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posted by martyb on Tuesday April 25 2017, @11:47AM   Printer-friendly
from the just-project-camera-views-onto-the-phone dept.

Zendrive makes technology that monitors how people are driving, so they took the data from 3 million drivers taking 570 million trips over 5.6 billion miles. They found that drivers used their phones for an average of three and a half minutes in 88 out of a hundred trips. From their study:

Everyday, that’s the equivalent of people behind the wheel talking or texting on 5.6-million car rides from our sample alone. When extrapolated for the entire U.S. driving population, the number goes up to roughly 600-million distracted trips a day….This finding is frightening, especially when you consider that a 2-second distraction is long enough to increase your likelihood of crashing by over 20-times. In other words, that’s equivalent to 105 opportunities an hour that you could nearly kill yourself and/or others.

One can download PDFs of the full report and the executive summary.

So that explains the steady stream of accidents despite the prevalence of anti-lock brakes, cameras, and accident avoidance features in passenger vehicles.


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  • (Score: 2) by archfeld on Tuesday April 25 2017, @07:12PM (2 children)

    by archfeld (4650) <treboreel@live.com> on Tuesday April 25 2017, @07:12PM (#499497) Journal

    How do they know you are driving or just a passenger in the car ? If my phone rings I hand it to my GF who answers it for me, thus neither points to my paying attention to the dang thing while driving. I do have it Bluetooth connected but find that that is as distracting as talking on it by hand so I avoid it as well.

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  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday April 26 2017, @08:57PM (1 child)

    by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday April 26 2017, @08:57PM (#500355)

    This is explained in TFA. The phone's sensors are used to determine (a) which side of the car the phone is on while travelling, and (b) which side of the car was used to exit. Supposedly this distinguishes between driver and passenger use.

    I see several problems with this approach.

    • GPS receivers in mobile phones typically are not highly accurate, with position errors as much as 5 metres possible even in ideal conditions. This could make the "side of the car while travelling" determination unreliable.
    • Most cars have passenger seats behind the driver. Such passengers will be indistinguishable from the driver as both measured conditions will be the same
    • "side of the car used to exit" will fail to distinguish between a driver using their own phone, and a passenger using the driver's phone.
    • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday April 27 2017, @07:53AM

      by Anonymous Coward on Thursday April 27 2017, @07:53AM (#500565)

      Its gonna be fascinating when we discover that the "new, shiny" phones ship with a security chip in them that alerts nearby police squad cars as to where the phone is being used in a car by the driver.... so the police can pull the driver over and get a $300 "contribution" for the city.

      Around where I live, I am quite confident the police force could easily fund their own way and probably several city councilmen's pet projects from automotive cellphone users.