Safety is engineered, it's not about throwing as many devices you can to a car hoping that something sticks and improve safety by chance.
Safety belts work even if I am unconscious, a car that slows down works even if I am unconscious, airbags work even if I am unconscious, so they are 100% safety devices, as in "they keep me safe when everything else failed and things are already out of my control".
Hands-free calls are a safety feature because they are designed to eliminate the distraction of operating a phone.
But they are a workaround, the real safety feature is "operating a phone while driving is prohibited by the law" because the simple act of talking is a distraction.
Voice commands are a workaround because the real safety feature is "touch screens are a distraction and you shouldn't use them while driving"
If we remove touch screens from cars, there is no need for voice commands.
Most of the sources of distraction in modern cars are caused by functions that do not belong to cars and are hard to operate.
I work for a large insurance company based in Europe whose primary business is car insurance (>10 million clients).
We launched a two-year program to monitor the distractions of our customers (we especially monitored the phone's activity, thinking it was a major issue) and the primary sources of distraction while driving are (in reverse order of importance)
- adjusting settings or operating car controls: less than 1%
- eating or drinking: 2-3%
- reaching for things: 2-3%
- talking: 4-5%
- multitasking: 5%
- looking at the GPS display: 10%
- texting and driving: 10%
- using a smartphone: 15%
- not looking at the road for too long: ~50%
there are subcategories for each one of the macro-categories above.
For example:
Adjusting car settings like mirrors, seats, the heater is basically risk-free, more than half of the distractions in this category are caused by adjusting the audio volume. It makes sense, muscle memory for settings helps us to not think too much when doing it. Regulating the audio volume usually follows some unexpected event that forces us to change it. Still only 1/200 distractions are caused by it.
Eating or drinking is mostly eating here, I guess in the USA it would be the opposite. Bringing hot beverages inside the car is quite common there, here is quite rare. People spill the coke on their shirts or choke on the water anyway. It is also very common to frequently stop at motorway restaurants here to eat, drink, use the toilets, rest a little bit and eventually refuel. It helps to keep this kind of distractions to a minimum.
Reaching for things is less dangerous when the driver picks up things from the driver's or the passenger's seat, opening the glove compartment is two times as dangerous, picking up something from the pedals area is the most dangerous of them all.
Talking is interesting because there's no difference between people talking with other occupants and people talking on the phone. What's less interesting and probably obvious is that 8/10 happen when people are arguing. But 2/10 are people talking normally like they would to a car to activate the wiper.
Multitasking is when people do other things unrelated to driving the car itself. For example, handling pets is more dangerous than applying makeup that is more dangerous than handling children. The good news is when people carry kids around they drive more carefully.
The GPS display is a major source of distraction, no matter what voice people chose to give them directions, the tendency to not trust other people's instructions makes people look at the screen to confirm what they heard. Also, there are times, not rare, when the instructions are not clear or haven't been updated to the actual road conditions (a roadblock for example.
Despite the technological improvements, texting and driving is still very popular, especially among younger generations. More importantly, we counted using chat apps in this category and it's not surprisingly the vast majority of the cases.
Using a smartphone is an interesting one: while the "phone" part of the smartphone has been standardized and is easy to remote nowadays, most of the time people use the "smart" part of the smartphone, which cannot be remoted. They scroll the Instagram feed, they take pictures, make videos, and, despite having the freehands at their disposal, people prefer to send voice messages. Which involves removing your hands from the wheel.
Did you notice how many times talking and/or hearing voices caused a distraction?
But the most important of them all is not looking at the road. It sounds obvious once you hear it, but it happens a lot more than people think, 100 times more than turning the volume up or down. It could be an external event like an accident, an emergency vehicle passing by, a fire, or something that attracted the driver's attention like a billboard or a beautiful person walking on the sidewalk - it happens more often than you can imagine -. These are the "good" ones, often they don't last enough to cause severe accidents and people just end up rear-ending each other at the traffic lights. The real killer is being lost in one's thoughts, zoning out, keep driving on autopilot while you are not there anymore, and don't realize you are still in a car moving at 50km/h.
That's how accidents happen most of the time.
That's why I think that cars that slow down automatically or correct your errors are a breakthrough, they already exist on the market, have no voice control but they can alert you with a warning sound if they detect that you are distracted behind the wheel.
A car that adjusts the temperature of the heather using voice commands is not equally useful, I would argue that is completely useless unless fixing the temperature in the car will become a dangerous activity in the future, but honestly, I don't see that happening very soon.
So yes, small things are important, but BIG things are even more important.
Let's fix those before thinking that cars need UI/UX designers more than safety engineers.
Before "disrupting" the car industry for the sake of changing things and adding the cool factor to something that doesn't really need it.
p.s.: My opinion is based on the experience gathered doing my job, I'm not against voice commands because I don't like them, but because they can be a source of distraction per sé.
p.p.s.: it took me time to put this together, so please if you don't like it don't downvote it without leaving a comment. Thanks.