Know a young
driver who's ignoring your pleas to buckle up? Chevrolet suggests you might try
to see if they'll listen to a different authority figure: their car.
Chevrolet is introducing a feature that will temporarily
block the auto from shifting into gear if the seat belt isn't buckled. A
message will alert the driver to buckle up in order to shift into gear.
After 20
seconds, the vehicle will operate normally.
The feature, which Chevrolet says is an industry
first, will come standard in the 2020 models of the Traverse SUV, Malibu sedan
and Colorado pickup truck. It will be part of the “Teen Driver” package, which
can also be used to set speed alerts and a maximum speed, among other controls,
and give parents "report cards" tracking a teen's driving behavior.
Teens have among the lowest rates of seat belt use,
with less than 60% of high school students saying they always wear their seat
belts as passengers.
Chevrolet safety
engineer Tricia Morrow, herself the mother of a teen driver, hopes the feature
"will help guide more young drivers to wear their seat belts and encourage
positive conversations among teens, their peers and parents."
A similar
feature was available for some fleet customers who purchased GM vehicles in the
past, but the new teen driver rollout is an industry first for consumer vehicles.
Research from the Highway Loss
Data Institute found that Chevy's system of keeping the car in park increased
seat belt use by 16%, compared to a vehicle that simply made a warning noise
when a seat belt was unbuckled.
However, more
recent research from the institute, which is supported by the auto insurance
industry, has found improving warning sounds — making the beeping last longer,
or even continue indefinitely — could increase seat belt use by more than 30%.
Lead author
David Kidd, a senior research scientist at the institute, says the result was a
surprise.
"We
completely expected that restricting vehicle function in some way ... would be
more effective than providing this ongoing beeping," he says. However, Kidd notes that those who are truly
opposed to wearing seat belts might be more likely to be swayed by a car that
won't move than a car that won't stop beeping.
This is not the
first time the car industry has tried to use technology to improve human
behavior.
In the 1970s,
when seat belt use was much lower, vehicle manufacturers introduced ignition
interlocks — devices to block cars from starting until the driver or front
passenger buckled up — to comply with federal safety standards.
People hated them.
"There was
so much pushback from consumers that Congress passed a law that drastically
limited what the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration could do,"
Kidd says.
But in the decades since, laws requiring seat belt use
have dramatically shifted patterns of behavior; nationwide, seat belt use has
increased from about 14% in the ealy 1980s to about 90% today.
And
manufacturers are testing out other ways cars can more proactively promote
safety. Increasingly, vehicles are being designed not only to protect occupants
in a crash, but to prevent crashes from occurring in the first place. For
example, an automatic emergency braking system that will avoid striking a
pedestrian, or a driver monitoring system that will notice when drivers are
distracted or drunk.
From NPR (edited)
