In- auto technology are we being vended a false sense of security?

 

Our new buses come equipped with technology to read out textbook dispatches and let us use voice commands to make phone calls. Allocating attention to other tasks, can lead to our driving performance suffering and putting lives at threat.

 

The sheltered football star David Beckham entered a six-month driving ban after being mugged using his hand-held phone while driving. Unfortunately, Beckham isn't alone in supposedly allowing that time spent driving can also be usefully spent doing commodity differently.

 

But it isn’t just phones that can distract us while driving. Decreasingly, vehicles are compere-installed with technology that promises to ameliorate our lives and let us get that little bit more productivity out of our trip – be it digital sidekicks similar as Alexa or parking help systems. Numerous similar technologies are designed to keep us safe, but could they actually be dangerous – giving us a false print that our attention can be concentrated away? We've been chancing out.

Interestingly, utmost motorists feel to support the view that hand-held phone use is parlous, as it involves the motorist potentially taking their hands off the wheel. They also know it's illegal. The problem is that numerous motorists still continue to use their phones “ handsfree” behind the wheel because the law allows them to do so furnishing their hands are on the wheel. This implies it's a safe volition.

 

 But exploration easily shows that the driving geste and the crash threat of a phone-using motorist (whether that's hand-held or hands-free) is analogous to, and occasionally worse than, that of a drunk motorist. Our exploration has shown that phone use carries a significant cost to a motorist’s attention, making them far more prone to crimes, including failures in visual perception and incapability to descry and reply to hazards.

The real problem with phone use is the cognitive demands it places on a driver. However, our performance in both tasks suffers, If we try to allocate attention to another engaging task at the same time as driving.

Infotainment and safety

 

We're continually introducing further technologies to our vehicles. Motorists can now ask Alexa or Google adjunct a question, hear textbook dispatches read audibly by the vehicle, and use voice commands to initiate phone calls. All of this tech also works on the supposition that if it’s only your voice you're using, there are no safety counteraccusations.

 

 This is problematic as a wealth of exploration demonstrates that this kind of “ infotainment” technology actually causes some of the distraction that contributes to motorist error.

 Driving is complex and presto- paced, taking the processing of information from multiple inputs, yet frequently we're made to feel as though it's easy. But demands on attention when driving vary from nanosecond to nanosecond, meaning any focus allocated away is a precious resource that may not be available when the motorist faces an unanticipated event. Harkening to music, still, is lower of a problem as it isn’t interactive in the same way as other technologies.

 

 As failure at the wheel can have ruinous consequences, it's unsurprising that the idea of technological results to alleviate motorist error is also getting more common. It’s likely that Beckham’s Bentley has (at the veritably least) ABS, parking- help, reversing detectors, and lane-keeping technology. Similar technology has led to a trend in advertising that encourages a belief that our ultramodern buses can enough much drive themselves.

The European Congress has blazoned from 2022, all new buses should be fitted with intelligent speed backing (ISA), along with other safety features designed to warn motorists to distraction and doziness.

 

But will these technologies increase safety, or could they encourage further distraction? Easily, motorists aren't great at esteeming speed limits, so it may feel like a good idea to aim to make the choice of whether to speed or not out of our hands. To make commodity “ techno-repairable” however, you need to reduce complex driving geste to incongruities of “ safe” and “ dangerous”. Technology needs to be told which geste triggers which response in simple, double terms as it can not ( yet) handle ifs and buts and environment. But the threat is that this may encourage us to believe that 30mph, for illustration, is innately safe, indeed when 20mph, or indeed less, might have been the safer choice. This is the commodity we'd like to explore further in our exploration.

 

 Likewise, tech that warns a motorist if they're showing signs of doziness or intoxication, and premises their auto for them if they don’t respond rightly, could actually encourage motorists to suppose that they can drive when unfit because the auto will step by and save them. Technology can be retailed as perfecting safety, but safety requires understanding – not incongruities.

We know that a motorist with their hands unwillingly at the “ ten and two-position” can nevertheless be dangerously distracted. Yet we're continually introducing technologies to our vehicles that are abstracting. Sorely, we can’t be sure that manufacturers are motivated by dealing safety, as opposed to an interpretation of safety that sells.

 

 At a time when we're no longer seeing time-on-time reductions in the number of people being killed or seriously injured on our roads, it seems clear that commodity radical requirements to be done to get motorists’ concentrate back onto the driving task itself – and to challenge the perception that getting from A to B is a good occasion to indulge in catching up on a bit of C

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