Windows Phone Takes a Stab at Safer Driving
Windows Phone Takes a Stab at Safer Driving by Michael F. Finneran
It’s been another busy week in the smartphone market. HTC came out with its One Max model featuring a 5.9-inch display and a fingerprint reader. These large format phablets are catching on with some buyers (not this one), and unlike the fingerprint reader on Apple’s iPhone 5s, HTC’s will launch one of three applications based on which finger you use to unlock it. Up north, Blackberry published an open letter in newspapers around the world seeking to reassure customers and carriers that the company is “here to stay” despite massive layoffs and plummeting sales. In the meantime, co-founders Mike Lazaridis and Douglas Fregin also said that they are considering a bid to buy the company – they might do better to follow Jim Balsillie’s lead and look for a hockey team.
The one piece of news that caught my attention was buried in the announcement regarding the Windows Phone 8 Update 3 that was made public October 14. Most of the focus was on support for 5- and 6-inch screens providing an opening into the phablet space, and now with six Live Tiles on the screen rather than four. The interesting element was the inclusion of a Driving Mode feature. Driving Mode will automatically silence incoming calls and texts; you also can configure the phone to automatically send a reply to say that you’re driving. You can even set it to start automatically when your phone connects to a Bluetooth device, like the Bluetooth interface in your car.
I am a long-standing opponent to using cell phones when driving. I don’t do it, and if I do answer, the call will be shorter than 15 seconds while I tell the caller when I’ll get back to them. The thing is, you really can’t maintain sufficient focus on driving if you’re engaged in a detailed conversation. The idea that hands-free operation solves the problem is nothing more than a fig leaf. Here in New York where we have a hands-free law, drivers regularly put the phone on speaker and hold it in front of their face rather than next to their ear. I’m sure that helps a lot!
The thing is, the danger is due to inattention, not the fact that you’ve got one hand off the wheel. Let’s face it, how many people actually signal turns anyway, much less put on the blinker 100-feet before the intersection like you’re supposed to? The term that has been coined to describe the problem is inattention blindness or selective attention. If you haven’t seen it, check out this classic YouTube video by Daniel Simon.
The bottom line is that the more intense the conversation, the less attention you’ll be paying to what’s going on around you, and business calls tend to get intense. Some like to think that talking on a cell phone while driving is no different than talking to another person in the car or listening to the radio, but nothing can be farther from the truth. In an excellent article on Impactful Distraction in Science News, sociologist Clifford Nass of Stanford University talks about cognitive load, and says, “When we communicate with a person we can’t see, we create a mental image of them.” That task occupies more available brainpower than passively listening to a radio that requires no interaction – except singing along.
For a more scientific proof, the article references a study conducted at Complutense University of Madrid and published in Transportation Research Part F in 2002. The researchers had drivers make phone calls using hands-free phones and used special vision-tracking devices to see where their eyes went. What they found was that conversations requiring extra thought or concentration diminished drivers’ extent of visual scanning (i.e. “tunnel vision”), speed control, detection of warning flashers, and decision-making ability. So keep chatting while you run over that kid who just chased his ball into the street.
Distracted driving is not just a public safety issue, it’s also a potential corporate liability. I run into this regularly with clients developing mobility policies who want to know if requiring employees to use hands-free devices or other “safe driving” measures on company calls relieves the company of any liability should the employee be involved in an accident. Unfortunately, the answer is “absolutely not!” As my friend telecom attorney Martha Buyer likes to say, “This is an issue juries can understand.”
In 2010, National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) said that on-the-job crashes cost employers over $24,500 per crash, $150,000 per injury, and $3.6 million per fatality. Rest assured, when the case goes to court, the attorneys for the victims will be going for the deepest pockets they can find. Jury awards for a single fatality have gone above $20 million, not to mention the fact that the company can be left with one ugly PR problem.
If for no other reason than “enlightened self interest,” I always point out this potential liability to any client I’m assisting in developing a mobility policy. To date, not a single one has put an outright ban on cell phone use while driving. The normal response is something along the lines of, “The field sales people will run us out of town on a rail!”
So in light of all this, it’s nice to see that Microsoft is at least doing something to make the world a little safer. It has taken years for the wireless industry to get behind the move to ban texting while driving, which is stupid enough to qualify for a spot on MTV’s Ridiculousness; of course, if people were still using SMS which had a better profit margin than IP texting, the carriers would probably have dragged their feet.
I am not so foolish to believe that an all-out campaign to ban all cell phone use while driving is in the cards even here in New York where Mayor and “Nanny-in-Chief” Mike Bloomberg has become public health advocate and supreme enemy of super-size sodas. Also, the idea of automatically disabling cell phones when someone gets into a car is highly problematic as it impairs the user’s ability to dial 911 in an emergency. The fact that Microsoft has acknowledged that distracted driving is a serious problem should be commended, but it will still take a good while before society comes to grips with what are acceptable activities while controlling a 2000-pound missile hurtling down the road.