NTSB wants your cell phones

[FreakyFastFreddie]

Someone already said it, but TEXTING is the MAIN problem here. Even though it's illegal now to text while driving, you see people still doing it all the time. Some people can do it, but most cannot. They are all over the road, their speed fluctuates all over the place, etc. I've been in the car with my brother and he's just like this. I tell him to either stop the car, or stop the texting. He doesn't listen.....

I just got my first iPhone (4S) and love that you can speak everything on this phone, even texting.

[cab2g]

nobody can text while driving safely. you have to take your eyes off the road too often to be actively paying attention to your surroundings. However, this "suggestion" is BS. You are not more distracted making a bluetooth call than you are while you are eating your favorite burger or changing the radio station.

I do think that it would be smart for cell phone companies to disable/restrict (non-voice transcribed) texting if the car is moving. All smart phones now have accelerometers/GPS and would be able to tell if the car is moving. and if disabling is too much, make the phones show a warning before and you have to enter a password to unlock texting for passengers at least.

[HumanWiki]

That's kind of a crappy penalty for passengers for just being in a car.. Then you have to deal with timeout settings, how long before it auto locks, how to detect start/stop scenarios for re-locking of the device, etc. Also, things like that would be easily rooted and gotten around. If people can remove things like CarrierIQ, this wouldn't be too tough. Also, the other penalty passengers get from an accelerometer would be pretty much everyone on any mass transit system. Then you have to deal with pairing in to a car, which could be avoided. Some sort of signal emanated from the car to tell the phone it's not in a mass transit vehicle, which would be an FCC pain due to how far would the signal propagate from the car -- I certainly wouldn't want to have to put up with my phone acting up just because I'm near a road with moving cars.

I don't think there should be any forced blocking of anything of the sort. Simply stiffer penalties for doing so as the driver. There are plenty of other distractions that are just as dangerous as phones. How about all the billboards that are outright TVs now?

[BumBLUEbee]

That's kind of a crappy penalty for passengers for just being in a car.. Then you have to deal with timeout settings, how long before it auto locks, how to detect start/stop scenarios for re-locking of the device, etc. Also, things like that would be easily rooted and gotten around. If people can remove things like CarrierIQ, this wouldn't be too tough. Also, the other penalty passengers get from an accelerometer would be pretty much everyone on any mass transit system. Then you have to deal with pairing in to a car, which could be avoided. Some sort of signal emanated from the car to tell the phone it's not in a mass transit vehicle, which would be an FCC pain due to how far would the signal propagate from the car -- I certainly wouldn't want to have to put up with my phone acting up just because I'm near a road with moving cars.

I don't think there should be any forced blocking of anything of the sort. Simply stiffer penalties for doing so as the driver. There are plenty of other distractions that are just as dangerous as phones. How about all the billboards that are outright TVs now?

I agree. Those digital billboards are distracting as all he11; especially at night. I've said that ever since I saw the very first one.

[Lawdog]

At least they could put a good movie up there to watch, HEHE