FEATURE: The history of distracted driving and the future of tech in the car

When you hear the phrase “distracted driving” you almost certainly associate it with a cellphone, but we’ve been distracted in the car ever since automakers installed AM radios back in the 1930’s. Since then we’ve seen the birth of FM radio, 8-track, cassette players, CD players, MP3 players, and now the dashboards of cars look more like airplane cockpits with the number of features you can have. A small number of Chrysler vehicles even had record players! The Highway HiFi a turntable mounted right in the dashboard, was installed in select models between 1956 and 1959. It wasn’t a big hit, as the units were a maintenance nightmare and you could only get a few records in the right size.

Cigarette lighters, cup holders, climate control systems and GPS are also features that by their very nature distract us from the road, but one driving expert says they’re not nearly as bad as the cellphone. “We’ve gotten used to the radio … so we’ve learned to listen to the radio and use it to our best advantage” according to Steve Wallace, who operates Wallace Driving School and has been teaching people to drive for 40 years. “The key … is to make sure that people are concentrating on what they’re supposed to be doing. So if you give people something to do, if they’re going to look in the rear view mirror every time they brake, if they’re going to have a pattern at the intersection … they become much less distracted by any of these devices.”

Driving classes have modules specifically about distracted driving to show the impact to impressionable teenagers. “We go through a process of distracting them, and they go through a process of matching up, it’s called ‘Distracted Match’, and it’s a kit that you get for classroom instruction.” But Wallace says the urge to pick up a ringing phone is sometimes insurmountable. “We had a guy on the driver’s test a couple of years ago, his phone rings, he picks it up … and he talks on the phone while he’s on his driver’s test, puts it down, then continues the test. The examiner brought him back and of course failed him, but it was a natural tendency for this person to do that.”

Local tech expert John Biehler says the in-car technology explosion began in the age of radar detectors and some of the earlier, more advanced stereo systems with “…features and functionality, or dazzling lights and those types of things that could be considered distracting as a way of enhancing things like music selection. As we got into more smartphones, it really blew up. Definitely the in-car navigation systems coming down in price. Years ago, when we had the TomTom and the Garmin set-top boxes that would just stick to your windshield, those started adding more and more functionality before we really had the pervasive smartphones that we have today … and it’s only gotten worse and worse and worse, with smartphones getting bigger and bigger, it’s way too easy to have that screen mounted within eye view while you’re driving.”

Biehler also thinks that driving safety apps, like ones that automatically text people back to let them know you’re driving, will slowly fade away in favour of integrated systems like Apple Car Play and Android Auto, because drivers don’t want to stop texting, they just want to do it safely. “That’s definitely been the reason why things like Siri and Google’s voice-recognition systems have gotten so much better, as well as being able to properly read back messages so you can focus on driving. People will always want to access this stuff, and these apps are getting better and better in taking advantage of where they’re being utilized. So when you’re in the car, they behave a little differently. Because your smartphone is a smartphone, it can actually change its behaviour depending on how it’s connected, so you don’t have to have a separate app for doing one task when you’re not in your car versus a different app for when you are in your car.”

Biehler says some of the apps being approved by Google and Apple to be used in vehicles really do take advantage of that connectivity aspect to the car itself. And what does Biehler do in his car? “I keep wanting to upgrade to some sort of third party display that supports Car Play or Android Auto, but the prices are still quite high for what you get, and I may end up upgrading my car before that’s even an issue. Right now I have a pretty big phone that I mount in the middle of my dash, and it’s actually bigger than some of the in-car displays I’ve seen. I use Google Maps a lot, I use Siri a lot more. I used to hate Siri but it’s gotten so much better now, so I use that and Bluetooth audio.”

However, Steve Wallace cautions against allowing the technology to lull you into thinking you’re more in control of the car than you are. “There is no discernable difference in the death and crash rate of people using handheld or hands free. The fact is that the phone is that distracting.” BC currently has the highest penalty for a first-time distracted driving offence, but Wallace says it still needs to be higher, and he thinks the public education campaign needs to be as serious as it was for drunk driving 30 years ago. “If this is the single greatest cause of death on the road right now, it’s time we react with a sledgehammer.”

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