Real-world personal conversations using a hands-free embedded wireless device while driving: effect on airbag-deployment crash rates.

A wireless device embedded in the vehicle allowed the user to engage in a personal hands-free conversation (HFC), and automatically placed an emergency notification call to an OnStar call center if the vehicle was involved in a crash in which its airbag deployed. A database stored the exact counts, start timestamps, and billed durations of all HFC and airbag notification calls. In 30 months of naturalistic driving, there were 91 million HFC calls from an average of 323,994 drivers per month who made calls. There were 14 airbag deployments in 276 million driver-minutes of HFC conversation for an exposed incidence rate of 5.08 airbag crashes per 100 million driver-minutes. There were 2,023 airbag deployments in an estimated 24.7 billion driver-minutes of no HFC conversation for a not-exposed incidence rate of 8.18 airbag crashes per 100 million driver-minutes. The crash incidence rate ratio (IRR) is the ratio of these two rates or 0.62 (95% C.I. 0.37 to 1.05). Sensitivity analyses controlled for the impact on the crash IRR of estimated time spent driving per day and calls by passengers. Counting all crashes as much as 20 minutes later than a call as related to that call gave similar results. We conclude that for personal conversations using a hands-free embedded device the risk of an airbag crash is somewhere in a range from a moderately lower risk to a risk near that of driving without a recent personal conversation. These results are not consistent with the large increase in crash risk reported in epidemiological studies using the case-crossover method.