Two fatal crashes involving Ford's hands-free BlueCruise system—one in San Antonio, Texas, and another in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania—have put driver distraction back at the center of the road safety conversation, particularly as April is Distracted Driving Awareness Month. The National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB) examined these cases and highlighted an important insight: driver distraction today is increasingly complex, and continued advances in technology may help address this evolving challenge.
In Texas, the driver was distracted by his vehicle's infotainment system while searching for navigation information. In Pennsylvania, driver distraction was coupled with impairment and phone use. Both cases highlight how complex the detection and prevention of distraction have become, especially given how drivers adapt when the vehicle is not only assisting them but also monitoring them.
Dr. Pnina Gershon, who leads the AWARE Initiative at the AgeLab, MIT Center for Transportation and Logistics, and co-directs the Advanced Vehicle Technology (AVT) Consortium, has been studying these exact dynamics. Her research examines how drivers interact with increasingly capable vehicle technologies and what it takes to design systems that support safer driving in real-world conditions.
Driver Distraction Is Evolving
"What stood out to me is that both cases involved distraction, but in different ways, and together they show how broad the distraction problem has become," Gershon said. "The Texas case highlights an important topic in modern vehicles: how drivers interact with built-in systems, including smart displays and navigation interfaces, while driving."
Modern vehicles rely on displays that are large, dynamic, multipurpose, and layered, showing navigation, vehicle information, media, communication, and driving-related visualization in the same interface. This creates a more complex measurement challenge that simple metrics like glance duration cannot capture.
"As central displays become more capable and multifunctional, it is more challenging to tell whether a glance is related to driving or unrelated to driving,” Gershon explained. “We need to understand what the driver is looking at, why they are looking at it, and how quickly they can recover."
Opportunity, Motivation, and "Check Behaviors"
At its core, distraction comes down to opportunity and motivation. Drivers need both the opportunity to get distracted and the motivation to engage in something other than driving. In vehicles with partial automation, both motivation and opportunity may change as the driver’s role evolves and the vehicle provides more support.
An emerging concern is what Gershon calls "check behaviors,” defined as brief glances that may meet certain monitoring thresholds without fully restoring attention to the driving task. With camera-based driver monitoring systems, a driver might glance at the road just long enough to avoid an alert. With hands-on-wheel monitoring systems, they might briefly touch the steering wheel and return to hands-free behavior.
"One of the most important lessons is that drivers adapt to the system," Gershon noted. "In the context of partial automation, drivers sometimes develop what we call 'check behaviors.'” The next generation of Driver Monitoring Systems (DMS) can build on today’s progress by encouraging the kind of attentive, engaged driver behavior we want to support. "
To do this, the path forward is to leverage technology to reduce distractions. "Technology can reduce opportunity by limiting or reshaping access to distractions," Gershon explained. "For example, tools like Do Not Disturb While Driving can silence notifications and encourage safer alternatives like voice interaction. The most effective systems will be the ones that reduce exposure to distraction, detect risk when it emerges, and guide the driver back toward safer behavior."
The Future: Human-Aware Systems
Rather than simply detecting distraction, the AWARE Initiative focuses on designing systems that actively support safer behavior.
"The long-term goal is not just to detect distraction, but to build human-aware systems that understand what the driver is doing, what state they are in, and what kind of support or intervention is most appropriate in that moment," Gershon said. "The future of distraction mitigation is not one tool. It is a layered, human-aware system that senses risk, understands context, and helps the driver stay engaged. The NTSB cases are a reminder of why continued research, collaboration, and innovation in this area matter."
About AWARE
AWARE (AI With Awareness for Real-World Engagement) is a research initiative that advances human-aware AI and intelligent systems capable of sensing, interpreting, and responding to the human state. AWARE provides organizations across mobility, health services, the home, and the workplace with the scientific foundations needed to design technologies that, based on human state, adapt seamlessly, shape behavior, promote safety and well-being, and elevate experience and quality of life. Learn more at: https://ctl.mit.edu/research/agelab.
