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Will Your Car Tell You To Put Down the Phone?
crimeandpunishment writes with this story from the AP: "We know it's dangerous to text while driving, or talk on a cell phone without using a hands-free device. What if our car knew it as well, and warned us about it? Our cars buzz and beep at us when our seatbelts aren't buckled ... now there are new applications in the works that could lead to a warning if we're driving with a cell phone in our hand."
Will Timothy post another article asking a vague, sensationalist question in the title? The answer may surprise you.
I thought it was still up in the air. Isn't the distraction being on a call?
What a waste of effort.
As a mechanic, I personally removed, disconnected or otherwise rendered useless dozens of "spoken word" feedback systems on cars. They have been around for many years, doing anything from reminding you that your seatbelt is unfastened, that you left your headlights on or to tell you your door is ajar (No it isn't! It's a door!).
I did so at the REQUEST OF THE VEHICLE OWNER.
Once the novelty wears off, spoken word feedback systems are annoying as a kid in the back seat repeatedly asking "Are we there yet?"
Law, or otherwise, such a system would be disabled as soon as the customers patience wore out, and there will never be a shortage of mechanics willing to do it for you if the price is right.
How about the headlights flash when the driver is using their cell phone so everyone else knows to dive out of the way?
"Have you ever thought about just turning off the TV, sitting down with your kids, and hitting them?"
The article only seems to mention smartphone apps, which doesn't seem optimal to me.
What about pressure monitors in the steering wheel that sound an alarm when they don't feel anything for more than, say, 30 seconds? Sure it might annoy those who prefer driving with one hand, but I suspect driving with two hands might be inherently safer anyway. Pressure monitors would also prevent you from fiddling with the radio for too long, and would work for people without smartphones - or people you lend your car to.
I'd rather you rationally disagree than irrationally agree.
I don't know what the current numbers are, but as of a couple of years ago the story was that the leading cause of distracted driver accidents was messing with the climate control and radio. So, yeah, let's go for saving lives and make it so you can't change the radio station, volume, or adjust the temperature. There will probably have to be congressional hearings on whether defogging of the windows is worth the risk involved in enabling it. I guess for safety's sake we should just make defogging be on all the time, just in case.
I personally think that the real problem is people not giving the driving the attention it requires. Whether it's your child (my wife was once rear-ended by a woman in a SUV because she was watching her child in the back seat -- did I mention we drive an impossible-to-miss yellow car), having a beverage, or adjusting the climate control... You need to pay attention to the weapon you are steering.
Sean
It's a social problem. No amount of gadgets is going to stop idiots from wanting to yammer away instead of paying attention; witness the mechanic in this discussion mentioning how many of those warning systems he disconnected.
The solution is brutally simple: three strikes, and you're out. Three tickets for driving while on the phone? Lose your license. Need your car for work? You should have thought of that and moved to the side of the road before dividing your attention between traffic and your important conversation.
Otherwise it is time for some good old vigilantism and just shoot them in the head. It's not as if they have any brains to splatter the inside of the car, so that keeps its resale value.
Mart
"I know I will be modded down for this": where's the option '-1, Asking for it'?
The people that ignore those laws and accept the danger inherent in being distracted from driving don't do so because they don't know better. No, I'm not shitting you!
You can forget to put a seatbelt on, although it is quite hard, and you can easily forget to turn the headlights off. But you cannot forget that you are texting while driving. So unless this system pulls the car over at the next save opportunity and doesn't let you start the engine until you've put the fricking phone away, this won't do squat.
Everyone else who commented that there are other, and worse, distractions, are correct. But people talking on the phone is something that is so easily fixed with just a few bucks, that I find it really annoying that people still keep holding onto their phones.
The interesting part around here (Switzerland)? Most of those people don't drive cheap, old Skodas or Renaults, no siree-bob. They're usually wearing business suits and driving new Audi, BMW, Mercedes or Lexus. Now if a single mother of three without a job is on her way to an interview and needs to contact her potential employer due to a detour, that I could understand. Fifty bucks, to her, are probably a lot of cash.
But this guy with the 1000$ suit and the 130'000$ car just does not get to use that excuse.
by not showing characters texting or making phone calls while driving... People see their favourite actor doing it so they think there's nothing wrong with it...
Donald 'Duck' Dunn: We had a band powerful enough to turn goat piss into gasoline.
After one major display of crap management (leaving the annual budget till the night before he had to present it to the group CEO and then blaming the CFO when the numbers didn't add up) the CFO announced that he now intended to wait till there was a really heavy storm on the M42 and the CEO was driving through it, then call him and tell him exactly what he thought of him. This would surely result in his getting flattened by a truck.
Unfortunately we all got other jobs and left before the opportunity arose, but I still think it would be a legal way to wipe out very aggressive people.
From scarped cliff or quarried stone she cries "A thousand types are gone, I care for nothing, no not one."
you could probably fit a hands free phone into the car for the same price?
What about talking with passengers? I think we should disallow passengers as well.
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
You see a problem, where I see none. Just tell your passengers that cell phone calls have to wait until the car is stopped again. Geeeez, I'd be happy if they just put a faraday cage into every passenger vehicle in the world. NOTHING is so damned important that it can't wait for you to leave the vehicle. Now, you'll come up with yet another imaginary scenario, in which you are trapped in a burning vehicle or something. I have news for you - I've pulled two people from burning vehicles in my day, and watched three other vehicles burn to the ground. The telephone didn't save ANY OF THEM! People passing by saved all of those people from burning to death.
In YOUR scenario, just open the door, and get out of the way of the train. Failure to do is justification for a Darwin award.
"Windows is like the faint smell of piss in a subway: it's there, and there's nothing you can do about it." - Charlie Br
I'm still a big proponent of the USD—the "universal safety device,"
It's a railroad spike sticking straight out of the steering wheel.
The way some people drive, they'd probably use it to hold their doughnuts and completely ignore the danger.
These posts express my own personal views, not those of my employer
Thank God for natural selection. ;)
"linux is just DOS with a UNIX like syntax" -- Galactic Dominator (944134)
Actually, steering wheels rarely kill you by hitting your head. What normally happens is that your chest strikes the wheel and experiences a deceleration injury. The way the heart is attached in the chest causes it to fold forward on the attachment where the subclavian artery meets the aorta. This causes a partial or complete tear of the aorta (aortic dissection/transection) If a partial tear is detected in the ER before it ruptures, the patient can occasionally be saved with emergency surgery. My general surgery chairman suggested that all auto manufacturers should mark steering wheels with a raised 'AORTAGRAM' mirror image on them. That way when the chest struck the wheel with sufficient force, it would remind the surgery residents to get an aortagram to rule out dissection by printing it right on the chest.
No need for crazy car-stuck-on-crossing scenarios...
- I'm driving, my passenger is on the phone, relaying landmarks to the person on the other side, and giving me directions as I drive. ("Ok, let me call you back after the next two turns and we've come to a safe stop because driver Runaway1956 doesn't want me to talk on the phone while he drives")
- I'm driving, we pass a big traffic jam, my passenger calls others that we know will be taking the same route, advising them to take another route ("Yeah sorry dude, we saw the traffic jam you got stuck in 15 mins before you left the office, but I had to wait until Runaway1956 stopped the car in order to call and let you know about it and of course by then you were already stuck")
Those are both completely legitimate scenarios of a passenger using the phone while the car is moving. You must be a bundle of joy, demanding that your passengers hand over their cellphones to be locked up until the car is at a safe stop.
It wouldn't work in this case. You can't drive until you're sixteen, and by then the idiots that would even get in a car like that would already have three kids.
Free Martian Whores!
Yeah, since all the studies show that talking on a hands-free cell phone is just as distracting as talking on a handheld cellphone that's a great idea. As for your idea, why don't we put a device in cars that detects if you're smoking pot, then it shuts down the car, locks the doors and calls the police.
I am sick and tired of people wanting to pass laws/implement solutions to problems that don't address the whole problem and are redundant (that is they make specific things illegal that are already covered under more general laws).
The truth is that all men having power ought to be mistrusted. James Madison
because only rednecks are bad drivers?
I'm just as likely to see a guy with a suit in a beemer fooling with his blackberry on I95 as I am to see a teeny-boper txting her bff.
Because the speed limit has nothing to do with safety and everything to do with revenue generation. They WANT you to speed. Thats why the speed limits are set so stupidly low. Many cities would be financially screwed without the income from speeding fines.
Autobahns in Germany are a great example that humans are quite capable of driving fast, safely.
If they REALLY wanted to increase road-safety in the US, they should make the driving test a lot tougher. Like at least as tough as it is in Europe.