Has anyone experience drowsiness while driving your car?

I constantly have drowsiness when I drive my car greater than 40mins. The car engine droning noise cause me to fall asleep.

How do you guys cope with this drowsiness problem? Do you drink coffee?

I've had this problem most of my adult life.

Usually it is by sheer will that I keep from falling asleep.

Now I use a rubber band, or I think about Baghdad, or in the extreme cases I pull over and take a break.

I use music. If it's cool weather rolling down the window and getting a blast of air in the face also helps. It may sound odd but chewing on strong flavored gum also seems to help a little.

Have you considered that you might have a sleeping problem, like sleep apnea or something?

You might want to see a doctor. I did and it changed my life.

We hired a taxi in Europe years ago for a 7 hour trip (long story). Anyway, we stopped along the way to eat and offered to pay his meal and he refused pretty much saying a slight hunger would help keep him awake. And of course that a big meal makes you sleepy. I never forgot that and its worked for me ever since (with a little coffee of course.) Not to starve yourself but try not eating a big meal before you drive.

I am an almost lifelong insomniac and have seen a doc. It has improved lately, and I feel much better than I used to, it's just too soon for me to be overly optimistic.

(For those who might be wondering, I refused to drive in a seriously impaired condition.)

Make sure you have no holes in the car, could be carbon monoxide making you sleepy. Especially if it happens every time you drive. Are you getting headaches?

Do whatever it takes to fix this problem. No matter what the police reports say, driver fatigue is probably the number one cause of solo vehicle traffic collisions (and I should know, I worked about a jillion solo rollovers on I-5). In my younger days I used to drive much longer than I should have; I rolled the window down, sang to the radio (thank goodness no one could hear me), and often stopped to walk around and spash water in my face to stay awake...

Amen! The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration conservatively [my emphasis] estimates that 100,000 police-reported crashes are the direct result of driver fatigue each year. This results in an estimated 1,550 deaths, 71,000 injuries, and $12.5 billion in monetary losses. These figures may be the tip of the iceberg, since currently it is difficult to attribute crashes to sleepiness.

(Scary) stats from DrowsyDriving.org:

• 60% of adult drivers – about 168 million people – say they have driven a vehicle while feeling drowsy in the past year, and more than one-third, (37% or 103 million people), have actually fallen asleep at the wheel!

• Men are more likely than women to drive while drowsy (56% vs. 45%) and are almost twice as likely as women to fall asleep while driving (22% vs. 12%).

• People who sleep six to seven hours a night are twice as likely to be involved in such a crash as those sleeping 8 hours or more, while people sleeping less than 5 hours increased their risk four to five times.

• A study...in Australia showed that being awake for 18 hours produced an impairment equal to a blood alcohol concentration (BAC) of .05, and .10 after 24 hours; .08 is considered legally drunk.

• This will wake you up: Several drowsy driving incidents have resulted in jail sentences for the driver. Multi-million dollar settlements have been awarded to families of crash victims as a result of lawsuits filed against individuals as well as businesses whose employees were involved in drowsy driving crashes.

Their suggested countermeasures. My personal "countermeasure" — a wife who talks incessantly, especially if she thinks I'm getting drowsy while driving

Here's a commercial "gadget," the Driver Alert Master, although I'd rather practice prevention and not rely on something that kicks in after I've nodded off. Better than nothing maybe, but a) what if you don't activate it, and b) there's the danger of "over-correcting" after being startled awake.

I think the best countermeasure is to know your own personal limitations and warning signs.

Ferinstance, I know that when I'm driving at night and lights start to *hurt* my eyes I'm getting dangerous. It starts with oncoming headlights, then streetlights, traffic lights. When the reflection of my own headlights off of signs starts to hurt...

Also, when that little voice says "Just close your eyes for one little second, you can open them again, just for a second, its ok..."