Does anyone excercise any critical thinking skills with these headlines.
Driving drunk is far far far more distracting and deadly than using carplay. Every Uber and lyft driver out there are running mapping apps. Every recent car is shipping with these (my wife's sister listens to her playlist on drive to work with it and uses the map).
I've seen drunk drivers. Carplay has nothing on booze. In an overseas country an ex-pat wanted to drive me drunk back to where we were going to be working. Within 2 minutes I'd taken the keys and started driving myself because he was all over the road - we had to stop so he could throw up.
“A new study says driver reaction times using this tech were worse than motorists with alcohol or cannabis in their system.” Alcohol impacts more than reaction times, but a drunk driver can actually be paying attention to the road. On the the other hand someone looking at a screen at best can use peripheral vision which may not be enough. Touch screens at the bottom of the console are sadly common and unusually bad.
There are also varying levels of drunk. At the legal limit in some places, some people might show very little impairment at all. It's impossible to compare without saying what level of alcohol or cannabis they're talking about and for what person with what tolerance. People react differently and consume different amounts.
That’s a reasonable objection. The best data I could find is a ~2% increase in reaction time from a 10% increase in BAC. That suggests the range from legally drunk to unconscious is surprisingly narrow at least in terms of reaction times.
I did not really dig into it, but these devices might actually be strictly worse from a reaction standpoint. At least until the driver is loosing consciousness.
Actually, distracted driving and chemically impaired driving are two separate, orthogonal things. They exist independently of the other. A driver can be afflicted with either, both, or neither. One can be measured objectively (blood toxicity), the other cannot.
We might read reports indicating that X number of accidents were caused by distracted driving, but distracted driving is very hard to prove because it is easy to deny. The only statistics we have on it are either when a driver admits to not paying attention, or when there is overwhelming evidence for it, such as video.
I think we can easily assume that most at-fault drivers are not going to willfully admit to liability for causing an collision (especially if a party to the collision was hurt or killed), so it is safe to say that distracted driving is highly under-reported and underrated as a threat to road safety.
Massive difference between driving at 0.08 and driving while drunk enough that your body’s survival is dependent on it violently expelling alcohol from your system.
Just in case I wasn't obvious enough, the issue with drunk driving is around much more than distraction. Drunk driving involves failures of judgement and comprehension, drowsiness and vision impacts (literally will not see a pedestrian, will not register a red light, will fall asleep and have a head on collision). In addition, driving while drunk is a continues impact. If you drive an hour and a half home wasted, you are going to be at risk / causing risk that ENTIRE time.
The article headline and narrative tries to generate a "carplay worse than drunk driving" narrative when this is totally unsupported.
First, the slow reaction time was measured while the subjects were told to carry out tasks on carplay. These tasks were very specific. Like use the BBC iPlayer app (ugh!) to play a specific radio station. Find and play summer by Calvin Harris, send text messages etc. AND the setting were such that you could not use voice for some of this.
OK - summer is in a ton of song titles, so finding summer by calvin hariss is going to take some typing. Making users use a THIRD party app on carplay is another whole issue.
So yes - if you are a total idiot who disables voice control and is trying to type out complicated things on carplay and send messages using text - you are definitely going to be temporarily distracted. They presented little evidence that while in use fatalities increase because of this risk.
My own observation is that folks stopped at stoplights are HIGHLY distracted by both their phones and infotainment.
I use voice control which works well, and I only do three tasks - message wife I'm heading home, get directions to home (driving time and detours)and play podcasts. I say this while waiting to pull out of a parking garage. In terms of actual road risk this in minimal.
It’s true people don’t individually spend a lot of time per interaction, but in country soon to hit 100 million touch screen cars, that’s easily millions of hours of distracted driving per year.
For a general risk comparison it’s percentage of time people are drunk driving x drunk risk vs percentage of time they interact with these devices x device risk. So, figuring out had bad things are during use is a very important factor.
This study is a like micro-benchmark, and it makes sense to say that phone distracted driving can lead to a more acute loss of road awareness vs. being drunk, because your eyes might not even be on the road.
Driving drunk is far far far more distracting and deadly than using carplay. Every Uber and lyft driver out there are running mapping apps. Every recent car is shipping with these (my wife's sister listens to her playlist on drive to work with it and uses the map).
I've seen drunk drivers. Carplay has nothing on booze. In an overseas country an ex-pat wanted to drive me drunk back to where we were going to be working. Within 2 minutes I'd taken the keys and started driving myself because he was all over the road - we had to stop so he could throw up.