Car Infotainment Distractions Can Be Deadly

A study just released by the AAA Foundation for Traffic Safety shows that many 2017-model cars have infotainment features that can dangerously distract drivers.  Such distractions may be an important reason why, after declining for years, the annual car-fatality rate in the U. S. rose in 2016.

A report in the Washington Post describes how University of Utah researcher David Strayer led a study involving about 30 different 2017-model vehicles, ranging from a Ford F250s to a Tesla Model S.  Test subjects performed infotainment-feature-related  tasks while being monitored in various ways, and while also having to push a button every time a buzzer went off.  The delay between the buzzer and the button-pushing has been found to be a good indication of how distracted the driver is.  And while all this was going on, the subjects were driving down a low-traffic residential street, so the whole experiment was conducted during real-life driving.

The findings were not encouraging.  Some tasks, such as programming a navigation system, took an average of 40 seconds to do. Some vehicles were twice as demanding as others on average, based on a rating called the "overall demand," which included a variety of visual and cognitive tasks. 

The Post article quotes AAA chief executive Marshall Doney as saying that there are some things we have no business doing while behind the wheel.  The U. S. National Highway Traffic Safety Administration issued guidelines to automakers in 2012, asking them to block certain kinds of tasks involving infotainment systems unless the vehicle is parked.  But this call has gone largely unheeded.

It's interesting that the two vehicles with the most demanding electronics were the Honda Ridgeline, Honda's answer to US-brand luxury pickups, and the Volvo Inscription, another luxury passenger car.  Among the cars with the less-demanding systems were the Ford F-250 pickup and the Chevrolet Equinox.  It begins to look like this problem is a side effect of carmakers' attempts to load up their vehicles with many-featured electronics in the higher-end models especially.  The practice of piling on new software features, whether useful or not, is familiar to anyone who has used computers recently, which basically means everybody. 

It's one thing to sit at your desk and fume at Excel for burying a function you liked in an avalanche of newer features that you find largely useless.  But it's quite another thing to be driving on an LA freeway and trying to program your next real-estate appointment address into your GPS system at the same time.  As unwise as such an action is, people will do it, and get away with it too, at least for a while. 

The car manufacturers face a dilemma.  The IT features of a car are sometimes one of the main things that set a vehicle apart from the competition, so you can't expect the carmakers to stop trying to offer newer and more exciting infotainment features. 

But safety can get lost in the shuffle.  A car company can either install lock-out technology that just flat prevents the user from doing time-and-attention-intensive tasks while driving, or the firm can simply warn the consumer not to do such things while in motion.  Most companies have taken the latter course, with the excuse that if people do stupid things, well, we told them not to do that, so you can't blame us. 

In other areas of human endeavor, this approach has been tried and found wanting.  In the field of occupational health and safety, for example, workplaces in factories used to be extremely dangerous, with bare moving belts and moving parts everywhere.  Employees were simply warned to stay out of harm's way, but that wasn't always possible, and a lot of people got killed.  With the advent of workmens' compensation insurance and government supervisory agencies such as the Occupational Health and Safety Administration (OSHA), attitudes changed.  Now employers largely accept the responsibility for building in safety in their plants with shields, safety interlocks, and procedures that approach being foolproof in many cases.  No small part of this change is due to pressure brought to bear on miscreant manufacturers by insurance companies that got tired of paying out premiums to workers injured at needlessly hazardous plants.

It may be that auto insurance companies will need to play a role in making sure that infotainment features don't distract drivers to death.  When you realize that only a certain fraction of cars on the road are replaced with new ones every year, the suspicious upward trend in car fatalities becomes even more ominous.  One wonders what would happen if everybody like me (our newest car is a dozen years old) bought a new car and started trying to use the navigation system in an injudicious way. 

I don't know whether auto insurance rates vary much from vehicle to vehicle based on the model's safety record, but if a prospective buyer learned that the bells-and-whistles luxury model he was about to buy carried a huge insurance price tag, he might hesitate.  And the carmaker might do something about installing a gentle form of lockout, making it at least inconvenient to use some of the more demanding features while actually driving, which would make the insurance companies happier.

What is generally regarded as the first fatality in an autonomous (self-driving) vehicle—the crash that killed Joshua Brown—occurred allegedly while Brown had set his Tesla Model S in self-driving mode and was watching a video.  Admittedly, this is carrying distracted "driving" to the extreme, and was against the manufacturer's instructions.  But it shows that if a system allows the driver to do a stupid thing, somebody somewhere will eventually do it, and sometimes with dire results.

No movie, song, or GPS information is worth a person's life.  Carmakers need to realize that they are undermining a decades-long trend of improved car safety with the fancy gizmos they are shipping with each new vehicle.  If the average consumer isn't smart enough to avoid the new hazards, something else needs to be done.  Voluntary compliance with the 2012 NHTSA lockout guidelines would be nice.  But if history is any guide, automakers may need the encouragement of laws and regulations to implement new electronic infotainment features that are both attractive and safe to use.

Sources:  The Washington Post carried the article by Ashley Halsey III, "New cars have more distracting technology on board than ever before," in the October 3, 2017 online edition at https://www.washingtonpost.com/local/trafficandcommuting/new-cars-have-more-distracting-technology-on-board-than-ever-before/2017/10/04/8dc1e91e-a880-11e7-b3aa-c0e2e1d41e38_story.html.  I also referred to the original AAA report, "Visual and cognitive demands of using in-vehicle infotainment systems," which is available at https://www.aaafoundation.org/sites/default/files/Report_0.pdf.  My blog on the Joshua Brown accident appeared at http://engineeringethicsblog.blogspot.com/2016/07/self-driving-car-fatality-no-1-joshua.html on July 4, 2016.

Driving While Online: Does the NHTSA Know Best?

Many generations of technology ago—that is to say, in the 1950s—there was a popular TV show called "Father Knows Best," starring Robert Young as the father of four children whose escapades and misfortunes always wound up with the kids having a talk with Daddy.  When this happened, you knew the final commercial break was coming up and everything would be tied up neatly in a few more minutes. 

Real family life in the 1950s wasn't as easy to fix as "Father Knows Best" portrayed, and neither is the problem of drivers getting distracted by portable devices such as mobile phones, tablets, and so on.  Some observers are attributing the recent rise in per-mile auto fatalities in the U. S. mainly to electronic distractions, and the U. S. National Highway Transportation Safety Administration (NHTSA) has a Department of Transportation (DOT) that has recently issued a draft set of "guidelines" for makers of electronic devices and automotive manufacturers to follow in order to address this problem.

Everybody admits there's a real problem.  If you've driven more than a few hours in rush-hour traffic in any major city, you've probably seen people doing things at the wheel that you can't believe they're doing, like texting or studying something on the car seat, even watching videos.  The question is what to do about it.

Lots of municipalities have tried to attack the problem by passing a no-hand-held-device-use ordinance for drivers, but enforcing such a thing is not something that highway patrol officers get real excited about, and the consensus is that these ordinances have not made a big dent in the problem.

So on Nov. 23, the NHTSA announced a draft of guidelines for makers of portable devices:  mobile phones, tablets, GPS display systems, you name it.  Two of the new concepts that these guidelines, if followed, would introduce to the driving public are "pairing" and "Driver Mode."

Pairing refers to an electronic connection between the portable device and the vehicle's built-in displays and controls.  Historically, the automakers have taken the NHTSA's word seriously regarding its recommendations for how to incorporate safety features in cars.  Although guidelines do not have the force of law, they can become law if Congress so chooses, and so many safety features such as seat belts and air bags showed up in cars as options before they were made mandatory.  In an earlier set of guidelines, the NHTSA set up rules for built-in instrumentation that would meet the agency's non-distraction requirements.  This involves things like not requiring the driver to glance away from the road for more than two seconds at a time and so on.  Their reference maximum distraction is tuning a radio manually.  Anything that distracts you more than that is basically regarded as too much.

Assuming the car's built-in controls and displays meet that criterion, pairing basically ports the portable device's controls to the car's built-in controls, which automatically meet the distraction guidelines already.  Maybe this sounds easy to a regulatory agency, but to this engineer, it sounds like a compatibility nightmare.  For pairing to work most of the time, every portable device that anyone is likely to use in a car will have to be able to communicate seamlessly with the wide variety of in-car systems, and be able to use those systems as a remote command and control point instead of the device's own controls and displays.  Maybe it can be made to work, but at this time it looks like a long shot.  And even if it does, you have the problem of those die-hards (such as yours truly) who cling to cars that are ten or fifteen years old and will never catch up to the latest technology.  (Those folks tend not to buy the latest portable devices either, but there are exceptions.)

Recognizing that pairing won't solve all the problems, the next step is Driver Mode.  This is an operational mode that goes into effect when the device figures out it's in a moving car.  Most new portable gizmos these days have built-in GPS systems, and so they can detect vehicle motion without much of a problem, although there might be issues with things like rides on a ferry boat and so on.  But those situations are rare enough to be negligible.  Once in Driver Mode, the device will refuse to let the user do things like texting, watching videos, and other activities that distract more than the reference tuning-the-radio operation would. 

One can foresee problems with Driver Mode as well.  The NHTSA says the user should be able to switch it off, and if this option is available, my guess is a lot of people will choose to disable Driver Mode altogether.  A determined distracted driver is going to find a way to text while driving no matter what, but the hope is that with these new measures in place—pairing and Driver Mode, mainly—the number of incidents of distracted driving will decrease, and we will resume our march to fewer traffic accidents that has been going on historically for the last several decades.

While the NHTSA deserves credit for encouraging device makers and car manufacturers to consider these ideas, it is not clear that there is a lot of enthusiasm for them, especially on the part of the mobile phone makers.  Automakers selling big-ticket cars can more easily adapt their products to the different requirements of different legal regimes in the U. S. and, say, France.  But piling a bunch of complicated pairing features onto phones sold only in the U. S. may not be an easy thing to convince phone makers to do.  Unless the U. S. initiative proves so popular that it becomes a global phenomenon, my guess is that mobile phone makers will resist building in the pairing function, especially because they would have to deal with a bewildering variety of host controls and displays in cars that would be hard to keep up with.

This issue is just one aspect of the huge upheaval in the auto industry that IT is causing right now.  Integrating cars with the Internet and portable devices, and making sure in-car displays work without causing wrecks, are only two of the many challenges that car makers face in this area.  Ironically, the move toward driverless cars, if successful, would render all the driver-distraction precautions pointless anyway.  If the driver's not doing anything, it's fine to let him or her be distracted.  That's Google's hope, anyway, in developing driverless cars:  less time paying attention to driving means more time on the Internet. 

The hope is that all the confusion will eventually settle down, or at least we will make the transitions to highly IT-intensive cars that are still at least as safe to drive as the older ones, if not safer—until we don't have to drive them at all.  But it looks like right now, at least, car makers will have to aim simultaneously at two targets that are moving in opposite directions. 

Sources:  An article summarizing the NHTSA proposed guidelines appeared in the San Jose Mercury-News on Nov. 23, 2016 at http://www.mercurynews.com/2016/11/23/biz-break-feds-nudge-phone-makers-to-block-drivers-from-using-apps-behind-the-wheel/.  The NHTSA press release about the guidelines can be found at https://www.nhtsa.gov/About-NHTSA/Press-Releases/nhtsa_distraction_guidelines_phase2_11232016, and the press release has a link to a .pdf file of the draft guidelines.