Toyota ad hijacks Siri to switch off iPhones while driving
marketingmagazine.co.uk
marketingmagazine.co.uk
This seems like it would be more likely to cause an accident as people have to divert attention from driving to mess with their phone so they can get navigation back (and having listened to the advert, I know I would be very distracted by it).
Finally, is this even legal? I have no idea of the law in Sweden (and IANAL) but I feel like you could make the point that this advert is interfering with your device without authorisation.
(Oh, how I long to be wrong on this, but I strongly suspect that nothing, or at least nothing that will make the campaign a net negative, will come of the fact that they violated the hell out of the CFAA.)
Is it illegal for me to unplug your computer? Jerkish, sure, but illegal only, maybe, in very rare circumstances.
Don't misattribute the responsibility.
Calm 'the fuck' down.
The only thing that would cause an accident would be if the driver diverted his or her attention from the road instead of stopping the vehicle in a responsible manner.
by the way, I don't like being made to interact with clunky robotic devices in a manner that suggests they might be human for the purpose of [marketing] making unintelligent plebians think 'wow that's cool'. If it's lifelike I'll use it like it's a personality, but otherwise it should just be a set of commands. Stop trying to confuse my socially inept brain
Valid? They are completely and utterly unnecessary. I was listening to music before the iPhone existed. I was also driving from point A to point B before GPS navigation existed. Funny, if you know how to read a map it you don't get lost.
No, these things are not necessary. It's one of those cases of "Just because you can <insert function> it doesn't mean you should".
Streaming Pandora while driving or using a shitty phone navigation system isn't a right. And certainly not one that is above the implied right to be safe on the road and responsibility to operate a vehicle in a manner that does not endanger the lives of others.
We are not entitled to use these toys while driving. Just because the features are there does not mean the driver MUST use them or IS ENTITLED to use them.
Let's start from the correct starting point: A driver should not interact with their phone in almost any way while driving. Everything else derives from there.
Now my docked phone in navigation mode is disabled, and I have to fumble for the airplane mode switch to then it back on, distracting me.
Or, my passenger, texting urgent details to someone else while plugged in to power, loses connection and doesn't realize. His message, "don't delete pied piper," never makes it to staff and a startup is ruined.
Or, the cell phone hidden the in the car by a jealous husband gets switched off, convincing him that the jig is up and an unstable situation turns grim.
Google and Apple should treat this as a security vulnerability. I think there were pranks related to Xbox voice control as well.
I wonder if there's any sort of sentence you can make that isn't actually "xbox shut off" but is interpreted by the xbox as such.
Perhaps something like "Ex Blocks Shout Ov".
(disclosure: I live in France, and as far as cycling culture/acceptance and infrastructure is concerned, this is a third-world country)
OTOH, I'm always wary when I see cyclists on roads where heavy boxes run with 40-80 miles per hour...
I do see this remark ("you dumb kids on your bikes break all the traffic laws!!") on all the web forums for the local newspaper, whenever any article comes along about bike lanes or whatever. I just don't see people on bikes breaking traffic laws anywhere near as often as people in cars.
As for needing to avoid things, would you call traffic circles or pedestrians a "hazard" as well? Again, you're in a two-ton metal box, none of this stuff is going to do anything more than scratch your paint.
If you want cyclists off roads, lobby to change the law.
Like I said, the world changes. We got to this autoist-centric world slowly and through a lot of policy choices, and we'll move away from it the same way.
A pedestrian myself, I've observed that the largest risk to cyclists appears to be either at the lights or in slow moving traffic.
This could be incorrect, but I think almost all mid-range cars come with parking sensors which alert drivers to objects around them. However, they typically only sense objects in front of or behind the vehicle.
Therefore, I think it would be great to extend parking sensors to provide 360 degree detection. As a driver, your car would be able tell you if there is a cyclist behind you, in your blind spot, stationary or moving - all without having to take your concentration of the road ahead - including pedestrians who choose to jump out right in front of you.
I don't know if this is present in executive cars, such as the Mercedes E/S class, however, it would be an amazing kit to have, and I think it should be a legal requirement on all busses and HGVs - the single largest cause of accidents between cyclists and vehicles.
It's a neat idea though, and if it is already on higher end models it'll probably trickle down eventually. Eliminating blind spots seems obvious - I imagine check the blind spot before moving is one of the first behaviours people lose after passing their test. I very rarely see drivers do it.
> I think it should be a legal requirement on all busses and HGVs - the single largest cause of accidents between cyclists and vehicles.
Do you have a link for this? It seems hard to believe given how relatively low the numbers of those vehicles are. Rospa [0] say it's cars or taxis which I'd have expected, although they do point out 20% of fatalities in London involve an HGV - and say one quarter of serious injuries are a bus/HGV (as you'd expect, performing a left turn). So more than I'd have guessed, but I'm not sure about the single largest?
For what it's worth they also say 75% of accidents happen at or near a junction which matches pretty well to your observation of lights/slow moving traffic.
[0] http://www.rospa.com/road-safety/advice/pedal-cyclists/facts...
In 2013, HGVs were the cause of approx. 65% of all deaths of a cyclist (http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-london-25080427).
* 2010: 10 deaths, four involving HGVs
* 2011: 16 deaths, 12 involving HGVs
* 2012: 14 deaths, five involving HGVs
* 2013 so far: 14 deaths, nine involving HGVs
In fact, it looks like every cyclist death this year (up to 9th April) has been from a collision with a HGV (http://www.london24.com/news/cycling/london_cycle_deaths_201...).
I've not read the 2014 report from ROSPA, so I will take a look! Thanks for posting the link!
matthewmacleod 28 minutes ago
Please stop fucking doing that. The number of times I've nearly been hit by other cyclists, who no doubt also "looked to see if it was clear", is terrifying.
I hope in 10 years people using their phones while driving will be seen on the same scale as drunk driving. At least drunk drivers keep their eyes on the road...
That said, yea - anyone in a car not paying attention are lethal, it's not easy to predict what someone is going to do even at 30mph if they act like they have the whole road to themselves.
Also a good argument for not using a radio in a car, but that is mostly my own personal bias.
Siri is a network service, it can't work locally.
In fact, IIRC, it had an offline mode back in the day before Apple bought them.
OTOH, if you crash and die, you'll miss all calls. And the other passengers of the other car too.
Parent wasn't talking about answering calls while on the road. Parent was referring to missing a call. If they need to have their phone on, that's completely reasonable. Maybe they're even an emergency driver. It doesn't mean they won't pull over when there's a call.
Having the phone on doesn't mean talking on the phone while driving. In fact, I'm pretty sure siri is disabled during phone calls, so this is a feel-good farce with very dangerous implications. One that's more likely to cause crashes than prevent them. Thankfully this happened in a low density country with safe roads.
Yeah, because they're gonna pull over on the side on the road to answer it.
In a world where people are even TEXTing while driving, pulling over to answer a phone is what most people would do, right?
Maybe you only know completely insensitive and inconsiderate jerks, but most of the drivers I know abhor texting/calling while driving. Don't turn your problem into everybody's problem.
And when he gets home, complain to the national govt communication agency, and Toyota.
I agree with that. Further, Toyota, nor anyone else, has no right to reach down into my life and disable something.
Apparently, headsets do not make calling while driving as safe as talking to a passenger while driving. If something happens, a passenger in the car with you will see it and instinctively shut up. Someone at the other end of the phone won't know anything is going on and will keep talking, keeping your attention distracted. Not for long, to be sure, but when you're behind the wheel of a car, half a second can easily make the difference between life and death.
But encouraging people to use safer alternatives is better then banning (or preventing) these alternatives because some people will always use a phone in the car. Remember that the average John Smith salesman who is about to use his phone to call his costumer doesn't immediately know how to turn off the airplane mode. He might be distracted for quite a while because he can't figure out why siri is not working. And if he is in a hurry, he will certainly not pull over!
Yes, as a driver I take it as my responsibility to shush people (whether talking via a handsfree arrangement or with passengers) when I need concentration or something unexpected has come up on the road.
That is a profound level of incompetence along a number of dimensions. Obligatory: ThisIsWhyWeCan'tHaveNiceThings.
If it happens to kill your navigation, it's going to cause a lot of unnecessary distraction. Whether you decide to turn it on again while driving or wait until you can stop.
Pizza Hut recently did something similar with their pizza box projector[1], a fun little idea which ultimately probably only directly reached a few hundred customers but which millions of people around the world read an article about.
[1] http://www.businessinsider.com.au/pizza-hut-box-turns-into-m...
What we saw in the ad is an ideal situation for the mechanism.
Only a miniscule amount of iPhones will be affected by this. In real life, iPhones won't be plugged in, won't have Hello Siri enabled (an explicit thing to do), won't be turned to a station that plays the ad, and so on.
-- actually, an iPhone will only respond to Hey Siri if you have _explicitly_ turned that feature on - it's not enabled by default and I would imagine that the vast majority of people wouldn't have bothered.
But here this is a malicious use of the feature. It doesn't even assume there might be other people in the car. I wouldn't be surprised if people start boycotting Toyotas if they get disturbed by this stupid ad.
I noticed on windows 10 you can switch Cortana to "recognize my voice". This would fix the problem for anyone with a voice sufficiently different from the ad
Zooming out, lots of ads expose people many kinds of danger. It's easier to criticize this ad because the danger-connection is obvious. It's harder to run robust thought-experiments about the effect of thousands of unhealthy food ads (or gambling ads, smoking ads, 411 scams, credit card offers). But the (speaking unscientifically) aggregate millions of extra calories consumed is a big deal.
So saying, "Toyota shouldn't've done this" neglects wider contexts.
[0] http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2014/06/16/aaron-paul-xbox-one...
That was a joke many years ago. Not so joke today?
Clever ad, btw. It's not like they are running this every day to enforce some law. It might be a little distraction (on top of the other 200 distraction/minute you get while driving) but it's good press, and for a good reason.
I wish there was something one could do every time we see someone staring at their phone while driving. I've seen it so many times. I wonder how many accidents those people have caused.
Frankly, the problem does have a technological solution. Is there no interest on the part of companies like Apple to fix the problem? I wonder how many people have been killed by iPhones and other "smart" phones?
One of the first things I noticed about smart phones was just how much more of your attention and focus they require for normal use. I've owned cellphones dating back to when they were the size of a shoe-box, including many Blackberry's. The last Blackberry I owned could be used with one hand. In fact, most everything I needed to do could be done with my thumb by using the rotary encoder on the side.
The minute we went to touch screens things changed radically. Usability, from a certain perspective, suffered greatly. A touch interface is inherently fragile. With physical buttons you know what you are touching without looking. You can learn shape and location based cues that do not require looking at the phone. A touch interface cannot be explored. If you touch the screen a mm this way or that way you can make an absolute mess out of things. A touch interface requires that you look at he phone and focus on it intently enough that your brain task switches during that time.
My own test is what I call the "Mom and Dad Test". I can deal with my kids in the back seat and retain far more attention on the road and my surroundings than when I have to look at and interact with a smart phone. The act of operating a smart phone, reading small type, locating buttons, menu's, understating state and then precisely touching small controls, seems to require far more CPU cycles than most other distractions.
Of course, I haven't conducted any studies. This isn't my field. This is just conjecture and one data point. Having one teenage kid now driving we had to make sure we pounded the "don't use the phone while driving" message into his head. It's scary, actually. And, it is also scary to realize that you could be perfectly responsible while someone in another car might plow into you because they were focusing on a small little button on their iPhone to be able to click it.
I hate government over-regulation and the insertion into our lives. However, this might just be a case where a law or mandate is required. It needs to be simple. We don't need a new government agency with 100,000 employees and 50,000 pages of rules. It can be stated very clearly: By the year 2020 car drivers should not be able to use their phones while the vehicle is in motion. Let car and phone manufacturers figure out how to accomplish this feat. If it means nobody in the car can use their phone.
One of the arguments being made is that for navigation. Frankly, I hate using navigation on my iPhone. It goes back to the fragility of the interface. I have a dedicated GPS unit on the dashboard. It's pretty hard to screw up and it is pretty much immune to fumbling. The using Apple/Google for navigation on the iPhone can fall pray to the issues and fragility of a touch screen system with a pile of unrelated apps.
How many of you are willing to lose your kids or your own life to the issues introduced by smart phones while driving? Right.
Apple has enough money to figure out how to solve this problem. They need to solve this problem.
You also need to opt-in: it's turned off by default and can be enabled by going to Settings > General > Siri > Allow "Hey Siri."