Phoning while behind the wheel is often blamed for road deaths, says Colin Barras, but is keeping connected in a car always dangerous?
It’s perhaps one of the most flouted rules of the road. Despite bans in many places, more than half of US drivers admit to using a mobile phone at least some of the time while driving, according to a report last week.
So what does the evidence say about the risks? And could a new generation of connected cars make phoning on the road safer?
As long as there have been hand-held phones, there has probably been a desire to use the devices in cars – and as smartphones and tablet computers become more powerful and versatile, that desire is only getting stronger.
“It’s quite a unique situation,” says Stewart Birrell of the Warwick Manufacturing Group at the University of Warwick in Coventry, UK. “Most innovation is first developed by manufacturers and then people can use it. But it’s users who are pushing to be able to use smartphones in cars, and manufacturers are following.”
Perhaps those manufacturers shouldn’t: one estimate suggests 6% of all crashes on roads in the US occur because drivers are distracted by their mobile phones. This equates to about 12,000 serious injuries and 2,600 deaths on US roads each year.
A solution might be to equip cars with technology that can prevent crashes even if the driver is distracted.
Some cars now come with technology that allows drivers to pay less attention to the road – and perhaps more attention to their phones. Adaptive cruise control, for instance, uses radar to automatically adjust the speed of a car so that it matches the speed of the vehicle in front. Automatic lane control systems promise to take care of steering, using the feedback from cameras trained on the road ahead to keep the driver safely in their lane. And collision-avoidance systems rely on lasers and cameras to sense emergencies and avoid the risk of a serious accident.
Perhaps understandably, these devices have their critics. “Manufacturers seem to be aiming to produce hi-tech and hence ultimately fallible solutions to problems that wouldn't exist in the first place if people took proper responsibility for their moral obligations as drivers – to concentrate on what they are doing,” says Graham Hole at the University of Sussex in Brighton, UK.
There is certainly a wealth of evidence that using a mobile phone increases a driver’s risk of being involved in a crash – whether those phones are handheld or hands-free. Some studies suggest either type of phone quadruples the risk of crashing. Other studies, however, disagree. A year ago, for instance, social scientists concluded that using a mobile phone need not raise the risk of a crash if the driver makes the call late at night when traffic is thin. Another study last year went even further, suggesting that phone conversations can lessen the risk of a crash if a driver is fatigued.
“Driving can be boring, and if you’re driving late at night when there’s little traffic around you might get tired and switch off,” says Birrell. “If you give people a secondary task at these times of cognitive underload it might improve their driving performance – although the secondary task has to be sensible.”