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.
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.