Research on driver distraction has a long history and attracts the attention of the scientific community, the public and the authorities. This resulted in a great number of activities. This article will summarize the main developments since the last ESV in 2013 from the perspective of an automotive manufacturer.
Guidelines and standards: In 2013 the National Highway Transport and Safety Agency (NHTSA) published a guideline for visual manual HMI . While basically following the structure of the European Statement of Principles (ESoP) [2] and the AAM guideline [1], the NHTSA guideline is much more restrictive, which means that more functions need to be blocked while driving. So the concern is that drivers will be inclined to use nomadic devices which have no restrictions at all (i.e. smartphones). Thus the overall impact of that guideline on safety may be negative.
The last version of the ESoP was published in 2008. In the framework of the iMobility Forum an HMI group was installed with the objective to check whether any changes, updates or additions are needed. The final report is expected for 2015. Some statements can be expected from the current draft which contains some recommendations and explicitly states to keep the ESoP as a design guideline, based on ISO standards, but not to include overall acceptance criteria. Due to the growing importance of applications that are being developed independently from hardware, another group was established within iMobility Forum, SafeAPP, in order to cover this specific topic. On international level OICA (Organisation Internationale des Constructeurs d’Automobiles) published a white paper with recommendations for guidelines.
Naturalistic driving studies (NDS): Most experiments in simulators or on test tracks measure driving performance or glance behavior to determine mental workload. For using the telephone they usually report an odd ratio of four (The probability of a crash is four times higher compared to normal driving). It was quite a surprise when the 100 car study in 2013 presented odd ratios below one. Recent data from SHRP 2 give even lower values. NDS seem to be a powerful tool to identify actions and behavior that cause crashes. Detailed methods are under development and handling of great amounts of data is a challenging task.
Tethering: Nomadic devices can cause a problem since neither their displays nor their controls are developed for automotive use. Also they do not block functions that are not intended to be used while driving. One way to overcome this problem is to tether the telephone with the display and the controls of the car. This also makes it possible to apply existing guidelines (AAM, JAMA, ESoP). The Car Connectivity Consortium (CCC) has rephrased the existing guidelines so that they are better understandable by app developers. The CCC also established a process that will be run by certified labs to verify that the applications are in line with the guidelines. Similar approaches are done be Google (Android auto) and Apple (Car play).