At Daniel McGehee’s informed opinion, it’s just too late to put the genie back in the bottle. People drive an average of 29 miles a day in the US. They have phones. They will want to use their phones while driving. The question is, how can they do this safely, free from the distraction of the distraction-filled devices in their pockets?
For more than a decade, automakers’ response has been to stuff their cars with sprawling and sometimes complex infotainment systems on giant touchscreens that span across dashboards — in the case of one Mercedes-Benz model, more than 4.5 feet wide. While using it while driving “isn’t necessarily optimal,” says McGehee, director of the National Advanced Driving Simulator at the University of Iowa, it probably beats the alternative of people looking at tiny widgets on a car’s screen while driving. pick up cell phone.
Because these manufacturers have struggled to build functional software in the past, tech giants like Apple and Google have offered their own in-car integrations, CarPlay and Android Auto. So McGehee believes the principle probably also applies to Apple’s recently announced next-generation CarPlay, an infotainment escalation that will infiltrate the entire dashboard. There will be widgets. There will be choices for instrument clusters. Rather than simply mirroring an iPhone, CarPlay lets drivers switch radio stations and also displays vehicle data such as fuel level and speed. The company says it will announce partnerships with automakers by the end of next year.
Embracing in-car infotainment has elicited understandable responses. For years, safety advocates and researchers have been warning that the systems designed by both automakers and technology companies cannot keep drivers on the road. “The state of infotainment systems is that the driver has far too many things at their fingertips,” said David Strayer, a cognitive neuroscientist at the University of Utah who studies how the brain multitasks. “They create a garden of distraction for the driver.”
But it is also difficult to determine how much technology such as telephones and in-car infotainment systems contribute to unsafe driving. More than 3,000 people died in distraction-related accidents in 2020, according to the U.S. Department of Transportation, accounting for 8.1 percent of the fatal traffic accidents that year. Young drivers are more likely to be injured or killed in distraction-related accidents. But data on accident causes is generally “pretty coarse,” said William Horrey, the technical director of the AAA Foundation for Traffic Safety.
On-the-ground reports that do draw attention to distractions tend to focus on cell phones rather than in-car systems. And because so many automakers have different infotainment systems, with variations in menus and font size and button placement, even studies connecting participants’ cars with sensors and cameras have struggled to gather enough data to come to solid conclusions about how often screen-related distractions occur. leads to injury or death.
Still, researchers broadly agree on some of the worst design violations: forcing drivers to scroll or navigate long menus. The font on the screen is not big enough, so drivers have to spend more time seeing. Designing buttons that are too small, especially those that are not close to the steering wheel. (The farther a button is, the bigger the target should be.) Allowing vehicles to update dashboards on their own, leaving drivers lost on their next ride.
