Many will argue that through practice and training, one can text and drive, or even master the art of taking a phone call on an earpiece or through the speakerphone when in reality, any distraction, hands-free or not, will increase your chances of being distracted. When you use common sense, you don’t need a study to prove this BUT there was a study done on this for the curious which I will tap into here.
I read an article on AAA’s Spring 2016 via magazine titled “The latest facts on distraction: New research says our minds wander for nearly half a minute after a hands-free call or text.” by Rob Bhatt. It talked about how a study sponsored by the AAA Foundation for Traffic Safety showed how distractions from in-vehicle messaging persist long after the message ends. They found that mental recovery takes time and that test subjects needed up to 27 seconds to fully refocus on driving after ending a hands-free call or sending a text message using a voice-controlled system. Familiarity doesn’t help either. The study also revealed that even after a week of practice on voice-guided systems only marginal improvement in performance was observed, concluding that such distractions can’t be practiced away.
So why put yourself and others at a higher risk when you have a choice? Unless it’s an immediate emergency, I think I’ll ignore calls, text messaging and any other distracting app while driving with the exception of GPS navigation. When I think about this some more, a tool like CarPlay doesn’t feel so good anymore to me. While it does free yourself some more from your phone, it doesn’t erase the fact that you’ll still need that mental recovery time after a call or text message. I feel this is an area where self-driving cars will prove valuable. Self-driving cars will remove the problem caused by distracted driving. Don’t put yourself and others at risk. If you have to make or take that call, please exit or pullover somewhere safe, do what you have to do take a moment to collect yourself and then drive safely again when you are ready.
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