The telematics crunch: regulation, laws, and education
By: Drivers.com staff
Date: 2001-06-06
"It's time to apply the brakes. We need to slap a speed limit on the adoption of potentially unsafe technologies in one place where it's careening into widespread use-our cars. And we need to do it before more of us become roadkill."--Patrick Houston, ZDNet News, Oct. 2000. The term "automotive telematics" describes the new integration of wireless communication and in-vehicle electronics.
What it represents is an invasion of the automobile passenger compartment with an array of information technologies that boggle the mind. The implications of that invasion, or potential invasion, are a major concern to all who will be involved in it-from auto manufacturers and equipment suppliers to road users, traffic safety policymakers, traffic law enforcement agencies, and driver educators.
Development of telematics is proceeding at a frantic pace, with all kinds of stakeholders jockeying for position in what they anticipate will eventually be a multi-billion dollar market. As Rodney Egdorf, Vice President, Wireless Business, OnStar, put it at a recent telematics industry conference in Detroit, "Today, consumer pull and OEM (original equipment manufacturer) push are working together to drive a frenzy of new product and service development that will put this business into hyper-growth."
"Consumers," says Egdorf, "want greater connectivity with the outside world while driving, and greater productivity during the 500 million hours Americans spend in their cars EACH WEEK!"
Egdorf admits that in this frenzied world of development the future is like a puzzle that is being assembled, and no one knows how the picture will look even a few years from now. OnStar was one of the first products to come to market (it was conceived in 1995 and introduced in the 1997 Cadillac model). It is, basically, a cell phone-based technology-"always on, always powered up, always in the vehicle", as Egdorf puts it. And herein lies the dilemma the telematics industry faces. Right now, some 40 states in the U.S. are considering legislation against the use of cell phones while driving. True, most of the legislation being considered is targeted against hand-held cell phone use, but this distinction is founded on shaky ground in terms of research into the dangers of cell phone use in automobiles. An English study has indicated that there is little difference between hand-held and hand-free phone use.
Further research may cast more light on the specifics of crash risk and driver distraction. In the meantime, the auto and telematics industries are anxious to push ahead with development and marketing. Onstar has placed safety and security at the center of its marketing strategy, and their research indicates that over 80 percent of OnStar subscribers cite automatic crash notification as the most important feature of their service. "In fact, we're now responding to more than 120 airbag deployment calls a month," says Egdorf.
However, regardless of how they market, there remains the huge question of how much distraction drivers can handle and how well. There is no doubt that cell phone use by drivers is a problem, but when legislators pick on outlawing hand-held phone use as a solution they may be taking the easy way out. And it is an easy way. Recent surveys indicate that the majority of the population may support such legislation, but there are a few problems with this:
- there is evidence that all cell phone use is equally risky;
- other distractions will not be addressed by the legislation;
- enforcement will be difficult;
- and there's a good chance that much of the antagonism towards cell phone use by drivers is triggered by cultural resistance to the new technology.
The mere sight of a driver using a cell phone while on the move seems to be enough to convince some people that that driver is not paying sufficient attention and is driving badly. And this attitude extends beyond the automobile world. Reactions to public cell phone use are evolving rapidly, but in the past it was common to hear derogatory comments about people using phones in public at all. For example: a shopper using a cell phone as he scouted the shelves of a supermarket was the subject of a scornful remark; young people were often the subject of anger just because they were using phones; the sound of a cell phone ringing in a restaurant can anger some people regardless of surrounding noise levels or the loudness of the phone.
Enforcement efforts directed against bad driving in general might be more difficult to deploy, but the efforts, and learning involved in overcoming those difficulties should be worth it. Rather than stopping and charging a driver just for using a cell phone, police would be obliged to focus on a particular driving fault. This would be an education for both police and the public.
Over the past decade or so, there appears to have been a perceptible shift in driving standards, away from obedience of traditional formal and informal laws and towards a more competitive style of road use. This is reflected in the design and marketing of automobiles as expressions of power and competitiveness.
There is evidence, too, that enforcement has slackened considerably in some areas, and the sight of other drivers ignoring road laws may be having a contagious effect. In short, the culture of the roadway may be slipping into a scofflaw style, more in tune with a "wild west" mentality than the traditions that held sway some years back.
If this is the case, it would fit the picture of driver behavior and risk taking described by Gerald Wilde in his theory of Risk Homeostasis. In broad terms, professor Wilde's theory goes like this: we all accept a degree of risk in our lives that we feel comfortable with-our "target" level of risk acceptance. Give us better cars, better roadways, better training and we will adapt our behavior to achieve the same comfort level. One of the factors that can change this comfort level is the economy, says Wilde.
Our target level of risk as individuals is the level at which we are comfortable with the "return" we get for taking risks. When the economy is in recession, Wilde argues, there is little incentive to drive faster or more aggressively to get where we want to go. In a roaring economy the pace picks up, and life on the road becomes more frenzied as time lost becomes equated with economic advantage lost.
There are those who would argue that we have gone through a sort of wild west period this past decade, as we move into a "new economy" and new technologies shatter old cultural norms, fostering new patterns of interacting and living. If the telematics people have their way, there is more to come. The new wireless age is, to use an old expression, just getting up steam.
At the Detroit conference, Egdorf threw out some teasers about how the telematics community sees the future: "What if you could have your Wall Street Journal read to you on your drive to work ... and how about getting real-time traffic reports on your favorite route to work before you leave the house ... and continuous updates as you head into the office?"
He had an even more tantalizing vision of a future in which the automobile becomes "a node on the network," connecting up with local information and services as it moves along, and even capable of being reconfigured as it moves.
"Because of OnStar's integration with the vehicle's smart electronics,
someday you may be able to customize the ride and handling of your vehicle
at a moment's notice.... Imagine adding horsepower for a short period of
time so you can impress the crowd at the Dream Cruise? And then reprogram
your suspension for a cushy, smooth ride on the trip up I-75 to your cottage?"
Some of these visions seem like a cross between a nightmare and an automobile lover's fantasy world. In the nightmare department, liability issues loom large. It's "untrodden ground," in the words of ITS expert John Bagby. And Charles Wu, director of Ford Motor's Manufacturing and Vehicle Design Research Laboratory, describes the effect of telematics on driver behavior as one of the industry's "most sensitive issues." Obviously, the specter of battles such as the one Firestone and Ford are having over blame-sharing is causing some sleepless nights in the industry.
Part of that sensitivity is the idea that the U.S. National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) may come under fierce pressure to push regulation in the interests of safety. Human factors expert Barry Kantowitz sees this as a realistic possibility but one that could be disastrous for the telematics industry. The NHTSA, Kantowitz notes, "is getting more and more interested in regulations in spite of themselves. They don't really want to promulgate regulations. They know the technical difficulties, but they have been subjected to the Firestone tire [recall]." He added that he is not in favor of the NHTSA regulating telematics. "We don't want in-vehicle devices designed in Washington, D.C."
OnStar is trying to head off any such trend at the pass. It announced a set of design guidelines that include minimizing distraction time and the number of steps required to perform a task. They also proposed a common interface for consumers to interact with the system, and a "lockout protocol" to prevent the use of systems that create unnecessary or excessive attention demands on the driver.
Also, in conjunction with GM, they are working on a program called " SenseAble Driving ." This program combines research to improve the technology with a massive public awareness campaign to educate the public on the dangers of distractions.
Such programs are a good start but a much more comprehensive education and training input is required. Traffic safety researchers will likely downplay the effects of education input based on 20-year-old studies into its effectiveness, but there really isn't much choice. In the long run, it all comes down to the driver to responsibly use whatever technology becomes available, and that requires education and training capable of producing such drivers, or at least enough of them to shift the balance of traffic culture.
As Professor Wilde points out in his book, Target Risk 2, regulation, technology, and even training will all fail to change crash risk if drivers have not been induced to either improve their perception of risk or somehow change the level of risk they are willing to accept.
One of the principal factors in driver distraction is " spare capacity", or energy and ability left over from the task of driving. A driver's perception of spare attention capacity at any given time will be very much related to that individual's knowledge, risk perception, and standard of driving skill. Drivers who are sloppy and don't know it, or worse are under the self-delusion that they are performing well, may be more ready to pick up a cell phone and engage in a conversation at an inappropriate time.
Placing the blame on the driver rather than on the cell phone is an idea that may be gathering some momentum. Just recently, Emile Therien, president of the Canada Safety Council, published an open letter to the Canadian Medical Association taking them to task on their unequivocal support for a ban on phone use while driving.
"There is no empirical evidence showing a clear causal relationship between cell phone use and collisions," Therien wrote ... " There appears to be much anecdotal evidence but short on supporting statistics."
Recent statistics from the NHTSA's Fatality Analysis Reporting System also cast some doubt on the bad rap cell phones are getting. With the proliferation of cell phone use in recent years (see Figure 1) and the huge increase in risk being attributed to their use in cars, one would expect a dramatic increase in traffic crashes. No such increase has shown up in the Fars statistics up to 1999. Preliminary figures for 2000 show only a slight increase in auto crash fatalities.
Growth in Cellular Phone Use (Millions of Subscribers)
Growth in cellular phone use as measured by millions of subscribers.
(source: Cellular Telecommunications Industry Association, 2000:
www.wow-com/industry/stats)
All of this does not exonerate cell phones as a driving hazard. But it does
indicate that legislation focused only on cell phones or on hand-held versions
may be more of a smoke screen than a solution to the driver distraction problem.
A strong enforcement effort to sharpen drivers' senses and awareness of the distraction issue, coupled with an equally strong training and education effort, may not only be more effective, but also will have many spin-off benefits. If implemented energetically enough, they could raise driving standards, improve the culture of the roadway significantly, improve efficiency of road use, and also allow drivers to use the many benefits of telematics without the side effects.
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