During this past summer, as auto manufacturers rolled out 2013 models, dozens of articles appeared describing their new “connected car” features — dashboard mounted screens synched to smart phones, console cradles for iPads, handwriting recognition, touch screens with Facebook and Twitter access, swipe and pinch capability for photos and maps, joysticks, rotating hand controls, voice-activated GPS, connections to The Cloud, and much more. The writers (Consumer Reports in particular) alternatively marveled at and bemoaned the “arms race” among car makers. They noted that the fast-paced introduction of this array of new and untested devices is essentially the auto industry experimenting on-the-fly with driver safety, because the National Highway Transportation Safety Administration has issued only voluntary guidelines on electronic devices, the dangers of these new devices are unknown, and no agency or organization has had time to evaluate these technologies from a safety standpoint, except to compare which ones have more steps and thus the potential of take the drivers’ hands or eyes off the road for longer periods.
Some of these new devices make texting look simple by comparison.
The distractions and resulting dangers of these new in-car features, and the issue of the federal and state governments trying to keep pace with them, is a separate subject, but let me pose this question to parents and adults supervising teen drivers: Can you effectively warn teens about the dangers of driving and texting, or using other electronic devices, when your car has the latest distracting technologies and you use them while your car is in motion?
I am increasingly worried about the side effects of these new dashboard technologies on teen driving (and hope you are also). One part of the concern, of course, is newly-licensed teens driving solo in a car with a complex and confusing array of electronics, but perhaps the bigger problem is how the presence of these electronics in the car can undermine the no-electronics message that parents and supervising adults should send to teens.
I don’t have a magic answer to this question beside the obvious one: Don’t use these electronic devices and capabilities when the car is in motion. In other words, if you must post a tweet, order movie tickets, review a restaurant, or update your Facebook page from your car, at least pull over to a safe stopping place first. The danger of course is not the technology or the car, but use of the two at the same time. The only way to have these technological capabilities in the car and also be a role model for your teens is to stop driving before you avail yourselves of the car’s electronic features.
