Chicago Car Accident Lawyer Blog

Our Chicago car accident lawyers read with interest a recent article on MSNBC about a Yale professor who hopes to use vibrating car seats as the latest invention aimed at helping motorists avoid car accidents.

Nationwide, the U.S. Department of Transportation reports the overall number of fatal traffic accidents has declined in the last decade -- from 41,501 in 1998 to 37,261 in 2008. Certainly some of that decline has resulted from advances in automobile safety. Curtain airbags, backup cameras and crash-avoidance alarms can all assist a driver in preventing an accident. It's when drivers come to rely on such systems that we think their effectiveness begins to diminish. For example, a driver who relies on crash-avoidance alarms to avoid an accident while backing up, is more likely to get into a collision when operating a vehicle not equipped with the alarms. These inventions are a great addition to driver awareness-- but they are a poor substitute.

As for the vibrating seats, John Morrell, an assistant professor of mechanical engineering at Yale University, claims the "touch" technology is superior to visual or audio alarms because it comes with the ability to alert a driver to the location of the danger. The seats use vibrating cell phone motors to alert drivers to the presence of another vehicle in a car's blindspot and around tough-to-see areas at the rear of a vehicle. A car approaching at the right rear will cause the right-rear portion of the seat back to begin vibrating.

“Looking at an (light) and converting that into an image of a car in your blind spot requires a little more cognitive ability than if something's touching you,” Morrell told TechNewsDaily. “It's a more direct pathway into the brain, since touch gives you orientation for free.”

A peculiar twist (for those of you who were otherwise taking vibrating car seats in stride) is that the seat always vibrates. It just vibrates more to warn of an approaching car. Inventors claim the mild vibration during normal operation will help increase the awareness of the driver.

We think that is a stretch and point to the addition of the third brake light, which debuted at the center-rear of vehicles several decades ago. They were shown to reduce crashes so effectively that they were eventually mandated for all vehicles. Now that they are standard on every vehicle, they are no longer as noticeable and their effectiveness has largely diminished.

And we don't think you can put the impact of a vibrating seat in the same class as more brake lights. While we don't necessarily think it's a bad idea, we also wonder what happens to the seat during heavy bumper-to-bumper traffic!