Washington ? Nearly all drivers become distracted when behind the wheel, and cell phones aren’t the main culprit, a study released Wednesday found.

Reaching for something in the car and fiddling with the audio system are the primary causes of driver inattention, according to a report by the American Automobile Assn.’s Foundation for Traffic Safety, a nonprofit driver education group.

“What we want to do is make people more aware of the fact that there are distractions beyond cell phones,” said Stephanie Faul, the foundation’s communications director. “When you’re fumbling around in the foot well because you’ve dropped part of your sandwich, that’s as much a distraction as anything else.”

The study was conducted from 2001 to 2002 by researchers at the University of North Carolina’s Highway Safety Research Center in Chapel Hill and by Philadelphia traffic research consultants TransAnalytics. Researchers used small windshield-mounted cameras to videotape 70 volunteers from either Chapel Hill or Philadelphia driving their own cars. The project then analyzed three randomly selected hours of tape from the average seven to eight hours collected for each subject and tabulated their concentration when behind the wheel.

More than 97 percent of the drivers leaned or reached for something inside the car; 91 percent adjusted the vehicle’s audio controls. More than three-quarters carried on conversations while driving and 71 percent ate or drank behind the wheel, the report found. Just 30 percent of the 28 drivers with cell phones used them in the car, according to the report.

“Cell phones have been getting a disproportionate amount of negative attention relative to the type of distraction” they cause, said Barbara Harsha, the executive director of the Washington-based Governors Highway Safety Assn., which seeks to educate states about traffic safety. “People just love to hate cell phones.”

Excluding talking to passengers, drivers engaged in a potentially distracting activity 16.1 percent of the time that their cars were moving. The scope of the problem is considerable: Inattentive drivers account for up to 30 percent of police-reported traffic accidents, about 1.2 million a year, according to the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration.

The traffic foundation study was the second phase of a project that began in 1999 with analyzing NHTSA crash data to determine the extent that driver distraction caused accidents. The recent phase of the project was designed to examine “what people actually do in their cars,” said Jane Stutts, the report’s lead researcher.

The foundation hopes to help combat the problem of driver inattention with educational warning sections in state driver’s license manuals. Only six states now offer information to new drivers on the dangers of distracted driving. The organization also unveiled a public service announcement campaign to inform current drivers of the risks of inattention.