Technology More a Distracted Driving Solution Than a Culprit, Conference Told
Technology is more a solution to distracted driving than the problem, consumer electronics and car industry executives told the Connected Car Conference at CE Week in New York Tuesday. But technology “can be both a problem in the car as well as a solution to the problems behind the wheel,” said David Zuby, chief research officer at the Insurance Institute for Highway Safety.
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There are certain “bad things” about the connected car, said CEA CEO Gary Shapiro. “Obviously people are dying” while using certain devices because they are “distracted from driving,” he said, calling it a “very big, important issue.” In response, the CE industry has attempted to educate consumers about the correct ways to use its products safely, he said. CEA has supported laws that barred texting while driving, he said. But CEA is “not as excited about” other proposed solutions that would impose government regulations on how CE devices are used in cars, he said.
Distracted driving, however, is only a “temporary problem” because “we're moving towards the future of a driverless car,” said Shapiro. The “self-driving vehicle” will be “very positively disruptive” and “peoples’ lives by the thousands will be saved,” he said.
"The connected car is here and here to stay,” and “that is a positive thing,” said George Lynch, Pandora vice president-Automotive Business Development. Fifty percent of all radio listening is done in the vehicle, so the connected car is important to his company, he said. Connected systems used in a vehicle must be simple to use or drivers won’t use them, he said. Changes are also “not going to happen overnight” because there’s a three- to five-year manufacturing cycle in the auto industry, he said. “If you don’t catch the cycle right, you're going to wait three years until the new technology” becomes available in a car, he said.
Driver distraction has always been around and it will continue, said Lynch, saying AM/FM radios didn’t initially have preset buttons in cars and tuning stations had long been a distraction for drivers.
About 20 percent of fatal car crashes involve driver distraction, said Zuby. But technology isn’t always part of the cause and the number is consistent with data from 1979, when there were no cellphones, he said. “People do weird things” while driving, including shaving and applying makeup, said Shapiro. Crying babies are also a distraction to drivers, he said.
The connected car is part of the “golden age of safety,” said Gloria Bergquist, vice president-public affairs at the Auto Alliance of Automobile Manufacturers. The connected car not only has safety benefits, but it also is making drivers’ time spent in cars more “productive,” she said. “It is a connected world” and the “genie is out of the bottle” on the connected car, she said. Ninety percent of consumers keep their smartphones with them in their cars, either in their hands, their laps or the cup holders, she said, citing the findings of a poll by the Auto Alliance. Seventy percent of smartphone owners sleep with their devices and that’s “not going to be changing anytime soon,” she said. The Auto Alliance polls 5,000 people a month, she said.
But there’s still “a lot of room for improvement” on driver distraction, said Brian Radloff, director-strategic accounts, automotive, at voice interface provider Nuance Communications. The car and CE industries need to “come together” and “build information management systems” that make information available to drivers when it’s safe to do so, he said. There’s “a lot of research that still needs to be done” and there must be more “simulation environments” used to test device interfaces within the vehicle, he said.
There’s a safety risk whenever drivers are using their hands to control devices when they should have their hands on the steering wheel and their eyes on the road, said Kevin Vincent, chief counsel of the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA). But technology can be used to solve issues including drunken driving and not using seat belts, he said. NHTSA doesn’t want to get in the way of technology being used to help safety, he said. But it has proposed voluntary guidelines in the past for devices used inside a vehicle and it’s still working on “phase two” of those guidelines, this time dealing with handheld devices that are brought into vehicles, he said. Those phase two guidelines will be released sometime this year, he said.
Consumers now expect to have connected car technology in their vehicles, said Ted Cardenas, Pioneer vice president-marketing, car electronics. “Everybody’s got a smartphone, everybody’s got a tablet and everybody’s connected” all the time, he said. Apple’s CarPlay connectivity, which a growing number of aftermarket CE device makers are adding to their products, is just another example of connected car features that consumers want in their cars, he said. Pioneer is adding CarPlay to five of the devices it bowed at CES via a coming update this summer, he said. There is a “huge opportunity” for the aftermarket CE market when it comes to connected car solutions because the average car on the road is 11 years old and the aftermarket is still where consumer go when they want to add a feature that they want, he said.