This device will prevent you from texting and driving
Despite the fact that it is illegal and kills far too many people on our roads, people still text and drive! We have done many articles around people texting and driving, the dangers of it and we have told people off for it. Thankfully, a chemical engineer who built a company that made motors and docking stations for NASA, has come up with a way that will stop you from texting and driving.
Scott Tibbitts, 57, has spent the last five years coming up with a way to block incoming and outgoing texts and to prevent phone calls from reaching a driver.
Tibbitts’s story doesn’t start off well. On May 8, 2008, Mr. Tibbitts, who lives and works in Boulder, Colo, drove to Denver for a business meeting. When he arrived, he discovered that the executive with whom he was supposed to meet had been killed that very morning in a car crash caused by a teenager, who, Mr. Tibbitts was told, was texting.
He had just sold his company and was looking for a new venture. The death of his colleague led him to seize on distracted driving as his next entrepreneurial challenge. Another incentive was that his two children were about reach driving age.
He immediately identified an engineering hurdle: To shut down a driver’s phone, you have to know that the person is driving. “How do we know the person is driving and not riding a horse or is a passenger on a bus?” he said. “How the heck do we do that?”
The telematics box was his solution. Ernst & Young predicts that by 2025, some 88 percent of new cars will have telematics and thus become so-called connected cars. Tibbits delved in to all areas of concern with building this device but, like so many inventions, he ran out of funding. Sprint, which is a mobile carrier, was interested in the project but had their own concerns.
“The costs were mounting, the returns unclear. “The technology works; the technology is there,” said Walter Fowler, a spokesman for Sprint. “It’s a matter of working out the legal issues. The legal uncertainty — that’s the major issue.”
The project, they said, is stalled, maybe indefinitely.”
In the meantime, Mr. Tibbitts pushes ahead, pursuing other carriers and using crowdsourcing to help keep the lights on.
“It’s so hugely frustrating,” he said. “I’ve put five years of my life into this; we’ve put in millions. I’m convinced there’s a great business and convinced it will save a bunch of lives.”
Let’s hope that soon a device like this becomes readily available and curbs this dangerous behaviour.
Source: nytimes
Image: Kevin Moloney for The New York Times