Can These Highly Trained Dogs Get You Off Your Phone While Driving? Geico Hopes So

By David Griner

Citing the stat that one out of every three crashes is caused by distracted driving, Geico’s newest ad aims to find a solution that will finally get motorists off their smartphones. The answer? Smartdogs.

How smart are these Smartdogs? They’ve been meticulously trained to slap or snatch away your smartphones while you’re behind the wheel—though they seem happy to perform this task regardless of where you are. Here’s a look at how the Smartdogs are being trained for this critical mission:

The new ad, from longtime Geico creative agency The Martin Agency, is timed to correspond with April being Distracted Driving Awareness Month.

The “one in three crashes” statistic cited at the beginning of the ad is just one of many findings about the dangers of distracted driving—especially with regard to phones and other devices—released in 2016 and based on data from thousands of drivers.

“The results show that crash causation has shifted dramatically in recent years, with driver-related factors (i.e., error, impairment, fatigue, and distraction) present in almost 90% of crashes,” says the report in the peer-reviewed scientific journal PNAS. “The results also definitively show that distraction is detrimental to driver safety, with handheld electronic devices having high use rates and risk.”

Here’s the study’s specific section where Geico likely got its stat:

“Calculating a population-attributable risk for distraction overall shows that potentially 36%, or 4 million of the nearly 11 million crashes occurring in the United States annually, could be avoided if no distraction was present.”

But the report has several other fascinating findings as well:

• “Driving while observably angry, sad, crying, and/or emotionally agitated increases the risk of a crash by 9.8 times compared with model driving.”
• “Driver judgment errors (e.g., speeding well above the speed limit or traveling too fast for conditions) and other aggressive driving behaviors increase crash risk 11.1 times more than model driving.”
• “Interacting with in-vehicle devices that do not include the more standard radio or HVAC tasks, such as using a touchscreen interface, had a high odds ratio (i.e., 4.6 times higher than model driving).”

It’s not all bad news, though! Here’s an interesting set of counterintuitive tidbits:

“Several factors previously thought to constitute significant driver risk factors, such as particular distractions (e.g., applying makeup) or errors (e.g., following too closely), were found to be much lower in prevalence in this analysis. Other factors posed much lower risks than previously thought, or even had a protective effect (e.g., interacting with children in the rear seat).”

Again, since you’re unlikely to get a smartdog any time soon, you should really read the full report.

Read the full article on Adweek