Voice input exists for a reason.
Designed and manufactured by the car company, probably has something to do with it. And after-market radios/stereos are designed to fit slots provided for that purpose by the manufacturer.
As @stinkinbadgers noted, the law is not keeping up. Some manufacturer car systems now replicate the phone’s own interface on their own built-in screens. So you could technicslly be ‘using’ the phone only by using the car’s own screen. Go figure.
OTOH distracted driving (driving without due care and attention, in UK) is just that. Trouble is it probably needs some proximate cause, but (IANAL) in UK I think it may be possible for a cop/court to infer it merely from observed/evidenced driving behaviour, without provable cause (such as using a phone). And as well as DWDCAA, there are specific phone use restrictions in law here in UK too.
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Lawsuit against McDs for 3rd degree burns to someone’s ears in 3…2…1…
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I do, too. Works great.
Nope, not in this jurisdiction. An installed car stereo or infotainment system = built in. The exact same thing wired to work with the car but sitting on the passenger seat = not built in.
If you put it up to your ear, you can hear Idaho.
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For my amusement whenever I witness someone sternly speaking at their phone 
Voice input may actually be more distracting than touching a screen because you have to think about how to say the command so the machine will understand you. It’s more cognitively taxing than a conversation with a person.
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Sitting on the car seat, clearly. But, where does it cross the line and become built in?
In a prior car that didn’t have gps and before iPhones, I had a setup with:
- Vehicle specific mount. Basically a metal part bolted in the dash sticking out through a seem in the dash panels.
- GPS Mount bolted to that.
- GPS firmly encased in the mount, a garmin.
- USB power plug for the GPS run through the same dash seem to a power source inside the dashboard.
You could remove the GPS, much like a pull out radio can be removed.
Does that go far enough to be built in?
I’m curious about how they defined it, and if it would be possible to hook a phone up to meet the definition. Not necessarily easy or practical.
I’m not sure how it would exactly be interpreted in those specific situations, but it uses the term “built-in” and goes through a lot of hoops to provide specific exemptions for CBs and Ham radios, both of which are usually mounted as you describe. Since those exemptions are required, I’d hazard a guess that any electronic device in a mount would not qualify as “built-in.”
Gotta check it for parasites before you chew.
Guy had video evidence it was a hash brown, but it was inadmissible cos it looked like it had been shot with a potato.
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I would disagree based on the designs newer cars employ. They are much like smart phones and tablets when it comes to their UI design. They use large digital buttons that are spaced properly apart. And they are easily tappable with a little mental memory as to which ones are where.
This!
(clearly Tobin has not had the misfortune of having to shuttle children around in a car…)
nah I am just good at filtering them out…
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Worst ones I ever saw:
- a guy playing guitar
- a guy playing clarinet
- a teenage idiot eating greasy fried chicken wings in a 1972 Country Squire with a smooth hard plastic steering wheel (yes, I was in that one, with three other kids, and we never let him drive the carpool again)
- a woman curling her eyelashes with those weird scissor clamp thingies
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This is why I rock a Nokia N-Gage.
I can talk in the car all I want and just claim I was enjoying a delicious taco.
How else can you choose the lesser of two weevils?
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I agree to some extent, but equally, to some extent you still need to look to ensure you do touch the right part of the screen/‘button’, in the right place. You cannot feel a digital ‘switch’ on a screen. With an analogue/tactile switch/button you mostly don’t need to look to ensure you switched the right thing. Attention is removed from the road - perhaps only infinitesimally more, but it is still removed away from what the driver ought to be looking at.
And it encourages more screen touching for other, non-essential things, which is not to be encouraged.
I appreciate this verging on a ‘get off my lawn’ position but I remain unconvinced sufficient ergonomic and safety work has been done, and that there is a risk that some of this direction of travel is led by “ooh - consumers want big shiny screens” marketing decisions (aka fashion over function).
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Fair enough. But progress is gonna progress.
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