Texting-While-Driving Coach Slightly Delays Appalling Crashes

If your car could talk, it might tell you to stop texting. At least that's what one research team hopes: after paying young drivers to perform texting-like games while driving a simulator, they found that visual warnings from an in-car "coach" helped keep drivers' eyes on the road. For high-risk drivers, the warning system "more than doubled their time until a virtual crash," a University of Washington press release says. That might not sound entirely reassuring. But the researchers say a similar system installed on a real car might help risky drivers avoid a crash altogether. A team led by Linda Ng Boyle, an industrial and systems engineer at the University of Washington, first had a group of 53 drivers, ages 18 to 21, attempt to drive a simulator while simultaneously playing a matching game. As an incentive to take the game seriously, they paid drivers according to the correct ...