A simple instant-messaging feature that could save countless lives

We fumble with the steering wheel while texting people where we are, rather than sharing our location automatically. We won’t switch on speaker phone, but we will drive with enormous phones held to our heads like half a set of horse-blinkers, or in front of our mouths like a slice of Hawaiian that’s not yet cool enough to eat. We cannot — will not — figure out our car’s handsfree Bluetooth thing. Most of us can’t remember the last time we owned a “dumbphone” and yet when we get behind the wheel of a car we become incapable of using any mobile tech features developed since Obama took office. (Blackberry, if you spot the seed of your next ad campaign in there, take it, it’s yours.)

Wherever you live, odds are that there are penalties for using electronic devices while driving. Still, distraction.gov recorded an increase in fatalities due to distracted driving of nearly 7% from 2012 to 2013, the year Werner Herzog’s anti-texting & driving PSA was released. (2014 stats aren’t yet in, but we don’t have a lot of cause to be hopeful.)

Something happens to us when we’re behind the wheel. We get dumber. Foolishly confident. Irrational. We’re the Dunning-Kruger effect at 100 kph. We’re the last people who should be trusted to reduce distracted driving.

What if instead of beating our figurative heads against the literal desire of our big human brains to be distracted, we nudged everyone else — people who are not driving — to take responsibility for distracted driving?

Every popular messaging platform shows you when the person on the other end is typing. Even if they never hit “send” you still get to see that they’re there, engaged, which keeps you engaged, which is why app developers implemented this feature in the first place. We don’t want to be rude.

What if you opened your messaging app, started a chat with someone, and saw that the person you’re about to message is traveling in a car?

You can still send them a message. They can still receive your message.

Everything works like it always does. If you like, you can carry on as you always do. And they’re definitely in a moving car.

Instead of dots, you’d see this:

Wouldn’t that change how you communicated? Wouldn’t you hold back the idle chit chat until the little car disappeared? If you absolutely had to send a message right then, wouldn’t you start with, “Don’t reply if you’re driving”?

We know that distracted driving is dangerous. And if we’re really smarter when we’re not driving then it should be up to us, non-drivers of the moment, to guard present drivers and our future driving selves from harm.

Maybe an advanced version of this feature would let the sender delay their message until the recipient stopped moving. If we’re going to leave anything up to drivers, maybe the app on their end shouldn’t say, “Send a message…”. Maybe it should say instead, “Tap if you’re not driving.”

Let’s implement an MVP and figure it out from there.

I haven’t patented anything on this idea. If I could have, then maybe I’ve just shot myself in the foot by publishing this piece. I don’t care. Nobody should have to consider licensing costs to implement such a simple and potentially life-saving feature. Steal this idea now, please.

We already believe implicitly that public education isn’t going to reduce distracted driving; if we really thought we could nag away distracted driving, would Apple and Google see a market for car-optimized versions of their operating systems? Android Auto and CarPlay promise to be far more effective than the feeble end of every alcohol ad that says, “drink responsibly,” but it’ll be many years and iterations before we can estimate how much they’ve affected road fatalities. And given the lengthy upgrade cycle of car buyers (geological in scale by Silicon Valley standards) it might be a decade or more before a significant portion of drivers’ cars are reliably conspiring with their phones to keep their eyes on the road.

There’s another problem with car-optimized OSes, and I think it’s bigger than mere compatibility: every point along an adoption curve is a person choosing to employ the technology. If you don’t set it up, then it might as well not exist. While our brilliant phones can figure out when we’re travelling by car (and where we parked) they can’t tell if we’re driving or just along for the ride. If the user doesn’t play along, the feature is dead.

For example, if your spouse always has music queued up, or seems to have a better handle on googling addresses, or some other claim on the title of Chief Gadget Officer of the car, are you ever going to get into the habit of connecting your phone to your car and using it through your car? Or are you going to quickly adopt the habit of dismissing “Tap to enable Car Mode” prompts that seem to be threatening to change your precious settings (and are themselves a significant distraction)? Adding features that rely on the driver to make any kind of effort is, if not a dead end, then it’s certainly a very bumpy road.

But just for fun, let’s say to hell with user experience. Screw your petty preferences. Nudges be damned. This is about safety and saving lives so let’s tackle it like legislators defending the public good: let it be decreed that every phone that detects that it’s traveling in a motorized vehicle must switch to “safe” or “car” mode. It’ll be annoying, but you’re not against saving lives, are you?

Yes, this is going to mean your colleague will have to take a call from her partner on speaker while you drive to the offsite meeting. It’s going to mean that while you’re headed to he airport in your Uber, you’d better have some podcasts to listen to (via an approved car-friendly app) because Facebook, Instagram, and Pocket will be blocked. And busloads and trainloads of passengers will just have to get used to being forced into a needlessly restricted and awkward experience.

Ridiculous? Yes, but it’s inevitable if we’re going to keep focusing exclusively on swatting phones out of the hands of drivers.

Let’s focus instead on making it evident that the person at the other end of the conversation is in a car. Let’s spread the responsibility for distracted driving to people outside of the car.

What do you say, Google? Are you reading this, Facebook? Apple, do you have an excruciatingly elegant solution for taking this beyond my modest proposal? Are any of you interested in empowering us to protect the people we love from themselves?

And if you’ve got any early info on how dumb people become inside of self-driving cars, let me know.