Connected cars may be the order of the day but the growing tribe of ‘distracted drivers’ is an irony that cannot be missed, said Richard D. Spitzer, Founder and CEO, Spitzer Group, a Texas-based consulting company.

Today’s cars come packed with infotainment features and applications such as music, navigation, GPS, wi-fi and telematics. Over the past decade, there has been an explosion of electronics in vehicles, but this has also raised the question of safety, said Spitzer, addressing a CII conference on innovation in the automotive industry.

“All these distractions lead to the drivers taking their eyes of the road. This makes people more susceptible to accidents than driving under intoxication.”

Electronics will make up 40 per cent of the overall composition of vehicles by 2015, from 19 per cent in 2004. The future points to augmented reality and tablet interface in cars.

Breaking the belief that smart features come only with expensive cars is Nissan’s Datsun Go, said Vincent Cobee, Corporate Vice-President, Global Datsun Business Unit, Nissan Motor, Japan.

Datsun Go is a compact hatchback unveiled earlier this week. Nissan has done away with the frills of a complex audio system by providing a simple ‘mobile docking station’ that tunes into music from your smart-phone and amplifies it on the car’s speakers. “This is an example of frugal engineering conceived at our tech centre in Chennai,” said Cobee.

More such innovations will happen in the future, even as the ‘distracted driver’ theory continues to haunt car makers.

> swetha.kannan@thehindu.co.in

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