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Cellcontrol app puts drivers' phones in park

Sending a text message to someone at the start-up company Cellcontrol might prompt an instant, automated response:

Jesse is currently driving and will respond to your message when the trip ends.

Cellcontrol makes an app that is serious about promoting safe driving practices, and it all but locks down a driver's smartphone when he or she is behind the wheel. The app is also cognizant that drivers don't want to seem rude, so its alerts explain ignored calls and texts. As concerns about texting while driving grow, Cellcontrol has positioned itself as a solution.

"From the minute we're young kids, we're conditioned to answer that phone. It's kind of Pavlovian in a sense," said Jesse Hoggard, Cellcontrol's marketing director. "Now that stimuli just follows us around in the back pocket all the time."

This year, U.S. motor vehicle deaths are expected to surpass 40,000 for the first time since 2007, and some auto insurers are raising their premiums. How much blame distracted driving deserves is unclear. Falling gas prices have led to drivers spending more time on the road.

Cellcontrol sells a black box that is attached to the inside of a car's windshield. It uses Bluetooth signals to split the car into zones, preventing smartphone usage in the driver's seat while allowing it in the front passenger seat and the back seat. A driver must install the Cellcontrol smartphone app for the system to work, but once it is up and running, the program automatically turns on when a user climbs into in the driver's seat.

If someone calls while a driver is on the road, the call will go automatically to voicemail. Alerts and text messages appear on the phone screen for slightly less than a second, and then the screen fades to black. If a driver tries to activate the phone, an alert will pop up reminding them not to use their phone while driving.

Select apps or phone numbers can be put on a safe list to be accessed when a person is driving. Exemptions might include a navigation app or a parent's phone number.

The Texas energy company CDM first installed Cellcontrol throughout its fleet of more than 500 trucks three years ago and saw an immediate, 33 percent reduction in crashes. Travis Duhon, who manages health and safety at CDM, said that driving in the company's vehicles had gotten progressively worse, and CDM knew its culture had to change. He has since installed Cellcontrol in the cars that his two children drive, too.

Cellcontrol includes features that a parent who wants to keep a close eye on a child probably would enjoy. It can send an alert to the parent when a trip starts after a certain time, or if the driver breaks the speed limit.

The system is targeted at parents who worry about their teenage drivers. As often happens with technology, the younger generations master it and find loopholes to exploit it to their advantage. But the Baton Rouge start-up's roots were as an information security company, so it has taken steps to try to prevent someone from gaming the system.

"We have a room full of engineers whose job it is to think like 17-year-olds. So they sit around and try to game and break our system as much as possible," Hoggard said.

If a young driver tries to disable Cellcontrol, an alert will be sent to his or her parent. Teenagers could try driving with their phones off, so that their trips wouldn't be recorded, but the windshield device collects data even when a phone with the Cellcontrol app installed is not present.

Cellcontrol costs $129 for consumers. Companies with commercial fleets pay a monthly fee to use it. The system works with both iPhones and Android phones.

But if the company can persuade parents and employers to install the system as a monitoring device, the question remains whether it can succeed in getting adults to use it to break their own bad driving habits.

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