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Software engineers and designers from Apple and Google are, it would seem, better at designing a safe interface for your car's infotainment system than any car company. A research paper, published by the American Automobile Association says that Apple's CarPlay and Google's Android Auto software can be between 24 per cent and 31 per cent faster to use than the systems made specifically for your car, which can mean having your eyes off the road for as much as five fewer seconds.
According to the AAA's paper: "CarPlay and Android Auto provided more functionality and resulted in lower levels of workload than the native OEM infotainment systems. That said, both incurred moderately high levels of demand, thus providing opportunities to improve the user experience. For example, CarPlay had lower overall demand than Android Auto for sending text messages and Android Auto had lower overall demand than CarPlay for destination entry to support navigation. In light of the current results, both systems can be improved toward more optimal user experiences."
Interestingly, Apple has recently announced that it will, later this year, allow access to Google's popular Google Maps app within CarPlay, which could narrow the gap between the two systems when it comes to navigation inputs.
It would seem, then, that having your phone plugged into your car can, potentially, be safer than using the touchscreen software that originally came with that car. The Road Safety Authority (RSA), though, is cautioning Irish drivers that safer doesn't necessarily mean actually safe.
An RSA spokesperson told CompleteCar that: "Much of the international research indicates that talking on a hands free is not as safe as widely believed, due to the cognitive distraction involved, and there is evidence to suggest that it is in fact as distracting as using a hand held device. The World Health Organisation report on 'Mobile phone use: a growing problem of driver distraction' states that phone conversations on a mobile are more distracting that conversations with passengers in the vehicle because: 'passengers are more aware of the driving situation and road environment, and can moderate, adapt or delay the conversations during challenging driving circumstances, a phenomenon that does not occur during phone conversations.'
"Researchers working on the 1997 Redelmeier and Tibshirani study found that the risk of a collision when using a mobile phone was four times higher than the risk when a mobile telephone was not being used. The results of the study also indicate that hands-free phones offer no safety advantage over handheld units."