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Bad driver? It's in the genes.

Bad drivers causing havoc in traffic cannot help it, US researchers reported on Wednesday.

They found that people with a particular gene variant performed more than 20% worse on a driving test than people with a different DNA sequence.

The study may explain why there are so many bad drivers out there – about 30% of Americans have the variant, the team at the University of California Irvine found.

“These people make more errors from the get-go, and they forget more of what they learned after time away,” Dr. Steven Cramer, who led the study published in the journal Cerebral Cortex, said in a statement.

Cramer and his team tested 29 people – 22 without the gene variant and seven who had it - asking them to drive 15 laps on a simulator and then repeat the task a week later.

To their surprise, they found that those with the mutant gene did worse, consistently.

This was posted in Bdaily's Members' News section by Ruth Mitchell .