Originally Posted by bonerp

Go to BMW mate - my M5 is awesome.

Originally Posted by fatalsaint

Well.. even though I said you and I won't agree on the laws I'll continue for a bit.

First: I don't think Texting while driving is a good idea for the vast majority of people. I just don't think it should be a law to such.

For your argument about holding a conversation taking more brainpower than yelling at your child I disagree. Both require similar amount of cognition. Holding a conversation with the neighbor sitting next to me actually takes more of my thought than texting (there's a caveat explained below).. because I am focused on what they are saying, or what I'm yelling to my kids, or looking at my kids in the mirror instead of focused on the road.

So IMHO, the risk of texting while driving increases and decreases with the type of phone you are using - and is heavily dependent on how responsible the person doing it is. However, a swerving vehicle is a swerving vehicle, no matter what the reason is. And this is where the "Reckless Driving" should be employed.

Originally Posted by Texrat

Wrong, wrong, wrong. This isn't about brainpower per se, and certainly not about opinion fatalsaint-- exhaustive studies have proved the point and been verified time and time again by peers.

Please read the actual studies. The important finding here is that we don't engage visual processing for someone with us-- only when we speak to someone remotely. That finding is so fundamental here that it has to be given more consideration than a casual read-through. Remote conversations highly compete with the attention we need for driving. That's no longer up for debate-- the evidence is conclusive... and the conclusions scary.

Originally Posted by fatalsaint

I did go to your link, and the subsequent link to the University of Utah. The theme is the same... they test undistracted drivers, drunk drivers, and texting drivers.

To use your style:

Undistracted <> Yelling at Kids, turning radio knobs, talking to a neighbor.

Originally Posted by Texrat

I'm frustrated by the fact that you're glossing over the key part here... but I'll only pound on a dead horse so long. Besides, not my mission to change your mind on anything. I have to reserve that energy for my stubborn kids.

“Drivers need to keep not only their hands on the wheel, they also have to keep their brains on the road,” said researcher Marcel Just.

Talking on a cell phone has a special social demand, and not interacting with the caller can be interpreted as rude or insulting behaviour, he added.

A passenger, by contrast, is likely to recognise increased demands on the driver’s attention and stop talking.

Just’s team used state-of-the-art functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) to measure activity in 20,000 brain locations, each about the size of a peppercorn. Measurements were recoded every second.

The listening-and-driving mode produced a 37 percent decrease in activity of the brain’s parietal lobe, which is associated with driving.

They steered a car along a virtual winding road either while they were undisturbed or while they were deciding whether a sentence they heard was true or false.

A study showed that the part of the brain that controls vision becomes less active when people focus on something visually while having a conversation -- underscoring the hazards of talking on your cell phone while driving. Human factors experts say hands-free phones do not lower risk. Drivers on the phone are four times more likely to have accidents.

Originally Posted by fatalsaint

That still refers to talking. So just explain to me: Are you supporting a Law to remove cell phones completely from cars?

It seems silly to me that if people believe that using a cell phone at all in a car increases the risk of an accident - why doesn't the law specify that? Why did they (most likely politicians) chicken out and single out texting only?