Happy Thanksgiving: DTYP!

It's Thanksgiving, a time when families gather in the U.S. to give thanks and watch football. It is also a time when hundreds of people die on their way to and from their Thanksgiving dinner.

I have a simple message for all of us at this time of danger on the road: Don't Touch Your Phone!

Experts estimate that 450 people will die on American highways during the four-day Thanksgiving weekend. Roughly 10% of those, 45, will die as a result of distracted driving, according to estimates from the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA).

The NHTSA released its phase two distracted driving guidelines earlier this week with a call for manufacturers - ie. handset makers - "to implement features such as pairing, where a portable device is linked to a vehicle’s infotainment system, as well as Driver Mode, which is a simplified user interface."

NHTSA says "both pairing and Driver Mode will reduce the potential for unsafe driver distraction by limiting the time a driver’s eyes are off the road, while at the same time preserving the full functionality of these devices when they are used at other times."

The Driver Mode functional "lockouts" sought by NHTSA include:

• Displaying video not related to driving;
• Displaying certain graphical or photographic images;
• Displaying automatically scrolling text;
• Manual text entry for the purpose of text-based messaging, other communication, or internet browsing; and
• Displaying text for reading from books, periodical publications, web page content, social media content, text-based advertising and marketing, or text-based messages.

Details of new NHTSA guidelines: https://tinyurl.com/h6stn3t

The Consumer Technology Association's President and CEO Gary Shapiro was quick to condemn the guidelines as too draconian and essentially beyond the mandate of the NHTSA, since they were partially aimed at handset makers and not car makers. Meanwhile former National Transportation Safety Board head and current president of the National Safety Council, Deborah Hersman, said the measures did not go far enough. Hersman is on record as favoring an outright ban on smartphone use in cars.

Once again our safety regulators have missed the boat. I have long called for a European-styled ban on touching phones while driving. The utter simplicity of such an approach would be welcomed by both consumers and law enforcement and would leave car makers and handset makers alone.

Don't touch your phone (DTYP) while driving!

But, there is a corollary message here regarding our obsession with our phones. Yes, this obsession has fatal consequences on the highway, but it can have a deleterious effect in the office and in our personal interactions. While not fatal, overuse of our smartphones is interfering with our humanity.

Let's set the smartphones aside on Thanksgiving. There is an app called Forest (pictured above) that rewards users for not touching their phones by planting a tree for every 30 minutes of non-interaction. Let's all grow a forest on Thanksgiving. We might save a life or a relationship in the process.

Roger C. Lanctot is Associate Director in the Global Automotive Practice at Strategy Analytics. More details about Strategy Analytics can be found here: https://www.strategyanalytics.com/access-services/automotive#.VuGdXfkrKUk