Why your hands-free car call could be your deadliest mistake
Millions of us use Bluetooth devices while we drive – without realising they quadruple your chance of an accident and could land you in court. Now read these devastating stories and find out . . .
SETH DiXON had a floppy fringe that fell in front of his blue eyes, a disarmingly cheeky grin and a disposition so sunny that his teachers nicknamed him ‘Smiler’. He loved climbing trees and camping, won prizes for his dancing and could recite much of The Gruffalo storybook by heart.
Like most little boys, he led a double life as a superhero — with three Spider-Man outfits in his dressing-up box to prove it — and dreamed of becoming a policeman when he grew up.
But Seth’s mother Alice will never see her clever, funny son reach adulthood, because in December 2014 he was knocked over by a car as he crossed the quiet road outside his house. He died from head injuries, aged seven, a fortnight later.
‘it is hard to describe the grief of losing a child so young,’ says Alice, 43, a school practitioner from Tydd St Mary, Lincolnshire. ‘Seth still needed me for bedtime stories and help with his homework. i miss his singing and the way he’d jump into my bed for a cuddle in the morning. He gave the best hugs. i’m constantly aware of the space where he should be.’
According to the coroner at the inquest into Seth’s death, 34-year-old Amy Asker, the driver of the Ford Mondeo that killed him, had been distracted by a conversation she was having on her mobile phone while it was on hands-free mode.
Yet as tragic as the consequences of that conversation were, it was perfectly legal — a fact reflected in Asker’s paltry punishment of a £90 fine for careless driving and five points on her licence.
The hazards of using a hand-held mobile phone at the wheel — illegal since 2003 and now penalised with six points on the offender’s licence and a £200 fine — have been well documented. But mounting research suggests that, although legal, driving and using a mobile hands-free — either on speakerphone or with Bluetooth technology that connects a phone wirelessly to speakers or a headset — is just as dangerous.
Hands-free conversations have been shown to quadruple the chances of an accident, making them as risky as getting into a car drunk. Those using hands-free kits brake later and jump more red lights.
One recent piece of research — a 2016 study by the University of Sussex in which 60 volunteers simulated driving by taking part in video tests while sitting in a car seat behind a steering wheel — found those who heard a male voice from a loudspeaker 3ft away were significantly worse at responding to emergencies on the road.
The Daily Mail has long campaigned for a complete ban on mobile phones at the wheel — and it seems the authorities are increasingly convinced of the dangers.
Last month, teaching assistant Samantha Ayres was convicted of causing death by dangerous driving after colliding with motorcyclist David Kirk on a rural road in Horsington, Lincs.
She was driving while talking on a hands-free system operated through the stereo of her Ford Fiesta and connected to her mobile phone via Bluetooth. Ayres, 34, had already made three phone calls and was 27 minutes into a fourth with a friend when she veered onto the wrong side of the road and hit 26-year-old David in November 2016.
On sentencing Ayres to three years in prison, the judge at Lincoln Crown Court told her that ‘the most likely explanation for your driving was the avoidable distraction caused by the hands-free’.
DAviD’S devastated widow Katie, 26, from Lincoln, with whom he had a twoyear-old daughter, Alyssa, has described her ordeal as ‘a horrible nightmare’ adding: ‘To know justice has been served brings a little bit of closure to the family.’
So why exactly is talking on a hands-free phone so dangerous? After all, many will insist it is no worse than talking to a passenger in the car while driving.
‘As we consciously initiate a mobile call, it is likely that the reason for the call — and the ensuing conversation — will be more complex (and more distracting) than passing chatter between driver and passenger,’ explains professor of psychology David Crundall of Nottingham Trent University, who has done considerable research into the subject.
‘Also, when you’re talking to a passenger they will understand why you might not answer immediately if you’re driving down a slip road about to merge onto a motorway, whereas someone on the phone wouldn’t have that shared visual experience.
‘if you go quiet to concentrate, they’re more likely to fill in the gap with conversation, while you might feel under pressure to maintain that conversation.’
Studies show engaging in a mobile phone conversation activates the temporal lobes of the brain — needed to process auditory messages — which can detract from activity in the parietal lobe of the brain, which is essential for the spatial processing needed to drive safely.
All of which has led experts to call for hands-free phone use among drivers to be made illegal — a ban that Alice, who has two older sons, Oliver, 17, and Jake, 13, supports.
‘Nobody would get in the car drunk, so why do something that has an even greater impact on the way they drive?’ she says.
Seth had safely crossed the quiet street outside his family’s fourbedroom home in the small village of Tydd St Mary on his own many times before the accident on December 5, 2014, said Alice.
‘On our way to a Christmas fair, i let him leave the house ahead of me to post a letter across the road.’ She emerged from her front door a couple of minutes later to see a hysterical Amy Asker getting out of her stationary Mondeo and found Seth — knocked several metres by the force of the collision with the car — lying unconscious on the road.
‘i held his head as a passer-by performed CPR on him,’ says Alice. Seth was airlifted to Addenbrooke’s Hospital, Cambridge, where surgery relieved swelling on his brain and he was put on a life-support machine.
Alice — who separated from her sons’ father when Seth was a baby — spent the next two weeks by his side.
‘i don’t know if he could hear me, but i read the Narnia books we’d been reading together and sang the songs he’d loved since he was a baby,’ she says. ‘i told him about all the cards his friends had sent.’
Seth died on December 19, 2014. ‘As he slipped away, i held his hand and told him i loved him,’ says Alice, her voice cracking with emotion. ‘Losing a child simply isn’t supposed to happen.’ Seth’s funeral took place the following month, his little body dressed in his favourite Spider-Man
outfit as his coffin was carried into a packed village church.
Shortly afterwards, Asker, from King’s Lynn, Norfolk — who had been driving at 27mph in a 30mph zone — was found to have been on her phone, hands-free, at the time of the collision and admitted a charge of careless driving.
At the inquest in May 2016, the coroner said if she hadn’t been speaking on her phone she may have seen Seth earlier, and that ‘using the phone while driving contributed to the child’s death’.
While admirably reluctant to apportion blame for what she regards as a ‘terrible accident’, Alice, who scattered Seth’s ashes at the local wood he camped in, hopes her story will serve as a deterrent to other drivers considering using phones hands-free.
‘The concentration required to take a call while driving is too distracting. If a call is that important, you should pull over,’ she says.
The law states that drivers are not allowed to have a mobile phone in their hand at any stage during an interactive communication, unless it is an emergency or they are responding to an emergency and it is impractical to pull over.
BuT says Professor Crundall: ‘If it is not combined with warnings about the dangers of hands-free calls, it may inadvertently promote an almost equally distracting and dangerous behaviour.’
Nick Freeman — the lawyer known as Mr Loophole, who defends motorists accused of serious road traffic cases — offers a warning.
‘If you are in an accident where there is a fatality,’ he says, ‘the fact that you were on your phone lawfully becomes irrelevant and can be seen as a serious, aggravating feature that could result in you being charged with death by dangerous driving, the maximum penalty for which is 14 years in prison. Hands-free phones are a dangerous distraction and should be banned, other than in emergencies.’
It is a sentiment echoed by the family of Margaret Luxton, who was killed in May 2014 after the coach she was travelling in crashed while its driver, Martin Chun, 60, was talking on hands-free.
Chun had been driving 51 passengers on an Age Concern day trip to Looe when he lost control of the vehicle on a steep hill near the Cornish town while in the middle of an eight-minute call to his son, killing Margaret, 59, and another passenger, Carol Muldoon, 68.
In August 2016, Chun — convicted at Truro Crown Court of causing death by dangerous driving and causing serious injury by dangerous driving — was jailed for five years.
Margaret, a carer from Exmouth, married for 40 years to her childhood sweetheart Richard, was on the coach trip with her elder sister. ‘She’d been so excited about it,’ recalls her daughter-in-law Ruth, 40, a swimming instructor, also from Exmouth.
The family heard about the crash on the local news before Richard, 65, a plasterer, received a call telling him Margaret had died.
She had been sitting at the back of the coach and was flung out of the window.
‘It was a horrible shock,’ says Ruth, who has twins Alfie and Archie, ten, and a six-year-old daughter, Amelie, with Margaret’s son, Terry, 44.
‘Margaret was so vibrant and a devoted grandmother.’ She and Terry felt powerless as Richard, who also has a daughter, Marie, 43, a carer, slowly fell apart. ‘He suffered depression and struggled to leave the house,’ says Ruth.
The jury at the six-day trial at Truro Crown Court in August 2016 heard that Chun, from Exeter, had made a series of hands-free calls throughout the journey in a ‘telephone-induced stupor’.
On sentencing, Judge Simon Carr said: ‘There was no other possible cause of the accident other than the use of the phone.’
In a victim statement, Carol Muldoon’s partner John Bearman said his life had ‘changed completely’ since losing her and he felt ‘lonely, miserable and depressed’ while Richard said he felt ‘nothing like the man I used to be’.
Ruth adds: ‘Terry has broken down and our twins have been so affected they don’t even like me to leave them alone because they worry I won’t come back.’
Her initial pity for Chun gave way to anger on discovering he had been talking hands-free. ‘Why would he have risked so many lives? People should put their phone out of sight and earshot when they’re driving.’
But in a time-pressed age in which cars double up as offices and social hubs, many drivers simply refuse to acknowledge the risk.
Leigh Divey, 31, who runs a care home agency, still uses her Bluetooth hands-free phone while driving, despite having been in a car crash that could have cost her life while having a hands-free conversation. ‘I’m on my phone to staff all day long and if I’m in my car that’s where I’ll answer it,’ says Leigh, from Watford, Hertfordshire, who has a daughter Emily, two, with her partner Billy, 33.
One morning in December 2015 she was talking to her mother while driving round the M25 to her office in Hertford when a lorry drove into her lane.
‘A couple of seconds after I saw it there was a big bang as it hit me,’ she recalls. ‘I shrieked and told my mum I’d been hit before hanging up. I was jolted forward in my seat and the car was thrown into the next lane. Luckily, there was nobody in that lane.’
A shaken Leigh — whose Toyota Yaris needed a replacement wing, door and front wheel — called the police. The officer who arrived at the scene asked if Leigh had been on her phone.
‘When I said I had, she looked concerned, but when I showed her my Bluetooth she said that was fine. The lorry driver admitted liability: the accident wasn’t my fault.’
ALL the same, many might have reconsidered their hands-free use after such a scare. But Leigh still answers and makes calls through the dial on her stereo and speaks into a microphone on her dashboard while her phone sits in her handbag behind her seat.
‘As a busy mum, sometimes it’s the only quiet time I have to talk,’ she admits. ‘I have been distracted on hands-free and realised I should have made a turning.
‘I’ve hung up on people when I’ve realised I’m lost and need to concentrate and never talk on it when I’m parking. But if I’m driving in a straight line, I’m OK.’
Yet this false sense of security is exactly what makes hands-free phones so dangerous.
‘We might think a particular road is quiet enough to engage in a hands-free call, but the demands placed on a driver can change abruptly,’ says Professor Crundall.
‘If you are talking on the phone when the situation becomes dangerous, you may not be able to react in time. So if you’re tempted to make or take a hands-free call, think again. It could kill.’