It’s really unfortunate that distracted drivers take lives and injure countless others every year across the globe. It’s a very serious problem and despite genuine efforts to tackle the issue, there are only so many ways that you can police the behavior of someone behind the wheel. Nissan has come up with an interesting solution to the problem. It thinks that distracted driving can be prevented by making it impossible for the driver to use their smartphone when they’re behind the wheel.
Nissan’s solution involves putting a Faraday cage inside the car’s armrest. It’s calling the compartment Nissan Signal Shield. Since it’s a signal blocker, once the handset is placed inside this block, no cellular, Bluetooth or Wi-Fi signals will be able to go through.
Drivers won’t be able to get much use out of their smartphone except to play music through USB or an AUX cord. Opening up the armrest would restore connectivity so it’s not like it won’t be easy to get service on the handset. However, it will put the driver off the grid and they won’t be available on the phone if there’s an emergency.
Nissan has introduced the Signal Shield as a concept idea for its new Juke model. Whether or not it ends up implementing it remains to be seen.
While one can commend Nissan for thinking out of the box on this idea, I’m sure in this day and age, not having access to your smartphone will be more stressful for people as opposed to having access to it and choosing not to use it behind the wheel like, you know, a sane person.