Ford Motor Company recently hosted one of its Ford Driving Skills for Life events at Citi Field in Queens, New York, where it educated participants about safe driving and enabled them to take part in some unique activities, such as a vehicle handling course, distracted driving simulations, along with a drive exercise with vision-altering googles and a drunk suit.
Drunk suit in action
The vision-altering googles, as well as a simulation involving Ford’s wearable drunk suit, were used to simulate the effects of drunk or impaired driving. You may have heard about both of those before. But what you might not have heard about or seen in use is a reaction timer. A new addition to Ford’s program, the reaction timer allows participants to compare their braking reaction times when fully alert and engaged to their reaction times when distracted by a task, such as texting while driving — which itself is becoming quite the safety hazard.
As one would expect at a Ford-sponsored event, the automaker’s staff also gave participants a rundown of its latest safety technologies, including forward collision warning with brake assist, MyKey, Blind Spot Information System, as well as the driver alert and lane departure warning systems.
The event coincided with a panel discussion entitled “Teen Safe Driving: The Next 10 Years”, whose objective was to address challenges facing new teen drivers today along with the issues and trends expected to shape driving in the future.
The Motrolix Take
We’d really like to try out that reaction timer and drunk suit for ourselves, if only because both present such eye-opening results as it relates to distracted or intoxicated driving.
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