Imagine if you had a car, whose dashboard acted just like a smart phone — checking tweets, messages, searching for restaurants, etc. Sounds pretty tempting, doesn’t it? Well, having such a dashboard brings to light two facts. One, that customers want it. And two, that car makers want to supply it. But how safe is it?
Debate rages on
If you believe the car companies, they think having dashboard-phones is a good idea. Not only will they boost revenue and attract buyers, the screens will also make driving less dangerous — well, at least better than fumbling with mobile phones.
But the increasingly elaborate screens seem to have set off a debate — how much technology is appropriate in a car? “I think they (the screens) raise serious public safety questions,” Joe Simitian, the former California lawmaker who spearheaded the state’s laws on phone use while driving, voiced his concern. “From a legislative standpoint, this is going to be something legislators struggle with for years to come.”
“You can’t be looking at a screen and at the road, at the same time,” said David Strayer, a professor of cognition and neural science at the University of Utah, who has written several studies on distracted driving. The screens, he says, “Are enabling activities that take your eyes off the road for longer than most safety advocates would say is safe.” His research shows that reading average text message — a function some of the screens support — takes four seconds, far longer than what he considers safe.
Irresistible for buyers
But for automakers and customers, the souped-up screens are proving irresistible. In an Audi A3, for example, drivers who sync their phones with their cars can check for mentions of themselves on Twitter and see those tweets on their dashboards. They can even upload photos taken on smart phones and request mapping to the place the photo was taken. Text messages pop up on the dashboard, in addition to being read out loud. “If you don’t provide something useful, people will just use their smartphones, and we all know that’s the biggest driver distraction there is,” said Mark Dahncke, a spokesman for Audi.
So far, the dashboard technology hasn’t really found its way into the ‘must-have-technology-my-car list of buyers, although manufacturers predict that it will feature in the next three to five years.
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