A study conducted by the Department of Transportation suggests that those who text while driving are 23 times more likely to be involved in an accident than those who drive undistracted. Despite that alarming figure, more than 37 percent of drivers polled admitted to occasionally texting while driving, while 18 percent said they do so regularly.
Judging by the observable evidence here on the streets of Los Angeles these days, I’d say those figures are woefully below reality – nearly every time I look around while in traffic it’s clear that most people are paying more attention to their mobile devices than the task of driving.
There’s little doubt that now more than ever we’re faced with a barrage of distractions behind the wheel, but while the social and legal repercussions of distracted driving are a fairly recent development, having your attention pulled away from the road while driving certainly is not.
Up until the mid-1950s, in-vehicle audio entertainment was largely a passive experience – that is, you listened to whatever was playing on the radio or you listened to the engine hum. But in 1956, Chrysler helped usher in the era of the active automotive listening experience with the introduction of the Highway HiFi.
Despite being conceptually ill-conceived from the get-go, the mobile record player allowed drivers to choose their music rather than having it chosen for them by a radio DJ. For obvious reasons the system was notoriously finicky, but it served as the prototype for the technological distractions that would increasingly draw drivers’ attention away from driving as the decades passed.
Throughout the rest of the 20th century, most of these distractions stayed largely confined to music selection, though the advent of the pager did provide some foreshadowing of a connected future in our cars. It wasn’t until cell phones became commonplace that the issue got out of hand. By the time smartphones became the norm less than a decade ago, the concept of ubiquitous connectivity to anything and anyone quickly became such a staple of the modern diet that both governments and automotive manufacturers found themselves at a loss for how to address the problem.
Read more of the original post in AutoBlog.
