Battle for the Dashboard - an update

By: Dan Keegan

Date: Sunday, 21. February 2010

gps and satnav help driver

"The race to funnel information, communication and entertainment into vehicles has accelerated as the costs of hardware such as Global Positioning System receivers and display screens have plummeted," says a recent article in the Wall Street Journal.

Drivers.com has been following this race very closely over the past several years. We've watched the pieces come together and also followed the discussion about driver distraction. What's shaping up, or should be shaping up, is a major debate over the future of human autonomy, privacy and safety.

Can we humans be trusted to manage such a difficult task as driving, or should we be heavily managed and restricted by laws, social engineering, or perhaps even sidelined completely by emerging technologies that take us humans out of the picture and let the vehicles drive themselves?

Trusting humans

The distraction issue is not new. There was an intense debate back in the 1930s about whether radios should be allowed on the dash. When mobile 'cell' phones began to be widely available in the 1990s, the controversy exploded. In August 2000, the U.S. National Highway traffic Safety Administration sponsored an internet conference on the topic.

This past week the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation addressed the issue in an episode of MarketPlace, and Oprah Winfrey joined the fray this past month with a special program devoted to the issue.

In short, there is no lack of media attention to the driver distraction issue.

Typically, media stories about the dangers of driver distraction will feature two prominent elements: a tragic story resulting from a gross example of distraction; and a demonstration of how distracting technologies such as phone texting and navigation systems can be.

These stories have a familiar shape to members of the traffic safety and driver education community. For a long time, it's been obvious to experts on driving that one of the biggest problems plaguing drivers is distraction. This has been a problem long before mobile phones and navigation systems. If there are no technology distractions there's that other, perhaps even more dangerous distraction -- absentmindedness.

For the most part, driving doesn't take all of our attention. That's just a fact. Boredom and absent-mindedness have played a huge role in the horrendous traffic fatality toll that has dogged our enjoyment of the automobile over the years. The people who design those public service ads saying "give driving 100% of your attention" do understand all of this. They just hope you'll try a little harder.

Before there was texting there were drivers who drove off the road into trees, drove full tilt into cars stopped on the shoulder, drove right through red lights without even seeing them. In one case that made headlines in Canada some years back, a driver plowed into a group of brightly dressed cyclists, on a straight flat road, on a bright day, in the middle of the morning! Police determined no drugs or alcohol were involved. friends of the cyclists wanted him charged with murder. (read expert analysis)

Back in the 1970's a major study of road crash causes determined "looking but not seeing" as the most commonly identified specific crash cause. Apparently, a driver could actually look right at something but not actually take in critical information about speed and direction.

Obviously, the process of seeking out the information you need to drive is not all that straightforward.

Divided attention

Driving is a task that depends on attention dividing. It's multi-tasking by nature. And there will always be distractions as long as humans drive cars.

The question is, how do drivers learn how long they can take their eyes of the road ahead? How do they learn what to look at and what not to look at? How do we drivers train our vision instincts?

It would seem to be a no-brainer that vision training would help. However, there are limitations there. Over the past few decades the value of training and education has been heavily discounted by researchers and governments just about everywhere. Today's training is more about getting a license than dealing with the problems that beset experienced drivers.

One of the scariest things about automobiles and us human operators is that, at any particular time, we do not have full control over where our eyes focus and what kind of attention we pay to particular things that are going on around us. Training is one factor in that process, experience is another. Since training typically ends at licensing, the rest of the process is handled by life's great instruction academy -- the school of hard knocks.

As one traffic safety expert pointed out some years ago, after licensing, drivers build two sets of habits -- good ones they pick up by dint of experience, and bad ones they think are good until they are caught out. Phoning and texting would come under the latter heading. The more you get away with it the more complacent you become.

Drivers, laws, and technologies

Over the past decade the role of 'telematics' in driving has accelerated. The transfer of wireless information over phones, internet, WiFi, is bringing to the car all the connectivity of home computing. The enthusiasm for all this technology will be evident if you type "telematics" into the Drivers.com search box and search our site.

For the manufacturers of the technologies the early problems were in the arena of marketing as much as tech development. Customers didn't understand them, or didn't want to pay. There were complex partnership to be considered and the whole issue of which tech goodies to package with the vehicle.

Now costs are coming down and the techologies are more sophisticated and easier to use. As the Wall Street Journal article mentioned above points out, the flood gates are opening up - potentially, that is.

What happens next depends on public reaction, politics, the wiles and skills of the technology developers, and the power of marketing. There are probably some extremists who want everything off the dash, maybe even the radio, and others who want everything on.

Police commissioner Julian Fantino feb 26 on CP24 talking about new tough speed fines in ontario. "Driving is a full time occupation that should not be distracted by any other activities. "

How the safety issue plays out may depend as much on politics as the realities of safety and driver distraction. Can drivers be trusted? How much? What kind of laws and restrictions?

These will all play a role in the future of driving and the automobile. Hopefully, informed public discussion will play a major role in the outcomes.

Your participation in the discussion below will help

Some questions to consider:

Should all interactive screens be banned from the dashboard?
Should there be specific laws for texting, phones, navigation devices?

Further comments to this article have been disabled.

All Comments (3)

Showing 1 - 3 comments

Chris DiOrio,

I have a patent for a reverse gear volume reducer this simple and inexpensive devise is one way that technology can help rather than endanger by Automatically lowering the volume on the radio when the car is put in reverse this will help the driver hear outside sounds while their vision is limited and helping them pay more attention to other technologies such as a backup camera while the car is in reverse the radio volume will automatically be restored to its oroginal volume when the auto is out of reverse this will help in backover accidents and in situations where there are many autos backing up at the same time such as Sporting events Shopping centers. Schools letting out etc contact volume reducer @hotmail.com

Chris DiOrio,

I came up with a way to help with distracted driving while reversing your car. In resent years there have been many reports of Backover accidents where people ran over children while reversing out of their driveways.They were not aware that their child ran out after them.I think that at times these parents were listing to their car stereos and could be disstracted by what they were listing to. I have a patent for a reverse gear volume reducer that automatically lowers the volume of the radio when the vehicle is put into reverse and then will be restored to its original sound level when out of reverse.This will help the driver hear outside sounds such as children or oncoming vehicles.The key to this idea is that it does not require the driver to anything it is automatic.

Mouhamad A. Naboulsi,

I liked what I read. Finally, someone that is not buying into the scare.

Distraction and conversations and texting are dangerous when they haapen at a bad time/place, when they are intense or when they require one or more hand off the steering wheel and eyes off the road.

These are the simple facts. If dialing a call requires eyes off the road or hands off the wheel, then that's unsafe. If conversation while driving involves taking notes or looking up information, then that's dangerous. The texting issue is Obvious.

A call from home to pick up milk on the way home is actually safer then having to come home just to go out again. A call to home to let them know that you are stuck in traffic can do wonder to family life and probably let the kids eat first instead of waiting indefinitely for the parent to come home.

The hysteria being raised have $ written all over it. The insiurance industry want to increase rates by claiming that the entire nation have increased the risk by all of us opting to use cell phones.

There is already enough technology to make calling, answering and doing just about anything safer. This is done by integrating the entire driving experience into one system so a driver is never distracted at a bad time or have to take eyes off the road and hands of the wheel. Please see iQ-Telematics.com for details.

Mouhamad A. Naboulsi