With one in ten driving fatalities being caused by distracted driving in 2015, the U.S. Department of Transportation’s National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) has asked the tech industry to create simplified user interfaces to limit certain cell phone features from being used while driving. While Apple had already created CarPlayto facilitate this, they are going to take it a step further with a new Do Not Disturb While Driving feature.
How it Works
This new feature will be able to detect if you are driving by using a combination of Bluetooth and Wi-Fi to determine how fast you are moving. Once the phone determines you are driving the screen will turn blank and you would not receive any notifications from iMessage or apps while you are driving. While in this mode people who message you would get an automatic reply notifying the sender you are driving and will receive this message when arrive to their destination. Thankfully they have also added a feature in case a message is important. If it is urgent they can reply with the text “Urgent” and the message would be pushed through to your phone. If you are not driving, upon initiation of this feature you can disable this feature and continue to use your phone normally.
Comparing CarPlay to the Do Not Disturb While Driving feature, we will say CarPlay is still the much more useful feature but this shows that Apple is dedicated towards people driving safely (or they are trying to limit lawsuits). Regardless how inconvenient it might seem, texting and driving is never a good idea.
