After a decades-long decline in automobile fatalities, numbers began to go up with the dawn of smart phones. Not even laws have stopped the rise — and the dawn of smart cars seems to be making things worse
After a decades-long decline in automobile fatalities, numbers began to go up with the dawn of smart phones. Laws banning use of cellphones while driving haven’t stopped the rise — and the dawn of smart cars seems to be making things worse.
Today, we talk about efforts to stop distracted driving — and why they don’t seem to work. Read the full transcript here.
Host: Gustavo Arellano
Guests: L.A. Times auto industry reporter Russ Mitchell
More reading:
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The DMV said it would investigate Tesla over self-driving claims. Then, crickets
Gustavo Arellano: For decades, it seemed like Americans were becoming better drivers. There was a noticeable downward trend to the number of motor vehicle fatalities for decades. But in recent years, those numbers have started to go back up.
In 2022, there were around 46,000 highway fatalities in the United States, up 22% from the year before. So why are we becoming worse drivers and what can we do?
Oh, wait, hold on, hold on.
Sorry about that. Uh, wait, where were we?
I'm Gustavo Arellano. You’re listening to “The Times: Essential News From the L.A. Times.” It's Monday, April 24th, 2023. Today, how we become worse drivers and what's being done to reverse this trend.
Here to talk about all this is my L.A. Times colleague who covers the auto industry, Russ Mitchell. Russ, welcome to “The Times.”
Russ Mitchell: Glad to be here.
Gustavo: More than 46,000 people lost their lives on the road in 2022. That's a horrible stat, but how does that compare to previous years?
Russ: It's up 22% from. uh, 2021 and it has been in the upper 30s for, uh, quite a while now. Because during the pandemic there were so few people on the road, of course there were fewer accidents and that caused the fatality growth rate to go down. But since things have opened up, it's just exploded from the high 30-thousands up to 46,000. That's a pretty steep climb. In the ’60s, in the ’70s and even into the ’80s, it was going up and up and up, and the government finally got serious about crashworthiness and requiring carmakers to make their cars better protective for passengers. The introduction of airbags helped with that too.
So, cars, in terms of protecting the occupants, are safer by far than they've ever been. And that was causing the growth in fatalities to go down and even decline. There's not been a scientific study that links these two, but it's pretty obvious that once the, uh, smartphone started coming in, deaths are on a big rise. It's not the only reason, and it's hard to sort out the real reasons because our government's data collection systems are so poor, but it looks like distracted driving is playing a major role in killing people and injuring people at increasing rates.
Gustavo: So you could literally see those numbers going down because of all of these improvements in the cars. And then, once the era of the smartphone starts coming up around the beginning of the 2010s, that's when it started to go up again.
Russ: That's right. Distracted driving has been around forever, well before cellphones. You drop a hamburger on the floor and reach to pick it up, you're putting on makeup, you're taking a glance at a newspaper, those used to cause the bulk of distracted driving accidents. It just has shot up since cellphones came around. Talking on the phone, fiddling with it with your fingers, even the conversation itself on a cellphone, even if it's hands free, has been shown to be distracting. The net effect is a lot of deaths and injuries.
Gustavo: Do people have any other theories why numbers are going up, besides distracted driving?
Russ: Actually drunk driving is declining, but speeding is going up and reckless driving is going up incredibly. There are various theories behind this, including, uh, the psychological, negative impacts of COVID, and also less police presence. There are fewer stops on the highways. Police have been accused, and from what I've been able to see justifiably, of stopping people of color more often than white people. And some police departments have decided that they would avoid the problem by not stopping as many people. There's a lot of road racing going on, a lot of crazy speeding driving going on. So that's playing a big role too, especially in California. And I see it both in L.A. and up here in San Francisco.
Gustavo: So smartphones are the biggest cause in this rise in fatal driving accidents. I don't understand, ’cause California and I think every state in the United States bans texting while driving. California bans using your phone while driving altogether unless it's hands-free. So have those banned at all to try to, clamp down on distracted driving?
Russ: Apparently not. I mean, maybe it'd be even worse if those laws didn't exist, but the laws seem fairly toothless and aren't very often enforced. Count the number of times you see people using their phones and count the number of times you've seen a police officer pull somebody over to, uh, give them a ticket for that. I don't think that happens very much. And its statistics, uh, from what I understand, bear those out. The numbers show that the law isn’t that much of a deterrent. In 2022 the Traveler's Insurance Co. did a survey, and these are people that admit their behavior here: 77% of drivers said they used their phones while driving; 74% used their cellphone maps; 56% read a text or email; 27%, more than a quarter of the drivers, updated or checked their social media while they were driving. They admitted this. And astoundingly, 19%, one in five drivers, admitted that they shopped online while they were driving.
Gustavo: Oh, man, but of course everyone says they never do that. They're not the guilty ones. It's always someone else.
Russ: Well, actually it's a little bit more nuanced than that. People tend to agree that they abuse their phone. Right after a crash, they probably don't admit it, but if they talk to me or to you or to other people, they'll say they probably use their phone too much while they're driving.
So what people have trouble with, though, is assuming that they won't cause a crash. They admit they do this, but they believe it will always happen to somebody else. Perhaps that they're a good enough driver, perhaps that, really it's a random thing and they're going to be able to avoid it.
These surveys show this — that people think it will happen to somebody else and not them. So it's only when somebody in their car or another car or a pedestrian or a bicyclist dies or has a broken leg or has a concussion or any number of serious injuries, it's only then that they recognize it can happen to them too.
Gustavo: Coming up after the break, the other factor playing into a distracted driving habit.
Russ, use of smartphones is basically ubiquitous nowadays. Everywhere and anywhere, people use ’em when they're not supposed to, let alone being on the road. But are there other factors that go into distracted driving?
Russ: Yeah, the, uh, the infotainment systems are getting more and more kind of amazing from a technological point of view. And from an entertainment point of view, they're pretty amazing. They provide information about, you know, where you are, the mapping system, that kind of thing, information about the performance of the car. They also provide entertainment, But the screens on these infotainment systems have grown from eight inches to 12 inches to 14 inches, and there are some car companies now that have infotainment screens that stretch all the way across the dashboard, from window to window. Mercedes has one of those. It's of course in expensive cars right now, but soon to be in a modest-size car near you. And the infotainment systems, they're often bundled with safety features like lane-departure warnings and backup cameras, sophisticated backup cameras, various pedestrian identifiers to note whether a person is walking behind your car. So they're kind of a mixing up, safety. Information and entertainment, and in large measure bundling that stuff together for maximum profitability. Most of them are not at this point very good. They're working on it, but the systems are terrible. We did a story in the LA Times not too long ago, called a Candy Store of Distraction. And, really, the infotainment systems are like putting you in your living room. Many times you can't watch a movie on the front screen while you're driving, although in an expensive car with your kids in the back, they can do that. But then somebody has to fix the settings to make sure that the kids have their movie on, and all this is happening while you're driving. Some cars, even to turn on the windshield wipers you have to go to the screen. And they're putting more and more of these things in there because, No. 1, consumers want them. And No. 2, there's revenue possibilities — everything from licensing apps to selling stuff. McKinsey is seeing $11 billion possible revenue available just from infotainment systems.
A couple years ago, I went to the University of Utah to talk to a, uh, cognitive psychologist, David Strayer, who is responsible for many of the statistics. He does a lot of research on distracted driving. And, he started out doing user-interface research with the army on Apache helicopters. And, they found that some helicopter crashes were being caused by too much distraction on the control panel. So they went back and redesigned the control panel and reduced significantly the number of crashes due to this kind of distraction. However, nothing is being done in automobiles. The safety regulators seem pretty much asleep. Congress, the state legislature, nobody's doing anything really seriously about it.
Gustavo: Does the government have statistics on how many car crashes are caused by distracted driving, whether because of the infotainment systems or cellphones?
Russ: They do, but they've come in at, uh, roughly about 10% of total fatalities if you just look at the fatalities year by year, including the latest statistics. But everybody outside of the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, including former NHTSA officials, believes that these numbers are a gross underestimate. Organizations, including the National Safety Council, believe, using their own estimates, that the number could be 25% to 30%.
Gustavo: Yeah, what factors have led to this supposed under count?
Russ: Well, it's a creaky old system. The numbers come in from police forces around the country. They fill out accident reports. Some departments still use paper and they have to be translated from paper into electronic systems. Those numbers are gathered, estimates are drawn and they come up with the final results. Some police departments don't even have a separate category on their accident reports for distracted driving, and often, it's just a check mark. In order to determine whether somebody was using their phone, unless they start going through these long processes of the equivalent of search warrants, is for a driver to admit that they were on the phone, using the phone or using the infotainment system, or a police officer would've had to have seen them do it before the crash. So that in itself would lead to an underestimate.
Gustavo: One thing I don't get: If cars are supposed to be safer now, like you mentioned, you have all these sensors. I see all these commercials that cars will beep if there's a car behind you in your blind spot. So, aren't we manufacturing cars with this technology so they could be safer, and yet at the same time fatalities are continuing to go up? I don't get that dissonance. I guess.
Russ: Yeah, and that's a good point. For one reason, because some of the technology that they put on cars, and I should have mentioned this earlier, besides, uh, the crashworthiness — things like, um, cameras that allow you to, uh, see behind you, uh, when you're backing up; warnings when a person might be crossing behind your car; lane-keeping assistance — there’s a lot of equipment that really is helping with safety. Part of the issue is that the automakers bundle — some of the safety stuff is just standard, but they bundle a lot of it in with the fancier infotainment kind of features or hands-free driving features, so if you have the money and you're willing to fork it over, you get the whole package; you get safety plus infotainment. But in order to get that safety, you have to buy the infotainment. It's like, uh, cable TV except that you'd be buying insurance on cable TV to make sure it doesn't blow up in your living room. It's crazy.
With all the electronics in the car and all the communications in the car, it's technically feasible to be able to tell instantly whether somebody was on their phone or using the infotainment system before a crash or not. But our safety laws, and data collection goes back to the ’60s, and the government, including the, uh, National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, seems to be doing a little or nothing to insist that carmakers take these statistics that they have and make them available so that we can find out both, in individual situations and broadly as a society, what's really going on here.
Gustavo: Yeah, and then not only that, you have more people driving distracted ever. So you could have all these safety features, but does it matter ’cause road conditions are more perilous than ever?
Russ: Yeah, exactly. With all these people speeding, driving crazy, distracted driving, it all adds up to, to death, injury and destruction.
Gustavo: What about removing the driver altogether? I know I keep hearing about autonomous cars in our future, but, I don't know, at that point you might as well use public transportation.
Russ: Yeah, we've been promised driverless cars for a long time. They are coming, but very slowly. Which is a good thing because there are car companies, or I should say driverless car companies, that are trying to make them as safe as possible in their deployment. They know that if these cars get into a lot of crashes or start killing people, that all of a sudden they're gonna be banned. So they're taking it fairly seriously, and we're getting slow rollouts. You can get a driverless, robo taxi service – it's kind of a beta program, it's not everybody can get it – but if you're in their program, you can order up a driverless taxi in San Francisco from Cruise or Waymo. These are restricted to certain areas, and they've done a lot of testing. There's also a company called Tesla that does what they call full self-driving, which – I don't know why this hasn't been an issue among the government that just seems to not care too much about safety on the roads – they're letting them sell this as full self-driving and letting people believe that it's full self-driving, when actually – unlike Waymo or Motional or Cruz – they're using customer drivers to test driverless cars on the highway and putting lives at risk. And again, Tesla knows what's happening in these crashes. And while highway safety officials require them to report crashes that they think are caused by these partial self-drive systems, they're not collecting digital data directly so that they know exactly what's happening. They're kind of trusting the companies to self-report,
Gustavo: Yeah, we had you on the podcast before to talk about specifically Tesla and this issue
Russ: Right, exactly. The Department of Motor Vehicles in California has actually a regulation that says you can't sell a technology or a feature on a car and pretend that it's full self-driving when it's not. That's an actual regulation. In May, which I guess is next month, it'll be two years since the DMV has launched its investigation, and they tell me they have no idea at all, they can't say when they're gonna be done — two years ago. So it seems nobody knows the real reason.
Some people think Tesla's paying them off. I don't think that's it. But Tesla does provide a lot of jobs in the state. Tesla is the biggest electric car maker, and the state is really all in on electric cars. There may be reasons for this that the state believes that they can't really crack down on Tesla because it's so important to our future and the state's future. But nonetheless, they have to realize that people are dying as they're making these trade-offs.
Gustavo: After the break, what solutions, if any, are there for our growing distracted driving problem?
So Russ, we've talked a lot about distracted driving and making cars safer in crashes, even though that's not really doing much to stop deaths and maybe even just taking drivers out altogether. None of this will fix things. So what will? Is there anything that car manufacturers can do to help solve this problem?
Russ: Well, the car manufacturers and the, uh, cellphone makers could set up their technology so that there's a lot less that you can actually use while you're driving. they can also — although this is also distracting, it's proving to be not as distracting as, using your fingers — but voice commands, once they get better and better, could improve things.
But they're so bad right now; you've got Bluetooth connections that may not understand exactly what you're saying. You've got systems put together that aren't as good as, say, Alexa or even Siri. One thing that the companies are doing, starting to do, is just get rid of their own native systems and give up and go to Google Android, for instance. Volvo and some other car companies are doing that. And those voice systems actually work a lot better because they've got the billions and billions of dollars of investment in cloud computing and data collection to be able to make them work better. If the voice system doesn't work or if the Bluetooth system doesn't work, you'll be on your phone turning your Bluetooth on and off, just trying to get your voice system to work, so that things can be safer, and that in itself is very unsafe.
And these companies don't really want to talk about this. Apple doesn't want to talk to me about this. I just saw, maybe some other people out there have seen this Apple commercial for the iPhone 14, where you've got a car crashing, spinning through the air with a crash test dummy, and at the end, the phone kind of descends down and it's an advertisement for their crash-reporting system.
The, the phone will tell you when you’ve been in a crash. But if this was an honest commercial, they'd have the crash test dummy looking at their phone before the crash. If Apple were totally honest, they'd say, when we provide the technology that causes your car to crash and you're sitting there with your head bleeding, our phone will call the ambulance. So thank you, Apple.
I reached out to several of the major car manufacturers, and the only one that would talk to me was Honda. The other major manufacturers offered to, uh, not talk about the issue, because I really want to quiz them on what's going on. They would be happy to send a statement.
I decided not to go that road. I said, look, either you want to talk to me about this issue and let's have a real honest discussion about it and let the people know what you're doing and what you're not, or I'll just have to say you were unwilling to do so.
Gustavo: Oh, boy. Technology. Wow.
Russ: Yeah
Gustavo: What about on a state or federal level? We've talked about how states have laws targeting phone usage while driving.
Russ: Right.
Gustavo: Are there any other bills in the works to really clamp down on distracted driving overall?
Russ: it goes state by state. Some states are better than others. Some local police departments are better than others at enforcement. I don't want to say that the hands-free laws are useless, but they are proving to be far from adequate. So there are movements to get the laws toughened. There are movements to get the police to pay more attention. But so far, politicians in Congress and in the state and the regulators seem willing to just let it pretty much slide. What it's really gonna take is people saying, in order to save the life of my child or somebody else's child, I would the government to have more regulation on how these things can be used in automobiles for the sake of everybody.
People love this stuff. They've been proven to be literally addictive for some people. It's very hard for anybody, including myself. I really try not to use my phone while I'm driving. And a lot of these laws, or proposed laws, don't get a lot of traction often, again because people don't want to be restricted from using their phones and their infotainment systems. There's enough of a lobby of people that say, “Don't tread on me” to make politician's loath to really get serious about it. Or the politicians are gonna be willing to let people die if they don't have public pressure to do anything differently.
Gustavo: What about private groups? Are there any activists trying to tackle this problem?
Russ: Oh, there are a number of safety groups — the Center for Auto Safety, the National Safety Council, the National Distracted Driving Coalition. And then there are groups that have been formed by parents of children that their children have died, sometimes because the parent themselves was involved in a distracted driving incident or somebody else was involved — very tragic situations. The progress has been forward, but very slow. It's really, I really think it's going to take more people who listen to podcasts like this or read stories like this that then turn around — I'm not telling them to do this — but if they're concerned, turn around and let their representatives know and let the safety agencies know that this is a real serious problem. Lots of people are dying, getting injured, and we really need to do something about it.
On the commercial side, there's actually something being done. More and more companies that have truck fleets and driver employees or even contractors are using systems that can monitor the driving and the distracted level of the drivers and send warnings – again this is the data systems that are available – send warnings or notices to the truck company or their contractor who monitors this stuff. And they can use this data to discipline drivers that are distracted while they're driving. So it's possible, but it's a question of where the liability lies, and the trucking companies don't want to be liable for accidents or crashes caused by their drivers.
Gustavo: Finally, Russ, just straight up, are things going to get better or are we just going to, as a society, accept that, hey, that's what the risk of driving a car is; we drive 'em and sometimes people are going to die.
Russ: I don't want to bum everybody out, uh, that's listening to this, but I think, uh, “Are things just going to get worse?” is a tagline for lots of things that are going on in our world today. There's a real lack of political leadership on a lot of counts and this is one of them. So yes, I think it's going to get worse and at some point something might spur more people or more politicians — maybe it's going to take a death in their own family — to really buckle down, so to speak, and do something about it ’cause it really is a serious problem.
Gustavo: Buckle down and buckle up.
Russ: Right.
Gustavo: Russ, thank you so much for this conversation.
Russ: Always a pleasure.
Gustavo: And that's it for this episode of “The Times: Essential News From the L.A. Times.” Nicholas Perez and David Toledo were the jefes on this episode. It was edited by was Jazmín Aguilera and Mark Nieto mixed and mastered it. Our show is produced by Denise Guerra, Kasia Broussalian, David Toledo and Ashlea Brown. Our editorial assistants are Roberto Reyes and Nicholas Perez. Our fellow is Helen Li. Our engineers are Mario Diaz, Mark Nieto and Mike Heflin. Our executive producers are Jazmín Aguilera, Shani Hilton and Heba Elorbany. And our theme music is by Andrew Eapen.
I'm Gustavo Arellano. We'll be back Wednesday with all the news and desmadre. Gracias.