NHTSA’s Distracted Driving Guidelines Actually Matter a Lot

It requires little effort to blow off the "distracted driving" guidelines for automakers, published by NHTSA this week—and many have done exactly that. Sure, the government's safety agency lays out a compelling case and ample data on the dangers of driving while talking on the phone and text messaging. And yes, there are endless details on how automakers ought to develop infotainment systems and phone integration for their cars, offering the methods for testing driver distraction during their use. But all are, as the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration itself emphasizes, just suggestions. Compliance by car companies is voluntary. To conclude, however, that they are meaningless—or even without teeth—would be completely wrong. First Things First: Talking, Texting, Surfing While Driving is Extraordinarily Dangerous There exists now a solid body of rigorously conducted university-level research on the dangers inherent to cell- and smartphone use while driving. Below are the findings of several different studies from the past several years. Many are surprising—even counterintuitive—but the data is there and research is continuing. Number four on our list, for example, was the finding of a Texas A&M study just released just week. (1) Using a cell phone while driving significantly reduces reaction times, perhaps to a level comparable to having a BAC of .08. (2) Talking on the phone affects drivers differently than listening to the radio, a book on tape, or conversing with someone else in the car. (3) Talking through a hands-free device might not be meaningfully safer than holding the phone. (4)  Voice-to-text systems are just as distracting as is traditional texting. (5) Distraction can mean blindness to objects in their driving environment—traffic lights, road signs, other vehicles changing lanes, items in the street, and pedestrians. Why NHTSA Couldn't Enact Real Regulations for Automakers—Yet While your state capitol decides whether you can use your smartphone for GPS navigation, NHTSA sets rules for car companies: how they design cars, what safety features are necessary, and how vehicle safety is evaluated. But to add enforceable rules to the thousands in the Federal Motor Vehicles Safety Standards, testing standards need to be "repeatable and reproducible." That's just not possible for most of these distracted driving guidelines yet, Richard Wilhelm, a prominent automotive attorney at Dickinson Wright told us. Part of the problem, he explained, is that the in-dash (and smartphone) technology is changing too rapidly to establish a set of rigid guidelines for how these systems are evaluated. This doesn't mean, however, that we'll never reach a point where what are now "voluntary" guidelines become actual rules. NHTSA will be monitoring automakers' [voluntary] compliance with the guidelines, collecting more data, and conducting further studies. It's entirely foreseeable you may have to kiss goodbye to your Mini's Twitter interface—at least when you're not parked. Speaking on the condition that we keep them anonymous, employees at a number of automakers told us their companies are expecting NHTSA to establish actual strict rules in two or three years. Why these Voluntary Guidelines Really Aren't Voluntary For now, automakers face no penalty for ignoring NHTSA's 281-page tome entitled Guidelines for Reducing In-Vehicle Distractions. Officially, they can address the issue however they like, and are free to develop their own procedures for determining the safeness of a nav system or a Facebook-feed reader. With that said, though, many car companies already comply with nearly all of the NHTSA guidelines. Not coincidentally, they nearly mirror guidelines in place for a decade by the automakers' industry association, the Alliance for Automobile Manufacturers. A few of NHTSA's rules are more stringent. First Drive: 2014 Jaguar F-type Instrumented Test: 2014 Mazda 6 i Sport Instrumented Test: 2013 Audi A8L 4.0T But the real teeth come in courtrooms and the threat of them. We're in the midst of another legal gold rush, with mega-lawsuits extracting millions from automakers for cars that lost resale value and fuel economy that didn't live up to advertisements and EPA ratings. Should—or, perhaps, when—a group of people sue a company because their cars' text-message readers distracted them enough to crash, compliance with NHTSA's guidelines will very much be a part of the picture. "You know of the NHTSA guidelines for evaluating vehicle distractions, right, Mr. Engineer? And even though they're voluntary, you didn't follow them, did you? Because you think you know better than NHTSA, right?" Compliance (or lack of it) even with voluntary industry standards comes up all the time in product liability lawsuits. We'll also see pressure from public announcements. Just as a vehicle with a low crash-test rating can still be sold, even if NHTSA can't stop a carmaker from selling a car with distracting toys, it can make that information public. The agency is going to monitor what car companies are doing, and we may well reach a day when a press release titled "NHTSA Finds Four Automakers Ignoring Distraction Guidelines" prompts a thousand news stories. from Car and Driver Blog http://blog.caranddriver.com

Put the internet to work for you. via Personal Recipe 647533