t took almost 36 hours, but his hectic driving schedule finally got the better of Bruce R. DuPont, the Midwest sales manager for ControlAir Inc., a maker of precision air converters, based in Amherst, N.H.

On Monday, Aug. 4, after a fitful sleep at his home in Rindge, N.H., Mr. DuPont got up at 4 a.m., drove to the Manchester airport for the 7 a.m. flight to Indianapolis, picked up his rental car, had two meetings with clients and drove 150 miles to Bloomington, Ill., for another restless night in an unfamiliar bed. Up at 6 a.m. on Tuesday, he drove 40 miles to Peoria, Ill., for two morning meetings, had lunch and hit the road again, this time for St. Louis, 150 miles away.

At 3:45 p.m., with 55 miles to go, "I'm starting to zone out and I've got that head-bobbing thing going on," said Mr. DuPont, 42. "I'd already pulled over once."

At that point, he did what many business travelers who spend long hours behind the wheel fail to do: he checked into a motel. Even then, he had qualms about surrendering to his fatigue. "One of my first thoughts was, `If my boss knew I was checking in at 3 in the afternoon, he might be ticked off,' " he said.

His guilt aside, Mr. DuPont's prudence may have saved his life. The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration estimates that drowsiness is the primary cause of 100,000 police-reported crashes each year, resulting in at least 76,000 injuries and 1,500 deaths.

With exhaustion an ever-present danger, and with more business travelers switching from air travel to driving after the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks and subsequent cuts in corporate travel budgets, the likelihood of becoming one of those highway statistics has only increased.

Of the 569 respondents to an unscientific survey this month on the Yahoo Autos Web site (www.autos.yahoo.com) who reported that they had driven a car on a business trip of at least 200 miles, 58 percent said that they had experienced drowsiness. To fight it, 48 percent said they listened to upbeat music, 45 percent rolled down the windows or turned on the air-conditioning, 39 percent drank caffeinated beverages, 10 percent talked on their cellphones and 10 percent did nothing.

Only 19 percent pulled over and took a nap. (The numbers add up to more than 100 percent because many drivers tried two or more of the tactics.)

"The characteristics we found frequently associated with sleep-related crashes are those most prevalent in business travelers," said Jane C. Stutts, associate director for social and behavioral research at the University of North Carolina Highway Safety Research Center and lead author of "Why Do People Have Drowsy-Driving Crashes," a 1999 study for the AAA Foundation for Traffic Safety. Those traits, she said, are driving alone, at night, on long trips and on long stretches of monotonous roadway.

Add to that all the other afflictions common to business travelers like jet lag, sleepless nights in motels, and the stress of meetings on the run, and you have a deadly formula for highway accidents.

"Corporate American business executives are hard wired to be workaholics," said Dr. Ronald Krall, a senior vice president for worldwide development at GlaxoSmithKline and a past president of the nonprofit National Sleep Foundation in Washington. "They boast about how little sleep they need and how long they work. They yawn or fall asleep at meetings. Yet they don't see that as a risk or a problem when they get in a car."

John Kauffman of the Hartford Financial Services Group in Hartford, Conn., said companies should insist that their employees follow specified safety guidelines ?and noted that it is in the companies' financial interest to do so. Otherwise, he said, "the insurance costs, the damage to the vehicle, injuries to the parties involved, lawyers' fees, keep mounting," as do indirect costs like loss of productivity.

For drivers who simply will not take a nap, a variety of devices are available to keep them awake at the wheel, though Darrel Drobnich of the National Sleep Foundation said most "aren't worth the money."

Among them are Doze Alert and the Nap Zapper, mechanisms worn behind the ear that buzz loudly if your head falls forward; the Driver-Drowsiness Alert System, which uses vehicle-mounted sensors to monitor driver behavior and deliver a warning (including light, sounds and seat vibration); and the Steering Attention Monitor that sets off an alarm when abnormal steering movement is detected.

That last one has led to at least one success story. Dick Middlekauff, 43, who says he drives 75,000 miles a year for Ebiz-Innovations, an Internet-based company he owns, bought the Steering Attention Monitor after "pushing it so hard" on several 400-mile trips between Jacksonville, Fla., and Atlanta that he would find himself at exits and not remember how he got there. The first time he used it, he said, "it beeped so many times I thought it was malfunctioning," but when he realized that was not the case, he pulled into a rest stop and took a nap.

A more high-tech gadget that records the driver's eyelid movement, yawning, head nodding and other indicators and sounds an alarm if they indicate extreme weariness is being developed at the Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute in Troy, N.Y., with financing from the Honda Motor Company and the Air Force Office of Scientific Research. But it is not expected to reach the market for at least five years.

In the meantime, those who make their living on the move do what they have to do. After a frightening episode on the Pennsylvania Turnpike, Cary Wolinsky, 55, a photographer for National Geographic based in Norwell, Mass., started taking Provigil, a prescription drug for sleeping disorders and a favorite of workers needing a pick-me-up.

"I was driving all night, shooting on location at dawn, then driving again to the next shoot," Mr. Wolinsky recalled. "One night I drifted off and woke up just in time to see my car fishtailing, perpendicular to the highway, heading straight for a guardrail."

Driving to exhaustion may become illegal throughout the country if other states follow the lead of New Jersey. This month it became the first state to make driving while fatigued, defined as not having slept in 24 hours, a form of recklessness under its vehicular-homicide statute.

But even State Senator Stephen Sweeney, the Democrat who sponsored the bill, acknowledged that getting drivers to pay heed to the new restriction could be difficult. "No one wants to admit they are fatigued, even us legislators," he said. "After our last 36-hour marathon budget session, other legislators said to me, `Thank God your bill isn't law yet, or they could lock us all up.' "