The Dangers of Smart Phones

As our main feature discusses, the Federated Insurance DriveSAFE program measures the following data points while techs are driving company vehicles to their daily jobs:

• Smart phone use
• Speed
• Hard braking
• Harsh cornering
• Hard acceleration

Although those are all bad habits worth breaking, drivers who use their smart phones while driving are by definition “distracted drivers” who are more likely to get into an accident because they may be unable to react in time to avoid one.

“If you’re driving at 55 miles an hour while distracted on a phone, in 5 seconds you will have traveled the length of a football field,” says John Gehan, executive vice president and chief insurance officer, Federated Insurance.

Measuring smart phone use while driving differentiates Federated’s DriveSAFE program from other telematics offered from other companies. 

“Our program knows every time that drivers pick up their phones while the vehicle is moving,” Gehan says.

In other words, DriveSAFE detects when the driver’s attention is off the road. However, it doesn’t penalize drivers who are using the phone’s GPS for navigation or making a hands-free call while the phone is safely placed in a dashboard mount.

During our visit to Bob Frame Plumbing’s South Bend, Indiana offices, Gehan spelled out the particular dangers of smart phone usage while driving:

According to the National Safety Council, 30 percent of all vehicle crashes involve the use of a smart phone while driving. And the council says 40 percent of all work-related deaths involve a vehicle.

“It doesn’t take a rocket scientist to say, OK, there’s correlation here between the use of a smart phone and car crashes,” Gehan explains.

Our main feature also recounts how Federated worked with a technology company Cambridge Mobile Telematics to develop its DriveSAFE program.

“Many other driving behaviors also decrease through the use of a telematics program,” Gehan adds “For example, CMT statistics show that hard braking – in other words, when drivers have to reduce their speed significantly in a short period of time – goes down by 51 percent. Hard braking could result from being on your phone and the driver reacting too late at the last minute.”

CMT figures also show that speeding decreases by 30 percent and phone use goes down by 39 percent. 

“So if you’re controlling your hard braking, speeding and phone usage, then we know that that’s going to reduce crashes,” Gehan explains.

As an executive in the risk management industry, Gehan thinks drivers are putting themselves into too much risk every time they check their phones while behind the wheel. Considering all the safety equipment that comes standard on most cars – antilock brakes, cameras and collision avoidance systems – in the last couple of years, Gehan says the number of vehicle crashes has actually gone up.

“That’s because we’ve got this other force out there,” he adds, “and the insurance industry thinks phone usage while driving is that force that’s pulling things in the other direction.”