NOT THE SHARPEST KNIVES IN THE DRAWER: Driven To Distraction
Texting while driving is so yesterday! Now, a plugged-in motorist can update his or her Facebook status while “driving” (Just passed another American Recovery and Reinvestment Act sign on the road; P-U! Dead skunk. Can smell it for miles.; “It’s raining buckets. I wonder how much space I should leeeeee-aaaaah …..”) via OnStar.
The press release and promotional video explains how this new, distracting feature works:
Audio Facebook Updates would allow OnStar subscribers to verbally update their Facebook status message through audio recordings and/or listen to their most recent news feed messages through the OnStar Virtual Advisor service.
Automoblog explains it is “retarded” (not The Stiletto’s word choice) to “add yet another way drivers can pay less attention to driving and more on sh*t that doesn’t matter” (redacted by The Stiletto):
As if we need more useless and uninteresting Facebook updates in the first place. Half of the updates in my news feed are already worthless Farmville invites, now people have another method to bore me with too much information. And if that wasn’t bad enough, the update doesn’t even dictate into text – it’s sent to Facebook as an audio file, making you click on the file to listen to that crap you don’t want to hear. …
For the love of god people, do you not realize that you’re piloting a two-ton hunk of metal down the road at deadly speeds when you’re driving? A flick of the wrist in the wrong direction can KILL you, your passengers, and other people on the road. Disconnect – it’s not that important.
So it’s a good thing that “OnStar continues to enhance its core safety focus” by teaming up with the GM Foundation to contribute $500K to the University of Michigan Health System’s International Center for Automotive Medicine for a study that links “actual OnStar crash data … to actual physical injuries sustained in vehicle crashes” that will ultimately “allow OnStar to predict not only the severity of a crash, but assist emergency care providers by providing the probability of certain types of injuries sustained by crash victims.” And that another $100K will be donated to enable the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention to “convene an expert panel to develop a multi-site study” that will “assess the correlation of real-time injury predictions sent directly from crash data with actual injury severity” that will “optimiz[e] the potential for automatic crash notification technologies to save lives.”
Talk about closing the garage door after the horseless carriage has run off (the road)!
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