Driving after just ONE drink makes you more likely to have car crash Even drivers with a slight 'buzz' are more likely to be at fault for accidents Those who had drunk just one bottle of beer were 46 per cent more likely to be solely blamed for the crash than a sober driver Experts say there is no level of alcohol when it comes to driving No safe limit: Even drivers with a slight 'buzz' are more likely to be at fault for accidents than the sober drivers they hit There is no safe level of alcohol in the bloodstream when it comes to driving, a landmark study has found. Even drivers with a slight 'buzz' are more likely to be at fault for accidents than the sober drivers they hit. U.S. researchers looked at fatal car crash data from a U.S. national database of more than 570,000 collisions between 1994 and 2011. They analysed blood alcohol content (BAC) measurements for the drivers as well as clear indicators of blame for the accident, such as which driver ran a red light or drove in the wrong lane. Drivers with a BAC of .01 percent - the lowest level recorded in the dataset - were 46 per cent more likely to be solely blamed for the crash than a sober driver. The legal driving limit in the UK and US is 0.8 per cent. An adult man would need just half of one 12-ounce beer - the size of a normal bottle sold in a pub - to generate a .01 percent BAC reading on a breathalyser test. For men and women, as blood alcohol level increased, so did the possibility of blame for the accident. The authors also find no 'threshold effect' - i.e. 'no sudden transition from blameless to blamed' at the legal limit for drunk driving. Instead, blame increases steadily and smoothly from BAC 0.01 to 0.24 per cent. 'Even if you're not aware of it, you are impaired after one drink,' he said. 'Maybe not as much as after 5 drinks, but you are,' he said. Despite this evidence, 'buzzed' drivers are often not punished more severely than their sober counterparts. In practice, lead author David Phillips said, police, judges and the public at large treat BAC 0.08 per cent as 'a sharp, definitive, meaningful boundary', and do not impose severe penalties on those below the legal limit. That needs to change, Phillips said. The law should reflect what official accident investigators are seeing. He added: 'There's nothing magical about .08. No research indicates that a great change in driving capacity takes place between .07 and .08. Crash: The landmark study looked at half a million accidents and the blood alcohol levels of those involved The lower we can make the legal BAC, the safer everyone will be. The study has a wide range of implications. For the individual driver it means don't drive while buzzed, and for a passenger, don't get in a car with a driver who is buzzed. Find a way to make the sober one the driver. Many European countries have legal limits of .05, and limits in Sweden and Japan are even lower, Phillips said. Strictly following the data, the only safe driver is one with zero blood alcohol content, he said. Although the study builds on 50 years of similar research, this one is unique and exciting because of its scale, said James C. Fell, senior research scientist at the Pacific Institute for Research and Evaluation in Calverton, Maryland. The study was published in the journal Injury Prevention. Commenting on the study, Ellen Booth, senior campaigns manager at the road safety charity Brake, told MailOnline: 'We would like to see the current limit of 0.8 per cent reduced. The current drink driving regulations are archaic and the UK has the highest limit in Europe alongside Malta. We know from evidence that the drink driving limit here is incredibly dangerous - it sends out the message that one or two drinks is completely safe, when we know that even small ampunts of alcohol can dramatically increase the chance of a crash or death.