CMT's Validated Data Studies
CMT is a trusted source of data for peer-reviewed research and federal government studies.
CMT’s driving analyses have been used in independent research by the Insurance Institute for Highway Safety (IIHS), the University of Pennsylvania, Virginia Tech Transportation Institute, and Stanford University. CMT’s co-founders have also published related peer-reviewed MIT research.
Findings from the research have appeared in journals including the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS), JAMA Network Open, the American Journal of Public Health, and the Journal of Safety Research — as well as in research published by the Federal Highway Administration.
Explore the Research
Journal placement pending, August 2026
Study shows police reports undercount cellphone use before crashes
Police reports miss most cellphone use before crashes. Telematics data linked to nearly 17,000 crashes showed cellphone use was undercounted in police reports by a factor of at least 7.
Traffic Injury Prevention, September 2026
Predicting cellphone manipulation based on magnitude of speeding
Speeding and phone use go hand in hand. A 5 mph increase in speed was linked to more cellphone manipulation, an effect nearly 4 times as strong on limited-access roads as on primary and collector roads.
Journal of Safety Research, June 2026
Evaluation of Arizona’s statewide handheld cellphone ban
Arizona’s hands-free law was followed by a real drop in handheld calling. Handheld-call time fell 26% after the law took effect — a reduction telematics data could confirm statistically, though roadside observation alone could not.
Journal of Safety Research, June 2024
The utility of telematics data for estimating the prevalence of driver handheld cellphone use, 2019–2022
CMT’s data lined up closely with NHTSA’s own roadside survey — tracking the same trends year over year, while also capturing conditions NOPUS can’t reach, like overnight hours and higher-speed trips. Nationwide, handheld calls showed up on 3.5% of trips and cellphone motion on a third of all trips.
Accident Analysis & Prevention, February 2026
A national randomized field experiment testing simulated UBI programs
Simulated insurance feedback made drivers safer. A 1,449-driver national trial found that usage-based insurance-style feedback and incentives cut speeding by 11%–13%, hard braking by 16%–21%, and rapid acceleration by 16%–25% relative to a control group.
JAMA Network Open, October 2024
Handheld cellphone use and risky driving in adolescents
Teen drivers and phones are a risky mix. Handheld phone use was detected in 34.1% of trips by newly licensed teen drivers and was associated with more hard-braking and rapid-acceleration events.
PNAS, August 2024
A randomized trial of behavioral interventions yielding sustained reductions in distracted driving
Gamified feedback and social competition reduced handheld phone use by 20% relative to control — and adding modest financial incentives pushed that reduction to 28%, a change that persisted after the intervention ended.
JAMA Network Open, July 2024
Feedback and financial incentives for reducing cellphone use while driving
Feedback plus incentives reduced handheld phone use by 15% to 21% relative to a control group, when combining social comparison feedback with financial incentives.
Transportation Research Interdisciplinary Perspectives, May 2024
Validation of a smartphone telematics algorithm for classifying driver trips
CMT’s driver-classification algorithm was found to be 96.5% accurate overall in an independent field study of the technology used across smartphone telematics apps — correctly identifying 97.5% of actual driver trips as such.
Federal Highway Administration, February 2022
Comparative effectiveness of alternative smartphone-based nudges to reduce cellphone use while driving
Two national randomized trials found that reframed, loss-framed incentives combined with feedback cut handheld phone use by up to 25%, in research published by the Federal Highway Administration.
Transportation Research Record, 2025
Safe driving is sustainable driving
Safer driving is greener driving. An interpretable telematics model found that safe drivers are more than 5% more fuel-efficient than risky drivers — savings that add up to nearly 63 gallons of gas and about $193 per year for a typical SUV.
PNAS Nexus, 2022
Measuring racial and ethnic disparities in traffic enforcement with large-scale telematics data
Researchers used CMT telematics as an independent benchmark for actual speeding rates and found that, on average, a neighborhood with 75% non-White residents saw about 20% more speeding stops than one with 75% White residents — despite similar underlying speeding rates.
ICCV, 2021
Inferring high-resolution traffic accident risk maps based on satellite imagery and GPS trajectories
AI can predict accident risk at 5-meter resolution. A deep-learning model combining GPS trajectories with satellite imagery outperformed the best comparable low-resolution method by nearly 18 percentage points on its accuracy metric — even without historical crash data.