X-Text future technology
We have decided that our project will be called X-Text. Twenty years the future, we hope that X-Text will be in all manually operated vehicles. The idea is to stop distracted driving by using pressure sensors on the steering wheel, forcing drivers to have two hands on the wheel at all times. If a driver does not have a hand on the wheel for over 2 seconds, an annoying beeping noise will come on, gradually getting louder and faster, annoying the driver, reminding and encouraging them put their hands back on the wheel. 4 seconds later, your headlights will turn on, telling other drivers that a) you are in trouble and you can’t put your hands on the wheel, or b) you are not following the rules of the road. When they put their hands back on the wheel, the pressure sensors will kick in, and stop the beeping. This is possible because all cars today have computers in them, so the computer will register the pressure sensors and trigger the beeping noise. As said before, there will always be a certain amount of people that will attempt to text and drive, no matter the consequences, even death. Our invention will limit the driver’s ability to text and drive and will hopefully stop texting and driving before a crash happens.
OnStar and Bluetooth take the same approach to car communication. With OnStar, there is an area that you plug your phone into, and there is a touch screen and you can do tasks like text and make phone calls. This is problematic due to the fact that you have to take your hands off the wheel to text and call, so it is pretty much like taking a phone and doing all the stuff on that. Because it’s distracting, this is a huge flaw Onstar. Bluetooth allows for hands-free, voice activated phone calling but no texting. But this still leaves people the opportunity to text on their phone if they want to.
Now let’s see how ours is different from the rest.
With X-Text, the problem of distraction will be solved, and there will be no more texting and driving, or using Bluetooth or Onstar and taking your eyes off the road causing a crash, saving lives and preventing traffic.
Of course, X-Text will change the future of texting and driving and save many lives. Up next are the technological breakthroughs, where we will discuss what breakthroughs will be needed to make this invention become a reality.
Breakthroughs
Like any future product, the X-Text has breakthroughs that we need to solve. These breakthroughs include creating automated cars, convincing people to buy the cars, and better sensor technology.
Although convincing people to buy the X-Text cars is not technological, it is still a breakthrough. Most people who text and drive are most likely at least slightly addicted to their phones. This means that people who text and drive probably would not want to stop texting and driving, so they would not buy the cars. In order to solve this breakthrough, we would just need time. If our invention were to become a reality, all cars would probably eventually have X-Text on it. People who do not want to stop texting and driving would either have to stop driving or drive with a very old car.
Creating automated cars would involve a lot of complex technology, even if it is only to program the vehicle to stop or pull over. We would need sensor technology to sense and identify where the car can pull over. Another thing we would need to do is code a car to safely come to a stop when the sensor detects no hands on the steering wheel for a certain amount of time. Coding a car is something people are already capable of doing but the specific code and its complexity are still in the developmental stages. However, there are still other problems. People who are very addicted to their phones may try to hack the car to not stop when the sensor senses zero hands on the wheel. In order to prevent this from happening, we would need to find a way to not allow people to mess with the code, such as firewalls and security measures.
We do not necessarily need better sensor technology. Instead, we need to figure out how to put our hand sensor technology on a steering wheel and connect it to the breaking system. Cars already have existing types of sensor technology. For example, the alarm that rings when someone touches your car is a type of hand sensor technology, and many cars can park themselves.
As you can see, our project is actually something that we could see in the near future, but we just need some more complex technology.