US regulators want to limit what people can do with their phones whilst driving. Sounds good to us! The US’s National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) have published their first safety guidleines regarding driver distraction which specifically target things that you connect to your car such as music players or better yet, smartphones.
The guidelines, which are part of a second phase of NHTSA proposals are for the cars console. These were back in 2013 and they suggested that you got to touch a button to call someone rather than dialling a number. Which sounds really safe to us!
At the heart of it it is all about making things ‘dumber’ and ‘easier’ to use while behind the wheel to reduce the amount of distractions that we have while driving. The NHTSA suggest a thing called “Driver Mode” which are like Apple’s CarPlay and the Android Auto. Where a selection of apps or tasks are easily attainable through easy to use big button interface. For example Drivers could see maps that are on their smartphone in short chunks of texts that can be easily read from a quick single eye glance from the road, but with more reliance on voice activated commands than physical touch.
Sounds good right. But the NHTSA’s “Drive Mode” system, wants to go one step futher and prevent certain features being used whilst driving. Which makes sense as you shouldn’t be manually entering text whilst driving or adjusting maps to see where you are. The NHTSA suggests that it would be better with their “Driver Mode” to do things through “Driver Mode” where the user wouldn’t have to turn it on and it is automatically switched on once you enter the car and it the car is in motion.
However all this sounds really cool and safe and would go a long way to prevent accidents, these guidelines are exactly that guidelines. Car makers don’t have to implement the technology into their cars. Not only that some tech doesn’t play well with others like Google Maps doesn’t work with CarPlay so a driver has to mount thier phone on the dash.
While it is important to make our drives safer, it still requires users to use self will not to get distracted and it does seem quite nanny state like to control what we can and can’t do with the stuff we own when in certain situations.
Will there be ways to prevent us from having more and more accidents, only time will tell, but this seems like a cool way to do it.
To hear the guys chatting about this please click here!
