Sam Hall

Banning phones in cars not a safety solution: Ford

Ford says more effective vehicle software is the real answer to distraction-related accidents.


Banning phones in cars not a safety solution: Ford

Sam Hall

Car maker Ford believes that "hyper enforcement" of mobile phone laws in most Australian states could be contributing to more accidents.

Most law enforcement agencies in Australia have adopted a no-excuses approach to the use of mobile phones while driving, with heavy fines and demerit points in force.

However, the global leader for Ford's infotainment interface, Jeff Greenberg, has told Fairfax Media the onus should be on car makers to reduce mobile phone-related accidents with smarter technology. Greenberg said the current strategy of simply banning mobile phones had encouraged motorists to be more discrete.

 "You see this regularly with hyper enforcement – people who would normally hold their phone up high to text (gestures phone at eye level), which is still bad by the way, are now holding their phone down near their lap and completely taking their eyes off the road," he said.

"There can be unintended consequences to being overly vigilant. That's what our concern is: that whatever policies are adopted, that we really think through the unintended consequences to make sure we don't make the problem worse."

Ford delivered its assessment during a presentation to journalists in Detroit overnight, where it promised more effective in-car software. The car maker also discouraged blocking incoming text messages and phone calls as a solution to driver distraction.

"Here's the problem: if you block the in-car system from letting in texts, our concern is that it will give people a disincentive to pair their phone with the vehicle and use a safer interface," Greenberg said.

In most Australian states, it is illegal to use a mobile phone in the car unless it is sitting in an approved cradle, and even then, there are limitations on how it can be used.

Greenberg said the statistics on which those laws are partly based needed a re-think.

"If you look at a lot of stories about driver distraction, you'll believe there is an epidemic of crashes on the road related to driver distraction and other issues," he said.

"But if you look at the data, the numbers of crashes have been declining or stable for well over a decade, and over that same period of time the number of cellular subscriptions has increased exponentially.

"The 'epidemic' of crashes that we might expect, we don't really see in the data.

"That's puzzled a lot of people because we can do trials in the lab that show [slower reactions]. A lot of researchers have taken those results and essentially made dire predictions out on the road"

Ford is among a raft of car makers that has already developed voice-activated text message technology, though it has alternative and arguably more effective measures in the works.

"There's no point in buying frustrated by the fact that people want to bring their digital lives into their vehicles. They just do," Greenberg said

"Our job is to figure out how to make that compatible. It really doesn't do any good to be the scold to say 'you shouldn't do this', because people are motivated to do this because they have real perceived needs. How are we going to make those things more compatible with driving so they are not endangering others or themselves.

"Visual demand is really important: nothing supports the idea that you can look at your phone and stay safe.

"But if you are looking out of the windshield and your eyes are on the road, you generally will respond, almost sub-consciously, to events. We're in this transition period where we have a social education problem as much as a technology and design problem.

"Some of this is about getting people to adopt a more social behaviour"

Until such software becomes readily available, Greenberg agreed that anti-phone enforcement was probably the next best solution. Asked whether law enforcement agencies should still be writing out tickets for illegal phone use, he said: "That's a great policy question but Ford doesn't have a position on it.

"There have been communities that have tried to do hyper enforcement of anti-texting laws … but it's really hard to find a correlation between hyper enforcement and crash numbers falling. It's not to say that it can't work or it's the wrong approach, it's just that right now the data is pretty weak."

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