Parksy
Moderator
When I drove lorries the early versions of 'hands free' phones were installed in the cabs during the 1980s.Raywood said:otherclive said:Re Parky's post: thank you. On the use of hands free whilst its not illegal the evidence is quite clear in that holding a conversation using hands free connection has a detrimental effect on the drivers ability.
You are right as I nearly found out the hard way. All our company cars had hands free sets as it was thought to be safe at that time. On one occasion I was on the Edinburgh by pass approaching a roundabout when the phone rang and in trying to talk and negotiate the roundabout I could easily have run off the road. After that I stopped driving and talking but many others do not. Some time after that all hands free sets were removed from the cars and taking a phone call when driving became a disciplinary offence.
The handset (Motorola if I remember correctly) wasn't exactly house brick sized but it was bigger than, say, a tv remote, and the hands free operation involved speaking toward a small microphone, a bit bigger than those on headsets now seen being used by actors in musical theatre.
The problem was that the microphone was mounted at the join of the roof lining and one had to direct speech toward it which meant trying to drive and raising the head toward the microphone which was very dangerous.
The drivers soon took a collective decision to switch the things off until parked, which was the safest option.
My Ford has a hands free Bluetooth set up but Herself handles comms and sat nav. from the passenger seat, I only drive and on the rare occasions when I go solo the phone is never on. I've also delegated the swearing and rude gestures to her, she's getting quite good at those :lol: