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Smart Cars: Too Distracting?
Taco Cowboy writes "The vehicles we drive are getting smarter and smarter, as more and more gadgets are being crammed into them. But as those devices creep into the driving experience, they offer the driver an increasing number of displays to monitor. Thus, drivers are more distracted than ever. At the recent 'Connected Car Expo,' which was held in Los Angeles, panelists discussed how these smart car features can impair driving ability. For example, researchers led by Bruce Mehler at MIT revealed that drivers using voice command interfaces to control in-car navigation systems or USB-connected music devices can end up spending longer with their eyes off the road than those using conventional systems. You'd think being able to operate it by voice alone would be beneficial compared to older radio systems. (Tuning an older radio was used as a baseline task in these tests.) But according to Mehler, problems arise when the system needs clarification of what the driver wants, which often happens while they're trying to feed an address into a navigation system."
I dreamed of a custom computer system for my car. After just installing the video screen and audio system, I realized exactly that: you either drive or you manipulate the gadgetry. Let's put the intelligence where it belongs in a car: under the hood. Or go for a self driving car Google style.
One thing auto makers can do is bring back old-school dashboards with tactile buttons laid out in a distinct, logical way. My last two cars (a Peugeot and a Toyota) had this. Once you knew the layout of the dashboard, you could operate anything by feeling your way around, without ever taking your eyes off the road. My current car (a Volvo) has tactile buttons, but they are laid out in a grid, so it's harder to figure out what function it's for. The rental car I had the other day had a touch screen with the crappiest menu structure ever, operating anything on that required close attention and taking your eyes off the road. Not good.
If construction was anything like programming, an incorrectly fitted lock would bring down the entire building...
What's with all the anti-tech posts lately? We're supposed to be technology for technologies sake! Drive me to distraction, I want radar, a HUD, ten different kinds of TV, wireless internet, porn, inflatable sexbots
Let the mundanes worry about the safety crap.
If the system needs clarification and this requires the driver to inspect the screen, isn't that a problem with the implementation?
Clarification should be requested and should be given in voice alone.
Anything else defeats the purpose of the voice interface, doesn't it?
Some of the distraction I find in my "smart car" features are due to poor user experience--location of hard buttons, layouts on screen of information or touch buttons ,and quality of speech recognition. From the article:
It's the clarification that is the problem, not that it is voice activated (i.e. user experience). I find this with Siri when I'm driving (using built-in blue tooth to integrate it like a "smart" car function) when trying to listen to or respond to a text using voice. Approximately 1 out of 5 times Siri misunderstands a word and I have to change the message. This pulls my attention from driving and I usually give up and wait for a light to try again.
This is just one example. In dash systems need more work on user experience.
I love the sound of distortion in the morning -- webcommando
Many of these smart systems - such as entering a destination into the navigation system should be made to only work while the vehicle is stationary so as not to distract the driver. It makes sense to input the destination before starting the journey rather than 'on the go'.
Or how about just install a decent intelligent voice system/menu. Every car system I've ever used has been crap-tastic. "Call Dave", you said "Call Carl, calling carl...ring.. ring. ", Crap (press cancel), "Main menu, what would you like to do". (press cancel). "Calling Carl.. ring ring."..
This story should have been filed under "Duh!" or "Obviously" or "Didn't anyone stop and think about this first?"
Yes, I know how that is...you try to get it to plot a course to nearest Best-Buy while you're out in an unfamiliar neighborhood, but you have to check or it'll route you to the Best Buy headquarters 4 states away (or something innane). I wouldn't want the navigational system to start giving me directions without confirming that it had locked on to the address that I REALLY wanted to go to.
Best avoided.
Now that Larabee is a straight-laced by-the-book young go-getter. Promote him!
It all comes down to user interface design. A good interface will grab you attention only when it has something important to say. And it will avoid false warnings. A lousy interface *is* distracting. So is an interface that screws up, by grabbing your attention with incorrect or irrelevant information.
Just as an example: my current car has a very distracting audible and visual warning when it detects ice on the road. The problem is: this warning delivers 99% false positives (in fact, it seems to be triggered simply by the thermometer crossing a temperature threshold (3C), in either direction). So - yes - it is a dangerous distraction. However, if the manufacturer had actually gotten it right, it would have been very valuable.
As far as issuing commands, it is really the same thing: poor design. Is the interface reliable enough that you can trust it to do what you say? Does it give positive confirmation, or leave you wondering?
Enjoy life! This is not a dress rehearsal.
I've been looking at some of these in-car infotainment systems for the last couple of years thinking they'd be as bad as a smartphone.
I've always thought the push to the connected car would be more of a distraction, and not something I'd personally want to be operating while driving the car.
Cadillac recently was running a commercial saying essentially "our car has more buttons than yours" because of the digital console. And my first thoughts were "great, I'd never find anything".
I'm on the wrong side of 40, but for me I still like physical buttons in well known places that I don't need to look away from the road to operate. I have a sneaking suspicion that if you actually tested people, even the ones who believe they can operate this while driving would be proven wrong.
Humans are terrible at doing more than one thing at a time, despite what they like to believe. Adding more crap like this into a car is likely just going to make that worse.
Lost at C:>. Found at C.
If the driver doesn't have to drive the distractions are all you do.
smart cars, connected cars that is, are regular cars with more gadgets and gizmos. cars that check email, report weather, play pandora and such are a recent development of course, and not one i may add that many drivers care for. Some argue they exist as a marketing effort to spur millenials to purchase automobiles. As a millenial myself, and one with an automobile that gladly interfaces with my phone to play pandora radio, I can confirm the marketing effort is misplaced.
what executives and marketing C-levels dont understand is that boomers drove because it was still fun. gas was inexpensive, income was plentiful to afford a car and its upkeep, and the novelty of road trips was still something most americans found fascinating and entertaining. Gen Xers piled their kids into SUV's for the ego stroke and gas, while not expensive, was still relatively affordable but something else changed. Traffic was becoming universally abhorrent. the much adored culdesac street planning mandate from the sixties had snarled it for miles and government budgets began to resemble holocaust victims to such a degree that potholes capable of puncturing a tire became commonplace on most commutes. the Xers responded by buying larger SUV's like the H2 and turning up the 20 speaker stereo to drown out the din of the crumbling pavement on their way to the cube farm.
fast forward to the millenials of today. the economic collapse of 2008 has caused most governments to send their highway planning divisions packing as their budgets turn tits up. highways and byways now look more like Reuters photos of bombed out occupied zones. Gasoline is so expensive as to make a road trip a punchline, and traffic congestion models the zombie apocalypse flicks we've glued ourselves to for the last 5 years. whats worse is most of the millenials you see today are falling apart under the weight of their college loans and an average wage thats declined precipitously for 30 years under the guise of free market capitalism. "a new car" for most millenials is a used SUV from a gen-Xer who just had to sell it to make the mortgage gestapo leave them alone for another week. factoring its voraceous appetite for gas, its high mileage, and its mad-max driver, all we've scored is a time-bomb with eddie bauer seats. So lets address the C-levels now...you want to sell us a new, tiny car with lots of gizmos and great gas mileage for less than 20k and while we applaud the offering we still can barely afford, the roads still suck and the insurance is only slightly less expensive than our education loans. Thank you no, the idea smacks of stupidity.
I can take the bus for a fraction of the cost of owning a car. I dont care if it takes 45 minutes because I have a smart phone, or tablet. im connected to all my friends, including the one im going to meet up with for drinks and dinner. my phone will warn me about making my stop, and let me recharge the fare on my card while i leave the driving to a competent, qualified and much more seasoned bus driver. i dont have to pay insurance, worry about parking, fret about the cost of gas, or earn a ticket for speeding
to put it quite simply: stop trying to sell me a $30,000 iphone case with wheels.
Good people go to bed earlier.
I guess folks drive differently. Back in the 80s, when we wanted to find an address, we studied a map, memorized directions, thought about the route. We didn't try to read a map while driving. If people used GPS devices the same way then we wouldn't have any problems.
I do like to be able to start a trip with: "OK Google. Directions to Walt Disney World Epcot Center." This gives turn by turn guidance, but at the loss of really knowing which way you're heading. I.e., before you knew to head in northerly direction for a couple hundred miles. The turn by turn often doesn't add this sense of where you're going. Many folks don't know that a stadium is 4K to the east, just that they need to turn at 57th and drive until the GPS says turn right. Heck, we used to know which way streets, avenues, roads, boulevards and ways ran and what each meant. Some delineate cities, so one could be driving on NE 42nd Ave, cross a boulevard, and be on SW 16 Ave.
I have an Alfa Romeo 159 with a very "basic" (IMHO) blue & me system. Never used it as it requires you to memorize button combinations (or watch the screen, which is a no-no while driving), and with my English (with a ~strong Finnish accent) I've yet to get a single voice command to do what I want.
They concluded it's more distracting to give voice directions to a GPS system than it is to tune a radio by knob. Absolutely brilliant.
Bad conclusion in the OP. Drivers aren't necessarily more distracted by using new tech instead of old tech. The old tech example of a GPS navigation system should have been a fold-out map. I suspect that's a hell of a lot more distracting than a good turn-by-turn voice GPS. Or even a crappy one.
I recently drove a family member's "smart car" and tried to change the GPS destination in mid trip. The voice control kept misinterpreting the address, requiring me to choose from an onscreen menu full of wrong choices. Eventually I gave up on the voice control and tried to have a passenger enter it in manually while I continued to drive in the general direction of our destination. However, the car refused to take manual input while it was in motion despite the fact that the input was coming from a passenger. Even worse, once the car started moving, it erased all of the information that had been entered up until that point! That meant pulling over on a busy road or frantically typing it in at a red light while trying to get the address in before the light turned green. What should have been a simple process that could be done while the car was in motion turned out to a be a very frustrating and distracting experience because the car thought it was smart.
I don't know how you think we're going to get a good thread going when you've injected common sense right into the first post. ~Clumsy Segue~ But, how about that Google route selection process if it works out? Surely the advertisers will pay more than $.0005 for a drive by.
Happiness in intelligent people is the rarest thing I know.
Ernest Hemingway
You'd think being able to operate it by voice alone would be beneficial compared to older radio systems.
No I wouldn't. Voice control is somewhat like a command line interface. Potentially powerful if you are already proficient at it but inscrutable if you aren't already well trained. Furthermore there is no standardization between vehicles. Unlike buttons and steering wheels which are well standardized, voice interfaces have no such commonality between automakers. Each vendor rolls their own. This makes it basically impossible for me to just hop in any random car and do useful tasks. Furthermore few people are practiced in dictating to a computer. This requires you to compose your sentences before opening your mouth and not putting a lot of "ummm" and other pauses in the instruction. Additionally most voice interfaces require rather specific sequences of words to work which people are demonstrably bad at remembering to do.
I am of course ignoring the problems with accents, road noise, passenger noise, faulty software, bad interpretations of commands, and much more. Most voice interfaces are just bolt on additions to existing interfaces and they aren't well thought out, standardized and generally don't work very well.
From there:
And call it 'train'.
--> "The vehicles we drive are getting smarter and smarter, as more and more gadgets are being crammed into them."
The people who drive those vehicles, are becoming more reliant on gadgets and gizmos, to do the actual driving for them. Efficiently, reducing the drivers skill at driving.
Driving should take your whole attention, not some of it, or a little bit now and then.
If you want everyone else on the road to feel safe, you need to pull your finger out of your ass, and do the simple task of Driving.
Driving is a skill, a skill which you qualified for. Not some glorified peice of paper that allows you to forget everything you learnt in a few days, and then rely on tech to do the job for you.
My most recent vehicle purchase was a Toyota Tacoma. Because I needed a truck, and I wanted a stick shift. The truck has no optional features at all. The nice thing is, there is almost nothing that needs fiddling with. Simple gauges. A nice but easy to control radio. No funny collections of buttons. Not even electric door locks or window controls.
Also no cruise control, but it seems like a small price to pay for having a truck that is otherwise simple, reliable and doesn't suck fuel like a three year old with a big gulp.
Easy Online Role Playing Campaign Management
When I look at a smart car, the cube or any other freak'n weird shaped car, I look at that car...not the road. That could be scary when you think you could get an accident in a blink of an eye. Automobile makers should stick to standards. Seriously, if a cube or other messed up designed car comes beside me, its too ugly (or cute ??), I have too look... I can't stop it.
You know when someone is soo ugly and repulsive... YOU HAVE to look, you can't stop it
PC Gaming enthousiast that gives comments, opinions and reviews on Games. I'm just having fun with games while doing let
Which is why every GPS system I've ever used starts off with a disclaimer that tells you not to program the thing while you're driving. I travel for a living so the choice isn't whether I want a screen or not. It's whether the GPS is telling me directions out loud or I'm trying to read them off a piece of paper when I'm driving. And the rental car companies seem to think that the proper place for a GPS is somewhere down at the passenger's feet, so I bring my own and stick it on the windshield where it's in my peripheral vision. And I don't answer the phone if I'm driving.
If it's "smart" it should be smart enough not to pester you when you're trying to drive. It's not that we need smarter cars, we need smarter people.
===== Murphy's Law is recursive. =====
The worst is the lack of tactile inputs on the console because everyone wants to look 'futuristic!'. You can't just reach over and turn the radio off because you can't find the knob w/o looking. It's dangerous, and stupid. Put the physical dials back.
My car navigation system and "infotainment" system locks out certain seemingly random features while the car is in motion. For example, you can change Bluetooth devices while the car is in motion but you cannot sync a new device to the system. I did not know this. I found it incredibly distracting to try to figure out what the hell was wrong with the system while driving, and I wasn't even the one trying to use the system.
I'm with most of the commenters here. We have a small fleet of company cars (5). We recently upgraded them as our existing vehicles, despite being 2008 models, were around 350k miles. Anyway, I evaluated a Ford Focus and hated it. The whole darn thing was a computer, or so it seemed. I want my employees focusing on the ROAD, not the vehicle gadgets. We ended up going with 2013 Honda Civics after my boss got involved because he's friends with the salesman. Even those are very sucky. The menu interfaces are total crap, make no sense, even to the point of feeling counterintuitive. The salesman I worked with kept touting "it's got Bluetooth, bluetooth, bluetooth" until he was practically blue in the face. I told him "Bluetooth whatever. How do I turn off all this shit?" He looked dumbfounded.
I don't need some distracting info graphic to tell me a door is open. If a car is smart enough to tell me a tire is low, tell me WHICH DAMN TIRE. And if I want to turn on the radio, let me turn a little dial in the middle of the front console area, not some generic plus-minus button on a steering wheel that does different things every time I touch it. Otherwise I end up being frustrated with the stupid thing and not focusing on driving safely.
Its obvious that well placed 'real' controls are better. They also now cost more than an LCD screen, since the round dials have to send data to a computer, and have to be designed 5 years in advance, priced, installed, etc. The 2023 Yugo or equivalent will have steering wheel, gas and brakes, and an LCD to everything else. It will run some crap version of Android.
Screens will be the mark of the cheap car.
So I guess a HUD pinball game is out?
I come here for the love
..is a perfect example of selective perception.
CLI paste? paste.pr0.tips!
I was just thinking that this "smart technology" acts like a useful intelligence test: anyone who actually tries to use it while driving is clearly too stupid to be driving (or do anything else). We could improve the state of humanity quite a bit if we executed people who think they can drive while texting. The trouble is you can only use that trick once, after that they'd probably modify their behavior, and you'd have to think of some other way of identifying them in the next generation.
And the car obeys these commands in these voice stream! These voice enabled car controls are dangerous. They should be banned.
sed -e 's/Chuck Norris/Rajnikant/g' joke > fact
Cars are getting smarter. People are not.
... then the problem would be solved. Next, the only thing I'll want is for the car to wake me up when the destination has been reached.
A failed education system.
When politicians/media/social activists team up to constantly cry that the most expensive (and under performing) system just needs more money, then more money, then more money (the only solution), what hope is there?
After all, why replace that Edsel when what you really need to do is pay the driver more?
What is that you say?
You are stuck in a ditch and the wheels are flat?
Clearly you are not paying your driver enough, think of the children!
No brain, no pain.
True story: I bought a Camry with the Nav system. Tried to use voice commands, but it would not recognize my commands. Not sure why; too much car noise, not the correct phrases, what ever. Finally, in frustration, I said, very loudly: "Fuck You." The system responded, "Shutting Down," and turned itself off.
I always thought the idea of "driving" was to get from one place to another quicker than walking, running or riding a bike. A couple years ago I went into the local Nissan to look for a new vehicle, in particular the Altima. I walked away from it mainly because it appeared to resemble the cockpit of an airliner. It had more gadgets, information displays,etc that I decided driving one had two distinct disadvantages. One being the technological distractions. The other was why pay for all that crap when it's not only a dangerous distraction but also useless crap. Who needs to know what the humidity is, what the name of the song on the radio is (HD radio), getting text messages on a display, etc. etc. etc. I'm sure there are those out there who have an addiction to information" and couldn't live without their phones, video games, and every available tech device that can be had. But in a situation in which "safety" is of prime importance, the fewer distractions from the road the better. Too many drivers, especially younger drivers can no longer distinguish between that is safe and what is unnecessary entertainment. Believe it or not, there are situations in which complete attention to the primary task is the thing that matters. And in operating a motor vehicle the task is getting from one place to another safely. The number of traffic accidents due to distracted driving (and excessive speed) has grown substantially over the past decade. No one ever believes something will happen to them ... until it happens. Then it's too late. Common sense is something sadly lacking on the highways and all those tech gadgets only complicates things. Where does the self indulgence end and safety prevail?
"Those who can make you believe absurdities can make you commit atrocities." - Voltaire
Some years ago a friend of a friend was showing off his big, new, expensive car (I think a 700-series BMW). It had a joystick (or some such pointing device on the console) to control stuff on the display screen above the console. I've often wondered whether he has killed himself or others with his inattention to driving.
Come on, folks, be responsible adults and play with your toys anywhere but on the road.
Circle the wagons and fire inward. Entropy increases without bounds.