Your body clears alcohol at a steady pace, so only time without more drinks lowers your BAC. Coffee, exercise or a cold shower might make you feel more alert, but none of them reduces your BAC.
Letting a sober friend drive keeps an impaired driver off the road. Coffee or a cold shower cannot remove alcohol from your blood, and the body needs about an hour to process each drink, so a 30-minute pause is not enough.
Your BAC mainly depends on how much alcohol you consume, what you weigh and how fast you drink. Age is not among those key factors.
Alcohol begins to dull these mental skills from the very first drink. You do not need to be over the legal limit for your driving to become less skillful and less careful.
Drinking dulls decision-making, blurs vision, and disrupts coordination at the same time, and safe driving depends on every one of these. That is why even a small amount of alcohol makes driving risky.
Alcohol dulls the physical skills that driving requires, such as quick reactions and clear vision, and it also clouds your judgment about speed, distance, and risk. It does not improve any part of driving.
The body works through roughly one drink's worth of alcohol per hour, and nothing can hurry that process. Drinking coffee or water, or eating something, will not lower your BAC any faster.
Alcohol lengthens the time it takes you to react and throws off your sense of speed and distance; it also blurs vision and makes risky choices more likely. Each ability named in this question is weakened by drinking.
The more alcohol in your blood, the longer it takes you to respond to a hazard, which raises your crash risk. Alcohol also tends to make drivers feel more confident rather than less, and the body cannot speed up the rate at which it removes alcohol.
Coffee may help you fight off sleepiness, but it does nothing to the amount of alcohol in your blood. Only time brings your BAC down and lets you become sober again.
With the same number of drinks, a lighter person generally reaches a higher BAC than a heavier one. Spacing drinks further apart also matters, because the body clears alcohol only at a slow, steady rate.
Alcohol does not improve concentration. It slows your reactions, blurs your vision, throws off your sense of speed and distance, and makes it harder to recover from headlight glare. It also tends to lower inhibitions, which leads drivers to take more risks.
Your BAC rises or falls with how much alcohol you take in, how fast you drink it and how much you weigh. Being in good shape does not help your body clear alcohol faster, so it does not keep your BAC lower.
Tip Neither fitness nor a high tolerance brings your BAC down; only time removes alcohol from your body.
The body clears alcohol at a fairly steady pace of about one standard drink per hour. A 12-ounce beer, a 5-ounce glass of wine and 1.5 ounces of liquor each count as one such drink. Coffee, cold showers and exercise will not speed this up.
Even at 0.04%, a level under the legal limit for adults 21 and over, your risk of a crash is two to seven times that of someone with no alcohol in the blood. There is no safe amount to drink before driving.
Every question in this set has its own page with the correct answer and an explanation.
