From our blog at Decision Points : Monday, 20 Feb 2012

During a press conference on Feb. 16, the U.S. Secretary of Transportation Ray Lahood, and the National Transportation Safety Administration’s (NHTSA) Administrator David Strickland, presented new proposed guidelines designed to encourage automakers to limit the risk of driver distraction when using communications, navigation, and entertainment technologies built into vehicles.

The first phase of the guidelines include recommendations to do the following:

• Reduce the complexity of in-vehicle devices, and the amount of time it takes to use those devices;
• To limit system operations to require only one hand;
• To limit the time required to glance at a device to no more than 2 seconds;
• To limit the amount of unnecessary visual information in the driver’s field of view;
• To limit the number of manual inputs needed to operate a device.

In addition, the guidelines suggest that automakers disable certain functions while the vehicle is in motion, specifically text messaging, Internet browsing, social media use, entering navigation system addresses, entering phone numbers for dialing, and displaying more than 30 characters of text unrelated to the driving task.

( Read the entire article )