Distracted driving: Everyone hates it, but most of us do it, study finds

Insurance company Esurance has a new study out on distracted driving, and it makes for interesting reading. Almost everyone agrees distracted driving is bad, yet it’s still remarkably prevalent. Even drivers who report rarely driving distracted also report that they engage in distracting behaviors. The study also raises some questions about the growing complexity of modern vehicles, particularly the user interfaces they confront us with.

Almost everyone does it

According to official figures, around 10 percent of all road deaths are due to distracted driving. That percentage has held steady for a while now after peaking at 15 percent a decade ago. In the time since, governments and the auto and tech industries haven’t been ignoring the problem. Texting-while-driving bans are ever more common. Smartphones now have do not disturb modes, some of which can turn on automatically. Phones can also cast their displays and certain apps to the car’s center stack using Android Auto and Apple CarPlay.

And modern vehicles are increasingly packed full of advanced driver aids—what the industry calls ADAS (advanced driver assistance systems)—like adaptive cruise control, lane keeping, blind spot monitoring, collision alerts, and so on.

The Esurance report includes survey data from more than a thousand participants. More than 90 percent said that browsing for apps, texting, and emailing were distracting. Yet more than half of daily commuters admitted to doing it. The survey also found that the longer your commute, the greater the chance is you’ll get distracted, probably by your phone.

Even participants who reported they were “rarely distracted” admitted to distracting behavior like talking on the phone or even viewing GPS Navigation data. (Any task performed while driving should be able to be performed in under two seconds to avoid becoming a distraction.)

Esurance also wanted to know if ADAS was actually making us safer or lulling drivers into a false sense of security. Almost half said semi-autonomous technology (like adaptive cruise control) makes their driving better, but one in ten of those surveyed believe the latter. But an important finding was that drivers of cars with lots of tech in them reported being more distracted than drivers of older or less advanced vehicles.

In addition to the survey, Esurance interviewed a number of drivers of modern, ADAS-equipped cars. The report features anecdotes about automatic emergency braking saving someone from a crash but also complaints about complex user interfaces some drivers have to contend with.

It’s not an equal playing field

If the last few months have taught me anything, it’s that there is a lot of diversity out there when it comes to implementing ADAS and designing good automotive UIs and UXes. Three cars from three different OEMs can all have similar-sounding systems that nevertheless have different operational domains or use different ways to alert or warn the driver.

Take the combination adaptive cruise control and lane keeping; these assists will behave very differently in a Tesla Model X (letting you go hands free for minutes at a time, automatically changing lanes for you) than in a Nissan Leaf (does a good job of staying centered in a lane, nags you a lot and disengages after 15 seconds) or a Toyota Camry (warns you when you depart a lane, couldn’t feel it steer for me at all).

Different companies also have different alert philosophies—a lane departure warning might consist of a haptic alert (vibrating seat or steering wheel), a visual alert on the main instrument panel or a heads up display, an audio alert, or a combination of some or all of those. Those alert noises made it into Esurance’s list, and 29 percent of those surveyed said they found in-car warning sounds to be a distraction.