VIDEO: Finally, a car stereo that can ignore you and make the roads safer
Dan Seitz One of the biggest problems on the road is distracted driving. Believe it or not, idiots yakking on their cell phones and fiddling with the radio are officially a bigger risk on the road than your buddy who always tries to drive home after drinking a dozen shots in an hour. Texting while driving is obviously the biggest problem, but you’d be amazed how many accidents are caused by drivers looking at the radio instead of the road.
Cirque, a controls manufacturer, now has a solution for that: a car stereo that works differently if it senses you’re using your right hand.
Sound weird? Here’s the video:
It’s not a replacement for the best solution, which is having radio controls built into your steering wheel (what, you thought those were for your convenience? They’re there to save your ass), but it does disable certain functions that are too distracting to do while driving.
This does have other applications; for example, if you were holding your smartphone with one hand, it could use Cirque’s technology to reconfigure the keyboard to make it easier to type, although for now the technology is only designed for knobs, obviously. But mostly it’ll be good for keeping the thicker of us from acting like morons on the road.
Proximity Sensing with Grip Detection [Cirque]
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