A Today.com segment looks at a risk many drivers underestimate, the morning after. Reporter Vicky Nguyen goes to a test track to see how hangover symptoms can affect driving even when a person feels mostly normal, and the takeaway is that hangover effects can linger for much of the next day and quietly erode the skills that keep routine driving safe.
What Today Tested
The segment uses a hangover simulation suit created and demonstrated with Ford, and Skip Barber Racing as the track partner. The suit weighs about 17 kilograms and combines a vest plus wrist and ankle weights, along with a cap, goggles, and headphones.
It is designed to mimic fatigue, dizziness, a throbbing head feeling, sound sensitivity, and difficulty concentrating, which are the same ingredients that make simple driving tasks feel harder than expected. In the demonstration, the point is not that a person is intoxicated, it is that they can be slowed down and distracted while still believing they are fit to drive, which is why the video frames hangover driving as an overlooked safety issue.
What The Research Shows
The discussion in the video aligns with published research showing that impairment can persist after blood alcohol concentration returns to zero. A controlled study summary described 48 volunteers tested on two days, one after no drinking and one after a night out, with participants averaging about 10 drinks and then completing a one hour simulated highway drive at 95 kilometers per hour.
When hungover, drivers showed more lane weaving and worse control, and researchers noted that hangover impairment can resemble performance seen around a 0.05 to 0.08 blood alcohol concentration. Sleep loss is a likely driver of the effect, because participants reported about 90 minutes less sleep after drinking and those who slept six hours or less performed worse, which suggests that hangover and fatigue can compound each other.
What To Do Instead
The practical advice is to treat the morning after as a planning problem, not a willpower problem. Alcohol clears with time, and sources like Drinkaware emphasize that you cannot reliably speed it up with coffee, cold showers, or a big meal, because metabolism varies and a rough rule of thumb is about one unit per hour.
UK road safety messaging has also highlighted that morning after cases are real, with reports pointing to hundreds of morning drink drive crashes in a year and thousands of failed morning breath tests annually, which reinforces that the risk is not hypothetical.
If you are still foggy, still tired, or unsure about residual alcohol, the safer move is to arrange a ride, and the broader context of impaired driving harms is reflected in where the worst states are for drunk driving deaths. Prevention tools are also evolving, from behavior trends, to ideas like a digital key with a breathalyzer, but the near term rule stays simple, if you would not trust your focus and reaction time at full speed, you should not be driving.
