NHTSA Proposes Phone ‘Driving Mode’ To Limit In-Car Distractions

It goes without saying that being distracted by your phone while you’re behind the wheel is very dangerous. That’s why smartphones these days have car-specific interfaces like Apple CarPlay and Android Auto to limit the distractions and allow users to access important features like maps. The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration wants to kick things up a notch. It has proposed a “driving mode” for smartphones as part of its voluntary guidelines to reduce in-car distractions.

NHTSA’s voluntary guidelines now call on smartphone manufacturers to include a “driving mode” alongside their own infotainment systems like Android Auto and Apple CarPlay. The mode will have a simple interface which doesn’t require the driver to pay too much attention to the phone and it will also disable or downplay features that are not needed while the car is moving.

Features that the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration would like to see disable include manual text entry, photo and video playback, social networking, web browsing, non-essential text, and more. It wants this mode to be launched automatically once the car goes beyond 5 miles per hour.

One might ask how the system will differentiate between the driver and the passenger if the speed is the only metric that’s measured before the mode kicks in. That’s a technological hurdle which needs to be overcome and until that happens, if manufacturers to start including this mode in their devices, it will likely be dependent on the driver to manually activate it.

Adnan Farooqui
Categories: Cellphones
Tags: NHTSA