Peggy Riggs often warned her children, including 20-year-old son David, about the dangers of texting and driving. In turn, David encouraged his friends never to engage in the practice.
But that message did not get through to the driver who killed David Riggs until it was too late.
In 2013, David was heading home on his scooter in Minnesota when a teenager in a Honda Civic slammed into him. The teen was distracted by texting on his iPhone, according to a lawsuit filed by Craig Riggs, David’s father.
Craig Riggs holds Apple partly responsible for the tragedy. He sued the company this month, joining several others who have accused the Cupertino company in court of not installing technology that could prevent crashes caused by distracted drivers who lack the self-control to stop toying with their phones when they’re behind the wheel.
“Don’t put another family through this tragedy,” Riggs said in an interview. “We (wake) up every day missing our son. He’s got two brothers and has a niece now he is never going to see.”
The teenage driver who hit David Riggs was convicted of a misdemeanor. He did not respond to a request through his counselor for comment.
Analysts say Apple and other smartphone manufacturers could add technology that forcibly shuts off text messaging and other distracting features for drivers.
“There is no technical reason for why these things aren’t available at this point,” said Douglas Schmidt, a computer science professor at Vanderbilt University.
The manufacturers of the world’s top smartphone operating systems — Google and Apple — have features that prevent texting while driving, but it’s all optional. Besides airplane mode, which lets phone users disconnect from the cellular network, those with iPhones can dictate messages with the voice assistant Siri. Google has an app called Android Auto that lets users access maps and music and send messages with their voices. Experts say, however, that switching to voice commands does not solve the basic problem of distraction.
Both Apple and Google also have features that work with car displays, depending on the type of vehicle.
Distracted driving accounted for 10 percent of deaths caused by vehicle crashes in 2015, killing more than 3,000 people, according to the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration. That year, 391,000 people were injured through incidents involving distracted drivers. About eight percent of the people injured were in incidents that involved distraction by a cell phone, according to the administration.
Apple argues that it shouldn’t be held accountable for such crashes because they were caused by the distracted drivers misusing the technology, not a defect in the iPhone.
Read more of the original article at SF Chronicle.
