Programming Blog

In 2008, an estimated 6,000 people were killed and 500,000 were injured due to cell-phone related car accidents. “Distracted driving is an epidemic and it seems to be getting worse every year,” said U.S. Transportation Secretary Ray Lahood. So, when Ford Motors decided to add Twitter to the arsenal of distracted driving devices, questions of safety where a salient concern.

2010’s Consumer Electronics Show assembled industry and government experts to answer questions and raise issues surrounding Ford’s keynote announcement that it would be launching social media-ready cars in 2010. The first and most obvious question participants had was:

Is using social media while driving safe?

“No,” says Peter Appel, the Obama Administration’s point man on transportation research. Appel’s curt, absolutist language is indicative of just how seriously the government is taking distracted driving. Given the Administration’s sobering stance, the next logical question is:

Is it Possible to Stop Distracting Technologies?

---

Commercial products are already in the pipeline, which can disable cell phones while driving. For instance, Taser, the makers of non-lethal electrocution law-enforcement weapons, has developed an almost disturbingly powerful app that lets parents control their teen’s cell phones. Among its many features is the ability to disable calling and texting within the proximity of the car.

While it may not be constitutionally viable for the government to restrict certain behaviors (Appel tells Mashable that the Obama Administration has no interest in regulating what people can and can’t do while driving), Ford Motors has chosen to disable some tasks while the car is in motion. For instance, the central on-board dash disables complex tasks, such as watching music videos, until the car is parked. Ford tells Mashable that the policy to make paternalistic decisions for drivers was done independent of the government, leaving hope that the private sector can, to some degree, self-regulate safety.

Wheel Controls and Voice Activation

---

The unwavering mantra of Ford’s CES keynote address was “hands on the wheel, eyes on the road.” Ford contends that steering wheel controls and voice commands facilitate more efficient task completion than fumbling with a cell phone.

Below is a video from Ford’s keynote comparing the completion time of steering wheel control vs. a handheld MP3 player. The first part of the video shows a music change task with an MP3 player, the second part is done with Sync technology. Notice the lane position metric in the bottom left-hand portion of the screen.

Here’s a comparison chart (courtesy of Ford) showing the measured eyes off the road time difference for other tasks.

Ford contends that Sync can substantially reduce task completion time and thus minimize distracted driving.

Will Drivers Actually Use a Steering Wheel to Tweet?

---

Ford believes that voice and steering wheel-controlled social applications could bring social media to the driver’s seat in a safe and effective way. Below is a video of the voice-activated Twitter Sync app in action I shot while at CES.

It’s too early to tell if car manufactures can design a sleek enough user interface to compete with smart phones. Further, safety measures that prohibit people from actually reading tweets while driving may reduce usefulness of these applications to the point that they are no longer worth using on the road. The type of social media user obsessive enough to listen to tweets while driving may become too frustrated by the slowness of voice-to-text. After all, how many tweets can the average Twitter user scan through in the time it takes to voice one tweet?

The Ford representative in the video was more optimistic about usefulness of Ford’s technology for social applications like Pandora, a popular, customizable Internet radio application. Pandora has relatively few options (genre selection, “thumbs up” preference tagging), all of which can be seamlessly done with existing wheel controls and voice commands without negatively impacting the user experience.

Conclusion

---

Ultimately, distracted driving is inevitable, and both governments and the automobile industry must face it head on. Ford’s new technology, which at least appears to make social media and multimedia safer while driving, is a step in the right direction, but it will take more than technology to beget safe drivers. If it is possible, it will likely require a combination of legislation, social awareness, and technological innovation to create a safe marriage between social media and driving.

More social media resources from Mashable:

---

- 3 Ways Educators Are Embracing Social Technology
– 7 Lessons for Better Networking with Social Media
– Zen and the Art of Twitter: 4 Tips for Productive Tweeting
– How Social Media Has Changed Us
– 5 Tips for Building Lasting Online Friendships
– 4 Steps for Effective Online Networking

Images courtesy of iStockphoto, jhorrocks, bakalusha

Tags: autos, driving, ford, safety, social media, tech, texting, twitter

Go to Source