Fast Forward 50 Years: Texting and Driving is a Thing of the Past with ORIGOSafe™

Setting: Front porch, somewhere in America

Year: 2053

Brian (a typical 17-year-old): Hey Dad, we were watching an old movie from like 2013 today at school, and one of the characters was SENDING A TEXT MESSAGE on this huge phone the size of like a deck of cards while he was driving! Did people actually used to do that? Someone in my class said his mom told him it wasn’t even illegal to text while you were driving back then, and that people did it all the time.

Dad: Brian, things were so different back when I was your age, it was crazy. Things change so much from generation to generation. It’s unreal to think that when your Grandparents were just a year older than you are now, they used to drive around drinking beer in the car, and cops would let them slide! Crazy huh?

Brian: Yeah, but you couldn’t do that, right?

Dad: Of course not! By the time I turned 18, you had to be 21 to drink a beer, and if you got caught drinking one while driving, you were pretty much guaranteed to go to jail, just like today. And that’s how it should be.

Brian: Good, that would be ridiculous to have 18-year-olds driving around drinking beer. But as usual, you’re getting off track, Dad, what about the cell phones?

Dad: Oh yeah, well, just about the time most people realized how dangerous drinking and driving was, cell phones started to become the big thing. Like you said, they were huge and bulky back then, larger than a deck of cards! They came along and created a whole new danger. Keep in mind, those were the days when a lot of people actually held their phone and looked at it to send a text message. There were people driving down the road, looking down at their phone and texting with one or even no hands on the wheel! It was insane. Some people even surfed the web while they were driving! It was absolute mayhem, and almost no one took it seriously.

Brian: That’s so crazy! If you are looking at your phone, how are you supposed to look at the road? It’s one or the other, how could people be so stupid?

Dad: I know. Back in 2013, when I was only 17, more than 6,000 people died here in the U.S. alone due to collisions that could have been avoided if they just hadn’t been distracted while they were driving. People read every day about people dying in horrible crashes.  Some people I knew lost family members, but they kept doing it. It was like an addiction- as soon as a text came, people HAD to read it, they just couldn’t wait until they pulled over. And a lot of folks suffered as a result.

Brian: That is really sad. Isn’t that how Mom’s friend Katy died?

Dad: Yeah, she was texting “LOL”, which people used to say to mean “laughing out loud” and she went barreling through a stoplight into the side of a minivan with 3 kids in it. She died on the spot, and so did 2 of the kids in the van. Katy’s boyfriend at the time, my friend Chris, was paralyzed for life.

Brian: Oh man, I didn’t know that part.

Dad: Yeah, one split second decision ended Katy’s life and two others, and changed Chris’s forever.

Brian: So, what happened? How did it stop?

Dad: Well, it was rough. Things got worse and worse. Laws were made to try to cut back on handheld phone use while driving, but they seemed impossible to enforce. A lot of what we used to call “apps” were introduced to prevent texting while driving, but none of them totally solved the problem either. Then, as you probably know, ORIGO™ came along with an early model of the device that comes standard in every car today. You know that thing you put your phone in every day to start your car? That’s ORIGO™. It was the first invention to completely stop handheld cell phone use while driving.

Brian: Wow, it’s hard to imagine a time when ORIGO™ wasn’t a part of every car coming off the assembly line… I guess that’s why people were texting and stuff in the first place, ‘cause they could just start their car with their phone still in their hand and whatever they wanted while they were driving…

Dad: I know, ORIGO™ is a big part of the reason the roads are a much safer place today...getting phones out of drivers’ hands was the best thing that could have happened.

Brian: Yeah I guess that’s true…anyway, Dad, I’d love to sit here and talk about cell phones for the rest of my life, but I told my friend Meg  I would be at her house 20 minutes ago, so...

Dad: Ok, ok… don’t forget your cell phone.

Brian: I couldn't start the car without it Dad...