Which impairs a driver more: vodka or texting?

Car and Driver recently conducted a real-world test to determine just how dangerous driving-while-texting can be. The editors rented an airport runway, far from any traffic (car or plane), and brought along a Honda Pilot, two willing test subjects, cell phones, and plentiful vodka and orange juice.

The Pilot was fitted with small lights in the windscreen that could be flipped on and off, and the subjects were told to react to them as if they were brake lights suddenly flashing ahead of them. As the lights came on, an observer monitored how long it took the driver to hit the brake pedal, both at 35 and 70 miles per hour. The drivers -- Jordan Brown, 22, and Eddie Alterman, 37 -- went through the test in four conditions: sober and attentive; reading a text while glancing at the road; writing a text; and loaded (BAC of .08 and probably climbing).

The results: DWT was actually worse than DWI. The following chart documents the average delay in reaction time (and, crucially, extra distance traveled) for the two drivers under each condition:

The drunken-driving performances were sufficiently non-scary that the editors felt moved to add the following caveat:

[D]on't take the intoxicated results to be acceptable just because they're an improvement over the texting numbers. They only look better because the texting results are so horrendously bad. The buzzed Jordan had to be told twice which lane to drive in, and in the real world, that mistake could mean a head-on crash. And we remind again that we only measured response to a light--the reduction in motor skills and cognitive power associated with impaired driving weren't really exposed here.

Of course, the main difference is that drunken driving is taboo in most circles while warnings about DWT have, for a large swath of the population, not yet sunk in.

(Scientists have studied the texting phenomenon in the lab, Car and Driver noted, but the editors laid claim to the first real-world test.)