Not everyone has the latest car or cell phone. But there is still plenty of modern-day technology that can lead to a costly or deadly crash.
Relying on new-age advances can lead to disaster or even death, here’s how:
- Phone use: It can be challenging to imagine life before cell phones, but transporting yourself to that mindset may help preserve your safety. Stowing your phone away can prevent you from making a quick call or reading a text message. A few seconds of distracted driving is all it takes to cover a lot of ground and end up in a crash.
- Navigation tools: Using an internal GPS or hooking your phone up to your car can help you remain focused in some instances, but not while fiddling with it while driving. If you suddenly become disconnected, it’s not worth trying to reconnect while operating the vehicle. Instead, a passenger can sort out the issue, or you can pull over to a safe place to fix it. Downloading maps and routes ahead of time can also be helpful.
- Self-driving: The ultimate hands-free driving tool or autonomous driving could also be one of the most concerning ones if technical difficulties arise. Self-driving car crashes happen at a much higher rate than human-driven cars — or 9.1 times every million miles driven as opposed to 4.1 every million miles driven.
These tools only scratch the surface of the technology used behind the wheel in this day and age. The underlying issue is accidents tend to happen when these tools take up too much of a driver’s attention span or when reliance on them is heavy. Rather than putting trust in these often helpful advances, it’s crucial to find a balance between using them to supplement driving while being fully in control of your vehicle.
