Are you pretending people can't be distracted by choosing which song on spotify they want on android auto or car play?

distracted != tapping on your phone

Having a handless call in your car arguing about what to buy at groceries in your return trip from work with your significant other can be a dangerous distraction. Sure your eyes may be steered towards the road but your focus might be somewhere else and make you miss important stuff. Or telling the kids at the back to shut up and stop fighting.

I wish people would be more aware of that and wouldn't think they can just drive their car as if it was an extension to their living room.

No, of course you can be distracted operating the infotainment systems in your car, but directly manipulating your phone is much worse.

As a Carplay user I plead guilty to having been distracted by it in the past while driving, though I think it generally does a good job of it.

I could see people still being distracted scrolling through podcasts.

As the user replying to you said, there are voice commands. But I get what you are saying — not everyone knows about or trusts the fidelity of the voice software.

I wonder though if Apple and Android could remove non-voice functionality from their platforms thereby forcing users to use voice to navigate certain features like song selection.

Or perhaps changing songs mechanically can only be done when the velocity of the vehicle is zero.

I suspect people will be pissed off about those changes, but I think if I were CEO and had the authority, I would sleep better at night knowing I am doing everything to try to curtail pedestrian deaths because of my product.

And for some reason voice commands for podcasts have never been figured out.

"Play a different episode"

"Sorry, I have no idea how to do that"

Them: Be scared. AI is really smart and is going to take your job.

In fairness, I think there's reasons they're intentionally making it different to select what you want to play... but WTF is up with that, too.

My favorite is, some time around last summer, whenever I told Google to play the latest episode of Wait Wait Don’t Tell Me, it invariably plays some random unrelated (not even a similar name) music on Spotify.

I have no idea if this would work with Google, but I've noticed with Alexa it seems less likely to play a song when I ask for a non-song if I tell it to "listen" to the non-song rather than to "play" the non-song.

People are making snaps (I see ZILLIONS of stories made by car drivers), scrolling through TikTok, watching YouTube, sending texts, not just making calls.

There is a very simple technological solution to this - disable screens on phones in motion faster than xmph - but people are violently against this minor inconvenience for passengers and mass transport commuters for the same reason drivers can't put their phone down, so this problem will likely continue to get worse, especially as the younger generation becomes drivers.

We're so far gone that we now bolt garbage touchscreens into the middle of the car to distract drivers by default. The same thing that would get you a fine if caught is OK as long as it comes with the car.

Or is it? My car has a warning when it starts up that basically says that the factory installed touchscreen is to dangerous to use while driving and I'm liable for any distractions it causes me.

I am more or less in favor of this - but how do you solve for the problem that not everyone in the car is actually driving and may not want to be prevented from using their phone when riding as a passenger? If we can solve that one, it sounds like a no-brainer to me.

Maybe insurance companies can give discounts for installing their app that "locks" your phone while in motion.

If you're the passenger and want to unlock the phone...take a selfie? More psychology than tech here.

This wouldn't affect mass transit commuters since they wouldn't have a car insurance app. The insurance company could sell it as a way to get additional savings...I recently did something similar with safeco that was way more invasive.

Not perfect, but if Im Geico; I have a team mulling over something similar as an easy way to drop accident rates...?

I don't think you can in an intelligent way. One simple solution would be to only disable the screen if the phone is connected to car Bluetooth - but this would just result in most phone addicts not connecting their phone to the car.

That's why people are against it - the idea of passengers returning to the pre-smartphone era while traveling seems to be considered by most people totally outrageous and and unacceptable price to pay for lowering the accident rate, which has climbed almost solely to due smartphones.

Even that is stupid. A passenger should be able to add a stop to the navigation while the car is in motion.

I can do this with voice on my iPhone. Worst case scenario you pull over and do it.

> most people totally outrageous and and unacceptable

What's totally outrageous and unacceptable is the idea that my phone can tell me when I'm allowed to use it or not, based on arbitrary rules set up by tech clowns who are not in my current situation and do not know why I might need it.

It's frankly asinine to suggest I should not be able to look up a map of a city while riding a bus because someone else might be texting and driving.

Most people would find this outrageous because it is.

Every phone has a camera. Basically require the forward facing camera to be on if using the phone above X mph. From there, we should have sufficient computer vision processing to identify if someone is driving, and refuse to allow any use until given to a passenger or pulled over.

Additionally we could require all phones to support the SafeDriving protocol, and there be dash mounted camera in all cars with appropriate computer vision to identify unsafe phone use while driving lock ALL phones within the car or slow car to the curb.

As someone who used to commute every day by public transport for >1 hour for years, I sincerely wish someone would disable the screen on all your devices, permanently.

I've seen plenty of delusional shit on HN when it comes to solving societal problems, and this is easily in top ten.

There is nothing worse than when techies try to solve social problems with tech solutions.

How about we try and figure out how to train people to be better drivers, and more responsible adults in general, rather than continuing to let people off the hook and treating the whole of society like children that need their phones taken away by big daddy tech?

I hate this sort of petty tech dictatorship stuff.

Enough of the population simply doesn't have the self control to resist the dopamine IV drip that comes from phone use.

I sympathize with your sentiments, but the social problem was created by tech solutions in the first place.

> How about we try and figure out how to train people to be better drivers, and more responsible adults in general,

You can't. You may improve things at the margins but it will do nothing to the overall trend. Smartphone use is addictive. Consider that decades of cradle-to-grave anti-smoking education with huge amounts of funding combined with immediate financial disincentives (high taxes) succeeded only in lowering the smoking rate to 12%. People are not ideal rational actors.

And smartphones are an even more intractable problem, because we're suggesting educating people out of smartphone addiction, but only out of not using it while they drive. It is simply not possible to educate a sizable proportion of the population out of this. Even strict police enforcement will not make a big difference.

That’s an excellent set of points. For analogy, people used to smoke on their cars (another very addictive thing), but smoking was not nearly as distracting as smartphone use.

Likewise, listening to the radio is habit forming (some people don’t seem to be able to sit in quiet in their car). But it’s also not nearly as distracting - just turn the radio on and maybe try to change the station.

Ultimately the tech industry needs to first be held responsible and liable for the problems it creates.

> social problem was created by tech solutions in the first place.

No it wasn't, people have driven with distractions since cars were invented. Eating in the car, arguing with passengers, wrangling children, looking at paper maps, doing their makeup. etc.

The problem is people

And yet, right in the title, pedestrian deaths are soaring.

Yes, distractions have always existed.

I don’t think it’s controversial to say that smartphone addiction increased the scale and severity of the problem by orders of magnitude.

No, it's not controversial at all, we're in complete agreement.

Tech has taken a lot of social problems and poured gas on them, it's not just this one.

In some of those cases it may make sense to place limits on the tech to try and curb that.

And yeah, if there is a tech way to solve this without negatively impacting passengers or commuters, it might be worth exploring.

But my point still stands. This is a social problem, it was not created by smartphones and it therefore cannot be fixed by changing smartphones. At best you can try and mitigate it.

And an effort to mitigate it will never fly if it has to affect every other person that may not even ever drive themselves.

Will CarPlay read Twitter to me?

Except when CarPlay(can’t speak to Android) doesn't work as intended, requiring you to still pick up your phone after you tried to accomplish something on CarPlay.

I’m on the road about 3,000 miles/mo and CarPlay not functioning properly happens so often that I don’t even really notice anymore how often I have to pick up my phone.

The correct thing to do in that case is to stop before picking up your phone and if it happens to much stop using it altogether and switch to a more reliable system.

And not driving at all for the entire day if you slept poorly the night before. And pulling over into a parking lot before attending to your toddler’s question. Follow at a safe distance. Slow down in rain. Completely stop at stop signs. Strictly follow speed limits in residential areas. And a thousand other things that unreliable humans aren’t going to do 100% of the time, but if done would improve safety.

What system is available for iPhone that is more reliable than CarPlay?