This may be one of the more fiercely debated issues in the concept cars of the future. How much can the driver handle? "The race to funnel information, communication and entertainment into vehicles has accelerated as the costs of hardware such as Global Positioning System receivers and display screens have plummeted," says a recent article in the Wall Street Journal.
Drivers website has been following this race very closely over the past several years. We have watched the pieces come together and also followed the discussion about driver distraction. What's shaping up, or should be shaping up, is a major debate over the future of human autonomy, privacy and safety.
Can we humans be trusted to manage such a difficult task as driving, or should we be heavily managed and restricted by laws, social engineering, or perhaps even sidelined completely by emerging technologies that take us humans out of the picture and let the vehicles drive themselves?
Trusting humans
The distraction issue is not new. There was an intense debate back in the 1930s about whether radios should be allowed on the dash. When mobile 'cell' phones began to be widely available in the 1990s, the controversy exploded. In August 2000, the U.S. National Highway traffic Safety Administration sponsored an internet conference on the topic.
This past week the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation addressed the issue in an episode of MarketPlace, and others have joined the fray this past month with special programs devoted to the issue.
In short, there is no lack of media attention to the driver distraction issue.
Typically, media stories about the dangers of driver distraction will feature two prominent elements: a tragic story resulting from a gross example of distraction; and a demonstration of how distracting technologies such as phone texting and navigation systems can be.
These stories have a familiar shape to members of the traffic safety and driver education community. For a long time, it's been obvious to experts on driving that one of the biggest problems plaguing drivers is distraction. This has been a problem long before mobile phones and navigation systems. If there are no technology distractions there's that other, perhaps even more dangerous distraction -- absentmindedness.
For the most part, driving doesn't take all of our attention. That's just a fact. Boredom and absent-mindedness have played a huge role in the horrendous traffic fatality toll that has dogged our enjoyment of the automobile over the years. The people who design those public service ads saying "give driving 100% of your attention" do understand all of this. They just hope you'll try a little harder.
Before there was texting there were drivers who drove off the road into trees, drove full tilt into cars stopped on the shoulder, drove right through red lights without even seeing them. In one case that made headlines in Canada some years back, a driver plowed into a group of brightly dressed cyclists, on a straight flat road, on a bright day, in the middle of the morning! Police determined no drugs or alcohol were involved. Friends of the cyclists wanted him charged with murder.
Back in the 1970's a major study of road crash causes determined "looking but not seeing" as the most commonly identified specific crash cause. Apparently, a driver could actually look right at something but not actually take in critical information about speed and direction.
Obviously, the process of seeking out the information you need to drive is not all that straightforward.
Divided attention
Driving is a task that depends on attention dividing. It's multi-tasking by nature. And there will always be distractions as long as humans drive cars.
The question is, how do drivers learn how long they can take their eyes off the road ahead? How do they learn what to look at and what not to look at? How do we drivers train our vision instincts?
It would seem to be a no-brainer that vision training would help. However, there are limitations there. Over the past few decades the value of training and education has been heavily discounted by researchers and governments just about everywhere. Today's training is more about getting a license than dealing with the problems that beset experienced drivers.
One of the scariest things about automobiles and us human operators is that, at any particular time, we do not have full control over where our eyes focus and what kind of attention we pay to particular things that are going on around us. Training is one factor in that process, experience is another. Since training typically ends at licensing, the rest of the process is handled by life's great instruction academy -- the school of hard knocks.
As one traffic safety expert pointed out some years ago, after licensing, drivers build two sets of habits -- good ones they pick up by dint of experience, and bad ones they think are good until they are caught out. Phoning and texting would come under the latter heading. The more you get away with it the more complacent you become.
Drivers, laws, and technologies
Over the past decade the role of 'telematics' in driving has accelerated. The transfer of wireless information over phones, internet, WiFi, is bringing to the car all the connectivity of home computing.
For the manufacturers of the technologies the early problems were in the arena of marketing as much as tech development. Customers didn't understand them, or didn't want to pay. There were complex partnership to be considered and the whole issue of which tech goodies to package with the vehicle.
Now costs are coming down and the technologies are more sophisticated and easier to use. As the Wall Street Journal article mentioned above points out, the flood gates are opening up - potentially, that is.
What happens next depends on public reaction, politics, the wiles and skills of the technology developers, and the power of marketing. There are probably some extremists who want everything off the dash, maybe even the radio, and others who want everything on.
How the safety issue plays out may depend as much on politics as the realities of safety and driver distraction. Can drivers be trusted? How much? What kind of laws and restrictions?
These will all play a role in the future of driving and the automobile. Hopefully, informed public discussion will play a major role in the outcomes.
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