AT&T Warns Teens: Don’t Text and Drive
The growing popularity of text messaging — especially by young adults — has had a really negative impact on vehicular safety, as more and more people text while behind the wheel.
Earlier this year, it became illegal for bus drivers or truck drivers to text while driving, but the problem only continues to grow among drivers in general. AT&T is joining in the fight to educate people about the dangers of texting while operating a vehicle by launching a new texting and driving campaign with the slogan: “Txting & Driving: It Can Wait.”
The U.S.’s second largest wireless carrier has created a website that has resources and safety guides for all drivers, but it’s clear that the focus is on teens.
In addition to offering a pledge and contract for teens and parents, AT&T has a Facebook page dedicated to the cause, and even a widget you can insert into your own website to show your support.
What do you think about the campaign? How do you think wireless companies, parents and the government should attack this problem? Let us know!
Tags: att, safety, texting, texting while driving
Volvo S60 features pedestrian tracking, ten years too late for Lizzie Grubman
[Thanks, Drew S.]
Continue reading Volvo S60 features pedestrian tracking, ten years too late for Lizzie Grubman
Volvo S60 features pedestrian tracking, ten years too late for Lizzie Grubman originally appeared on Engadget on Wed, 10 Feb 2010 13:49:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.
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Can Using Social Media Behind the Wheel Ever Be Safe?
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
Reviews: Mashable, Pandora, Twitter, iStockphoto
Tags: autos, driving, ford, safety, social media, tech, texting, twitter
US government launches Distraction.gov, wants to scare you straight (video)
European countries may have long ago banished the use of cellphones while driving to the dark side of the law, but many of the United States persist in allowing their citizens to talk while driving. One reason for their reluctance may be that outlawing something that has become second nature to most people would be both unproductive and tough to enforce. So what do you do? The natural alternative to forcing people to drive attentively is educating them of the reasons why. Never mind the fact that we all kinda, sorta know the risks we undertake while operating a Droid and a Dodge concurrently. The newly minted Distraction.gov is chockfull of scaremongering statistics, topped by a truly epic video which we’ve handily stashed for you just after the break. Go get it while it’s hot.
Continue reading US government launches Distraction.gov, wants to scare you straight (video)
US government launches Distraction.gov, wants to scare you straight (video) originally appeared on Engadget on Fri, 01 Jan 2010 16:02:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.
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Dell Mini 9 suffers meltdown, scorches owner’s floor
While this isn’t quite bad enough to merit a “dude, your Dell is on fire” part deux, it’s a pretty frightful example of the hazard modern batteries (of any kind) represent. A Consumerist reader reports that her year-old Dell Mini 9 recently popped, “hissed and sizzled” as it filled her room with smoke and tarnished her fine wooden flooring. Judging from the fallout pictures (available after the break), we’d say the culprit for this Mini fire (oh!) was the battery pack, which again reminds us how badly we need to improve our energy storage technologies. Dell has been quick to remedy the situation with an upgraded laptop being sent over to the young lady and the melted machine packed off to the labs for inspection, though there’s no mention of compensation for the owner’s scarred floor and mind.
Continue reading Dell Mini 9 suffers meltdown, scorches owner’s floor
Dell Mini 9 suffers meltdown, scorches owner’s floor originally appeared on Engadget on Wed, 23 Dec 2009 06:52:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.
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Art Lebedev’s Transparentius eliminates opacity, improves road safety
Kudos where it’s due: not many design houses use tanks in their illustrations of a new road safety concept. Transparentius, as with most good ideas, is remarkably simple — you jack a camera onto the front of a truck, or lorry as they’re known in some places, and then project that image onto the back of your hulking transporter. The effect of this is to render the truck figuratively transparent for the driver behind, who is enriched with a lot more information about what lies on the road ahead. No word on how the rear projection is achieved or how sunlight glare is overcome, but knowing Art Lebedev, you can bet both challenges are solved in the most unaffordable fashion possible. Anyhow, now that you’ve got the idea, we’re throwing this one over to you dear mod-loving friends — can you build this without remortgaging the house?
[Thanks, Dennis]
Art Lebedev’s Transparentius eliminates opacity, improves road safety originally appeared on Engadget on Tue, 22 Dec 2009 06:07:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.
LED traffic lights don’t melt snow, do cause accidents
A number of cold weather American states are reporting their dismay at finding out that LED traffic lights are so energy efficient that they do not produce enough excess heat to dissipate any snow that covers them. It turns out, perhaps in an homage to bad engineering everywhere, that the inefficiency of incandescent light bulbs was previously relied upon to keep traffic signals unimpeded. The new LEDs do not achieve the same effect, which has resulted in a few accidents and even a death being blamed on obstructed traffic lights. Feel free to apply palm to face now. It’s not all gloomy, though, as the majority of people are said to treat a dysfunctional traffic light as a stop sign (how clever of them), and a tech fix is being worked on as we speak.
LED traffic lights don’t melt snow, do cause accidents originally appeared on Engadget on Thu, 17 Dec 2009 09:16:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.