Apple and Google need to put the brakes on car APIs

If you’re an iOS developer, Apple’s iCar announcement at the recent WWDC is good news. If you’re on Google’s side of the code divide, you might be happy to know that OpenXC will let you write Android apps for autos. The car of the (very near) future, as they used to call it, won’t fly, but it will be loaded with digital devices that let drivers do almost anything on the road they could do in the office.

Is that really a good idea? I don’t think so. More than 3,300 people die every year as a result of distracted driving, according to the U.S. Department of Transportation. But I’m not going to sit here and say you shouldn’t text or hold a phone while you’re driving. You already know that, as do the auto and consumer electronics industries, which is why they are spending tens of millions of dollars to develop hands-free devices that allow the drivers to keep their eyes on the road while taking care of some sort of digital business.

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It turns out, though, that these hands-free systems are not safe. They distract drivers every bit as much and, in some cases, more than hands-on activities. That’s according to a just-released study by University of Utah psychology professor David Strayer on behalf of the AAA Foundation for Traffic Safety. Strayer and his colleagues found that drivers’ mental workload increased when using advanced, voice-controlled systems, slowing their reaction time, which could make them miss things in front of them that should be obvious, such as pedestrians and stop signs.

Just because you can walk and chew gum at the same time doesn’t mean you can simultaneously drive and dictate an email to Siri — at least not safely.

Open standards in cars In-car electronics are following a path that many other devices have followed, moving from closed, proprietary system to more open standards, with generally available APIs. That’s happening, in part, because consumers aren’t particularly satisfied with the devices built into their new cars.

Earlier this year, J.D. Power and Associates released a study on this very point. It showed that satisfaction with in-car systems dropped another 13 points in the study’s 1,000-point scale to 681, one of the lowest scores on record. Tellingly, of the 20,704 owners polled, 47 percent had downloaded a navigation app to supplement their in-car system, up from 37 percent in the 2011 study. There’s real opportunity here, not all of it related to entertainment or office-related productivity.

Ford and Bug Labs, its co-developer, explain OpenXC like this:

OpenXC is an API to your car — by installing a small hardware module to read and translate metrics from a car’s internal network, the data becomes accessible from most Android applications using the OpenXC library. You can start making vehicle-aware applications that have better interfaces based on context, can minimize distraction while driving, are integrated with other connected services, and can offer you more insight into your car’s operation.

It’s worth noting that some of the OpenXC projects mentioned have nothing to do with entertainment and might well enhance safety. An intern at Ford, for example, developed a collision avoidance app tuned for nighttime driving in rural areas.

As to Apple, by 2014, up to a dozen automakers will put a car-specific version of iOS on dashboards in some models, allowing iPhone owners to get access to navigation, music, and phone functions with a familiar interface.

Given the push by the auto industry and now the software industry, we’re bound to see an awful lot of consumer electronics in cars really, really soon. And that worries me.

Real evidence mounts up I’m no researcher, but the Utah study is entirely consistent with my own experiences. I’ve seen too many people do really clumsy things while they were using a cellphone equipped with an earpiece and microphone. Yes, their hands were free, but their brains weren’t. That’s no slur. Other studies I’ve seen indicate that when one’s attention span is divided, something has to give. Sure, there are probably some people whose brains are wired differently than mine and who are capable of multitasking safely while driving — but not many.

Even actions that don’t seem very distracting can turn out to be a problem. A recent study out of the University of San Diego, for example, shows that when you’re subjected to other people’s conversation on their cellphones you’ll be much more distracted than you thought, and much more distracted than if you had listened to a conversation by two people in the same room or elevator or train. Who knew?

But getting back to the work on voice-activated devices: The researchers measured drivers’ brainwaves and eye movements to see what happened when they performed different tasks, such as listening to the radio and talking on the phone while behind the wheel. Their conclusion:

Compared to the other activities studied (e.g., listening to the radio, conversing with passengers, etc.) we found that interacting with the speech-to-text system was the most cognitively distracting. This clearly suggests that the adoption of voice-based systems in the vehicle may have unintended consequences that adversely affect traffic safety.

The Utah study doesn’t stand alone. Researchers at UAE University in Abu Dhabi came to similar conclusions in a study released in March.

As I discussed this issue with a colleague, he asked me if I thought babies should be banned from cars, since they’re a distraction. Sure, he was being a bit snarky, but that raises a point that should be addressed: In the real world, how far do we want to go to make driving safer?

I don’t think we should be banning babies or voice-activated electronics from cars. What we should do, though, is slow the push to add consumer devices to automobiles until we are more certain of the effect they have on the ability of drivers to focus on the road. Missing a couple of Facebook updates while we’re behind the wheel isn’t much of a sacrifice if it turns out that even hands-free devices are too distracting to use in the car.

I welcome your comments, tips, and suggestions. Post them here (Add a comment) so that all our readers can share them, or reach me at bill@billsnyder.biz. Follow me on Twitter at BSnyderSF.

This article, “Apple and Google need to put the brakes on car APIs,” was originally published by InfoWorld.com. Read more of Bill Snyder’s Tech’s Bottom Line blog and follow the latest technology business developments at InfoWorld.com. For the latest business technology news, follow InfoWorld.com on Twitter.