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By MATT RICHTEL
People know they shouldn’t text and drive. Overwhelmingly, they tell pollsters that doing so is unacceptable and dangerous, and yet they do it anyway. They can’t resist. So safety advocates and public officials have called for a technological solution that does an end run around free will and prevents people from texting in the first place.
That’s where Scott Tibbitts comes in. A chemical engineer who built a company that made motors and docking stations for NASA, Mr. Tibbitts, 57, spent the last five years coming up with a novel way to block incoming and outgoing texts and to prevent phone calls from reaching a driver.
He wasn’t some crazy inventor or relentless self-promoter acting on his own. To bolster his engineering solution, he struck a partnership with two heavyweights: American Family Insurance, which agreed to invest in the technology, and, even more important, with Sprint. It agreed to allow Mr. Tibbitts’s company, Katasi, to use its network to stop texts. It was a kind of holy grail, safety advocates gushed, a first for an American phone carrier.
The product was being completed in February for a summer start — “a huge deal,” as it was characterized by David Teater, senior director for transportation initiatives at the National Safety Council, which works to curb distracted driving. Sprint hailed it as a major step. It seemed to answer a call from people like Senator John D. Rockefeller IV, Democrat of West Virginia, who had assailed the telecom and auto industries for keeping drivers connected all the time and urged them to find a “technology” solution.
And then things started to go wrong.
Shopping a Solution
The story starts with tragedy. On May 8, 2008, Mr. Tibbitts, who lives and works in Boulder, Colo., drove to Denver for a business meeting. When he arrived, he discovered that the executive with whom he was supposed to meet had been killed that very morning in a car crash caused by a teenager, who, Mr. Tibbitts was told, was texting.
At the time, Mr. Tibbitts was looking for a new venture, having sold his previous company, the Starsys Research Corporation, in January 2006. The death of the executive led Mr. Tibbitts to seize on distracted driving as his next entrepreneurial challenge. Adding incentive, he had two children who were about to reach driving age.
He immediately identified an engineering hurdle: To shut down a driver’s phone, you have to know that the person is driving. “How do we know the person is driving and not riding a horse or is a passenger on a bus?” he said. “How the heck do we do that?”
At the point when Mr. Tibbitts was starting to tease out this puzzle, a handful of technological attacks on distracted driving were already emerging. But they weren’t, and still mostly aren’t, able to answer the question that he was asking. Generally, these systems work by using a phone’s Global Positioning System capability to determine whether the phone is moving, say, more than 10 or 15 miles an hour. If the answer is yes, a screen pops up that allows the phone’s user to override the service if he or she isn’t the driver. (Of course, a driver can lie and thus bypass the system.) Another disadvantage of GPS systems is that they generally eat up a ton of battery life, experts said.
In January, in a parking lot in Boulder, Colo., Mr. Tibbitts huddled in the back seat of a 2002 Mazda Protégé to show off his solution. The car belonged to his son, Ryan, 20, who sat in the driver’s seat. Ryan reached to his left and pulled out a small square box that had been plugged into a port under the steering column. The port, called OBD 2, comes standard in cars built since 1996, and the black box plugged into it is part of a booming business called “telematics” — so named because it combines telecommunications and mobility. Ernst & Young predicts that by 2025, some 88 percent of new cars will have telematics and thus become so-called connected cars.
There are many reasons for connecting a car to the Internet. Cars that can send and receive information allow for remote diagnostics by technicians or for enhanced navigation services. Many of those applications are not yet developed, but insurance companies are now using telematics to measure driver behavior — do you speed or slam on the brakes? — and applying that information in setting insurance premiums.
Telematics also help Mr. Tibbitts shut down the phone. The telematics box sends a wireless message that the car is moving. The phone sends its own message about its location. Both sets of information — from the car and phone — are sent to Katasi’s servers. Then, an algorithm weighs the incoming data with other information, like the location of the phones belonging to all the people who drive the car and the starting point of the trip; if the trip starts at Junior’s high school, and mom and dad’s phones are at work, the driver has been identified — Junior is driving.
So what happens when husband and wife share a car and Katasi’s servers say that both are in the car at the same time with their phones? Which one is driving? At that point, Katasi generally doesn’t block the messages on the assumption that the passenger will prevent the driver from texting. The system is capable of blocking calls, email and other data, but initially the plan was to block texts.
In 2010, Mr. Tibbitts got a big break. American Family Insurance, which is based in Madison, Wis., where Mr. Tibbitts grew up, got wind of his project and was intrigued. The company eventually invested $1 million in Katasi.
Curt Davies, head of the connected-car team at American Family, was enthusiastic: “You don’t need to download an app. You start driving” and the technology “stops a text or call from getting to your phone.”
Mr. Tibbitts needed one more crucial ingredient: a telecommunications partner. Public safety advocates had dreamed about a so-called network solution to the distraction problem. The idea was that a phone carrier could shut down a driver’s phone automatically, at the level of the network, without giving the driver that initial choice to opt in or out. (The Katasi system does let a driver opt out, but only if that driver takes the initiative; the default is to block texts.) Another big advantage of such a system is that it would become easy for the network to automatically send outgoing messages like, “Junior can’t see your message right now because he’s driving.”
Mr. Tibbitts had initial conversations with AT&T and Verizon. Then, in the fall of 2012, he met with Sprint and got limited access to the company’s network to test his software. The next March, he showed up at Sprint headquarters in Overland Park, Kan., and, from the parking lot, called a Sprint product manager named Mark Chan, who works on distracted-driving solutions and had cooperated with Katasi.
“I’ve got something to show you,” he told Mr. Chan, who came outside and saw firsthand how his phone could be shut down by the Katasi system.
“Within 30 seconds, all texts to my phone stopped,” Mr. Chan said. “I said, ‘This is amazing.’ ”
A Changing Business Model
Cellphone carriers like Sprint have become strong opponents of distracted driving. That was not always so. When cellphones first became mass-market products, drivers were the target market. Carriers sold talk-time by the minute, so the more people talked, the more money carriers made. And people spend a lot of time in cars.
But business models have changed. Carriers now sell unlimited use, making it much less important to their bottom line that people talk or text behind the wheel.
“It did become less of a business interest for carriers to push the freedom of use wherever an individual might be,” said Ray Rothermel, internal counsel for Sprint, who works on government affairs.
Moreover, carriers can now receive fees from insurance companies for carrying the wireless connections on their networks — up to $5 a month a car. That money can add up.
Back in February, Mr. Rothermel described the partnership with Katasi as “a good-sized weapon in the war against distracted driving.”
At the time, it looked as if the Katasi technology might be deployed by summer. There was already talk of a price, perhaps $8 a month and $5 for individual trucks in a fleet, a potentially big market. But some questions were still being worked out, such as how it would be marketed.
Looming in the background was a more fundamental question: Would people use it? After all, the GPS solutions, limited though they might be, had been around for years and were getting only modest traction. Aegis Mobility, a company that is a leader in the field, has around 10,000 subscribers paying $5 a month for its GPS service that can selectively block texts, phone calls or email.
Free GPS systems are more popular, at least at first blush. AT&T has a free app called DriveMode that it says has been activated more than 1.5 million times since its introduction in 2012. But the company won’t say how many of these are regular users, nor will Sprint discuss how many people use its own free GPS app, called Drive First. Another service, offered by CellControl, uses software to pair a phone and a car — through Bluetooth — then blocks communications if the car is moving. It costs $129 and has “tens of thousands of users,” the company says.
Still, relative to the number of drivers and the size of the problem, adoption rates of the GPS apps are “a drop in the bucket,” said Paul Zimmerman, the chief executive of Aegis, which is based in British Columbia. People aren’t buying in, he said, because “the pressure to stay in touch is getting stronger, not weaker.” Independent of Mr. Tibbitts, Aegis has built its own technology to work at the network level and was also in talks with Sprint, though those discussions have been delayed.
As the Katasi technology developed, the question of who would buy the service took on added weight. To determine how much to invest, Sprint had to know how much the service would bring in. In particular, Sprint executives said, they needed to understand the scale of one important risk: legal liability. In a nutshell, company officials said they asked themselves what would happen if the technology let one text slip through, and someone reading the message became involved in a crash. That could be a financial liability for the company, and a tragedy.
“If that one message does get through, and someone understood, ‘I bought this and I’ll be safe,’ what does that mean for our brand and our business?” said Wayne Ward, vice president for business and product development at Sprint.
The challenges “kept mushrooming,” Mr. Ward said. For instance, was Sprint required to check every link in its network to make sure it could be counted on to block information? Did Sprint, Mr. Ward asked, need to build a second network, a redundant one, in case the first failed for some reason?
The costs were mounting, the returns unclear. “The technology works; the technology is there,” said Walter Fowler, a spokesman for Sprint. “It’s a matter of working out the legal issues. The legal uncertainty — that’s the major issue.”
The project, they said, is stalled, maybe indefinitely.
Mr. Ward said he appreciated what Mr. Tibbitts had done, having poured about $450,000 of his own money into the venture, along with about $2.5 million from investors. But Mr. Ward said he had the big picture to think about. “I’m protecting the brand of a $35 billion company,” he said.
‘This Is a Behavior Problem’
To some legal experts, Sprint’s concerns about liability seem overblown. W. Kip Viscusi, a professor of law and economics at Vanderbilt University in Nashville, and the founding editor of The Journal of Risk and Uncertainty, said that even if Sprint were sued and lost, a judge or jury would be unlikely to perceive its actions as reckless, a legal standard that can lead to big punitive awards.
Some people involved in the negotiations, who asked for anonymity because the discussions were private, said Sprint was worried more about how much money it would make. It wanted more from American Family for providing wireless service to the telematics boxes, these people said, and wanted to make sure that there would be enough customers demanding text blocking.
Mr. Fowler of Sprint, however, said the company’s position was “not about profit; it is about doing the right thing.”
Mr. Tibbitts conceded that consumer demand was a big challenge.
“This is a behavior problem,” he said. “It’s like trying to make condoms cool.”
He has ideas for stoking consumer demand, like enticing teenagers to buy the service by giving rewards to users from companies like Chipotle and Starbucks. Chipotle management was excited about the idea, Mr. Tibbitts said. But it wasn’t enough to convince Sprint.
For now, Mr. Tibbitts and American Family Insurance have turned their energy to several other carriers. Mr. Tibbitts says the potential for a partnership gives renewed life to the technology. Time will tell.
In the meantime, the outcome with Sprint raises a fundamental question: Is a technological solution, long thought crucial to ending distracted driving, enough?
The efforts to stop drunken driving and to improve seatbelt use prove the value of two tactics: education campaigns combined with tough, enforced laws. Forty-five states now ban texting and driving, and education efforts have grown. Many surveys show that awareness of the problem is not an issue; a 2013 report from the AAA Foundation for Traffic Safety found that 94 percent of people surveyed considered sending or reading texts while driving “unacceptable.” And yet roughly a third of drivers admit to doing both.
Mr. Teater, the executive with the National Safety Council, said he still thought that a “network level” technology solution was essential. (He was an executive at Aegis but left in 2009 and is no longer involved with the company.) “If one of these players steps forward and aggressively promotes it,” he said, speaking of a text-blocking service, “I firmly believe demand will be there.” When people start using it and “realize their worlds aren’t falling apart,” he said, they will tell their friends and “we’ll be off and running.”
But Paul Atchley, a psychologist at the University of Kansas who studies compulsive use of texting by drivers, said awareness wasn’t enough. The lure of the device is too powerful, he said, to be overcome by awareness of the risks.
He agreed that a network-level solution was important, but only when combined with tougher laws. Drunken-driving laws, he said, are clear and unequivocal, whereas laws around distracted driving are confusing, because they seem to allow some phone use — dialing the phone and calling up a song — but not texting. And they’re tough to enforce. An appropriately tough law, he said, would be this: “If you’re seen manipulating the phone, you will be pulled over. Period.” Only then, he said, will behaviors and attitudes become aligned.
It seems unlikely that all use of phones in cars will be outlawed. But if it’s unthinkable to take the phone out of a driver’s hands, maybe it’s possible to remove the car.
That’s the thinking of Jeff Larason, the president of the Safe Roads Alliance, a nonprofit advocacy group that works with state departments of motor vehicles to distribute safety information to drivers. Maybe, he said, this problem is so intractable — the lure of the phone so powerful — that the real technological solution will come from Google in the form of the self-driving car: “Maybe the Google car is going to win, and it’ll make these questions moot because you can do whatever you want in the car while the car drives for you.”
In the meantime, Mr. Tibbitts pushes ahead, pursuing other carriers and using crowdsourcing to help keep the lights on.
“It’s so hugely frustrating,” he said. “I’ve put five years of my life into this; we’ve put in millions. I’m convinced there’s a great business and convinced it will save a bunch of lives.”
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