In the battle of the sexes, nothing gets women riled up like the words, “You can't drive! (And neither can your mother).”

The proper response to that jab, of course, is, “Well you drive too fast. (And your father's a jerk).”

So, in the war between a deliberate female driver and a testosterone-fueled road warrior in this car capital of L.A., which one is, in fact, the safer motorist? Don't blame the messenger, but …

… lady drivers suck! Ahh. We knew it. In this case is the messenger is a University of Michigan study that's been sitting on the shelf this summer but which is getting a lot of play this week for some reason.

According to Michael Sivak and Brandon Schoettle of the University of Michigan Transportation Research Institute men and women actually get into pretty much the same number of accidents in six crash scenarios they looked at.

But: Men drive more — about 60 percent of the time versus women's 40 percent.

So women, in turn, have more of these crashes compared to the time they spend behind the wheel.

U of M:

But the researchers found that crashes involving two female drivers were overrepresented in five of the six crash scenarios, including two by at least 50 percent more and two others by more than 25 percent greater than what was expected.

On the other hand, crashes involving two male drivers were underrepresented in four of the six scenarios …

So what is it with girls and cars? Well, that's a question for another study, maybe. Sivak:

This pattern of results could be due to either differential gender exposure to the different scenarios, differential gender capabilities to handle specific scenarios or differential expectations of actions by other drivers based on their gender.

So next time you crane your neck to see who that idiot is making that annoying move, now you know what to look for. Not just Mexicans/Koreans/Jews/old people/debutantes/whipper-snappers/yuppies. But female ones.

Comment away.

[@dennisjromero/djromero@laweekly.com]

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