There is a rule that keeping a safe distance between you and other vehicles when driving, while not allowing yourself to be distracted, can save your life.
Today, car makers have offered more technological gadgetry to keep drivers off their phones, but those efforts have often been thwarted as drivers have been frustrated in getting it all to work properly. That makes them even more distracted.
Car fatalities in the first half of 2016 rose 10.4% to 17,775 according to the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration. That is a steep increase following an already surprising uptick in fatalities last year.
A recent study by State Farm Mutual Automobile Insurance Co. of 1,000 drivers a year shows that 55% of drivers reported talking on a hand-held cellphone, 33% reported sending a text message and 26% surfed the internet on their phones.
Drivers ages 18 to 29 reported those behaviors at a considerably higher rate: 64% reported talking on a hand-held phone; 58% reported sending a text and 48% browsed the internet while driving.
The problem is that hands-free devices don't eliminate cognitive distraction.
One of the pitfalls to voice-activated technology in cars is how error-prone it is: a cognitive distraction scale of 1 (simple driving) to 5 (driving while doing an impossibly complex mental task, such as balancing a checkbook). Results showed that listening to the radio (1.21) or an audio book (1.75) showed a small increase in cognitive distraction. Drivers that used speech-to-text technology (3.06 and up) had the largest cognitive distraction rating.
Today, there is so much information in the vehicle that it is very easy to become distracted while driving.