSA points still hit your record.
The Distractions
The phone gets all the headlines, but it’s not the only threat.
Cognitive distraction, the mental diversion of attention from driving, may be even more insidious because it’s invisible. Research published in Accident Analysis & Prevention found that emotional stimuli can modulate attention and decision-making, with adverse effects on driving behavior.
Studies from the Virginia Tech Transportation Institute discovered something that should terrify every fleet safety manager: Drivers experiencing strong emotions, visible sadness, anger, or agitation, showed a tenfold increase in crash risk compared to emotionally neutral drivers.
Ten times the risk. Not from phones. From feelings. I call it driving under the influence of emotion, and it deserves the same attention we give to alcohol and devices.
A driver who just got off the phone with a spouse announcing they want a divorce. A driver who just learned their kid got expelled from school. A driver who’s been stewing for 200 miles over a dispatcher’s disrespect.
Cognitive distraction can reduce brain activity associated with driving by up to 37 percent, according to research cited by the National Safety Council. And unlike a phone, which you can put down, emotional distress doesn’t have an off switch.
Add in the physical distractions, eating, drinking, adjusting climate controls, reaching for objects, and the mental distractions, mind-wandering, daydreaming, ruminating about problems back home, and you start to understand why distracted driving kills more people than any single variable except impairment.
The Large Truck Crash Causation Study found that distraction and inattention were the second-most-common driver-related factor in fatal CMV crashes, trailing only speeding. In 2022 alone, distraction or inattention was recorded in 278 fatal large truck crashes.
The Camera Is Your Witness
Which brings us back to that Turo rental and the dashcam that wouldn’t stay quiet. In trucking, we’ve had driver-facing and forward-facing cameras for years. The professional drivers I work with have a nickname: witnesses.
Those cameras protect drivers when four-wheelers cut them off. They protect carriers when frivolous litigation comes knocking. And yes, they expose the truth when a driver makes a bad choice.
The woman in that viral video made a choice. She chose to text. She chose to lie about it. And when the footage made her a cautionary tale for millions, she chose to sue the platforms hosting the evidence.
That lawsuit will play out however it plays out, but the footage isn’t going away. Neither is the reality it documents. The camera didn’t ruin her reputation. Her hands on that phone did.
The Other Side of the Coin
That Turo renter knew about the camera and declined to disconnect it. She had notice. She had a choice. That’s why her lawsuit faces an uphill climb. Carriers installing driver-facing cameras with biometric capture capabilities don’t always extend the same courtesy to their drivers. And they’re paying dearly for it.
In July 2025, Lytx finalized a $4.25 million settlement with approximately 85,000 truck drivers who alleged the company’s DriveCam system collected facial scans without proper notice or consent under Illinois’ Biometric Information Privacy Act. The settlement covered drivers whose biometric data was collected between October 2016 and January 2025.
That same year, HMD Trucking settled a class-action lawsuit after drivers claimed the company installed driver-facing cameras without the required written disclosures and consent forms under BIPA. Lily Transportation agreed to pay $132,300 to settle similar claims involving multiple major dashcam providers. And the granddaddy of them all, BNSF Railway, paid $75 million to resolve claims that fingerprint readers at Chicago rail yards violated biometric privacy laws.
Illinois’ BIPA requires any private entity collecting biometric identifiers, including facial geometry captured by AI-powered cameras, to inform individuals in writing that data is being collected, state the purpose and duration of use, obtain written consent before collection, and maintain a publicly available retention and destruction policy. Violations carry statutory damages of $1,000 per negligent violation and $5,000 per intentional or reckless violation.
A 2024 amendment limited exposure by counting multiple scans of the same individual as a single violation rather than separate infractions, but the math can still get ugly fast for large fleets.
The compliance burden falls on carriers, not vendors. If you’re running driver-facing cameras with AI-powered behavioral monitoring or biometric data collection, you need more than a sticker on the dashboard. You need a written biometric data policy. You need informed consent, in writing, before that camera ever captures a frame of a driver’s face. You need that documentation in the driver file, not lost in an orientation packet nobody reads.
States beyond Illinois are watching. New York, Massachusetts, and Missouri have considered BIPA-style legislation. Texas and Washington have their own biometric privacy statutes with different requirements.
The irony is that a woman who was warned about a dashcam and chose to ignore it is suing for invasion of privacy. Meanwhile, carriers who install biometric surveillance systems without telling their drivers are writing eight-figure settlement checks.
The camera is a tool. Like any tool, it can protect you or expose you. Managing the data the camera provides and obtaining consent are key to building a defensible program. The difference is action and accountability, disclosure, consent, and documentation.
What We Do From Here
Distraction prevention can’t stop at a policy in a handbook. It requires training that addresses cognitive and emotional distraction, not just device usage. It requires a culture where drivers feel comfortable pulling over when they’re not fit to drive, mentally or emotionally.
If you’re deploying driver-facing cameras or any telematics system that captures biometric data, you need a documented process that includes:
- A written biometric data policy that’s publicly available
- Clear disclosure to drivers about what data is being collected and why
- Written consent is obtained before the first frame is captured
- A defined retention schedule and destruction protocol
- Acknowledgment forms are in every driver qualification file
Don’t assume your telematics vendor handled this for you. They didn’t. The liability is yours. Telematics vendors can provide valuable resources to help fleets build and implement their systems, programs, and policies, but you must do the work and manage them. For drivers, particularly those holding CDLs, that text, that call, that moment of emotional fog, none of it is worth your career. None of it is worth your life or someone else’s.
The Federal Communications Commission notes that more than eight people are killed or injured daily in reported distraction-related crashes. The actual number is almost certainly higher.
We can do better. We have to do better because the cameras are always watching, and they tell the tale.
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