Smartwheel Debuts at CES, Could Save a Few Lives and Will Retail for $199

A young American inventor named T.J. Evarts proposes a rather affordable solution for parents and employers to stop teens and employees from using their smartphones while driving. The 20-year-old man called his creation the Smartwheel and will start selling it this year for a retail price of $199. It’s not exactly cheap, but if it keeps a teen from texting or tweeting while driving, it’s worth it.

For the other customers, the Smartwheel is intended as an assistant linked to their smartphones. The creators of the device claim it can connect to the user’s smartphone and notify them when receiving navigation directions. For example, when the phone’s built-in GPS issues a command to go left or right at an intersection, the light on the Smartwheel gets brighter as the vehicle approaches the turn.

The Smartwheel has its own app that’s capable of tracking turn rate, hand position, gesture history, drowsy driving events, unsafe driving events, trip length and time, hard braking, sudden acceleration, collisions, and potential tampering. At the end of each trip, a safety report and rating is issued in the app’s history for that journey. If you’re a parent and your teenager is driving, it sounds like you could use such a report.

Unlike GPS-based trackers and other apps, the Smartwheel actively notifies the driver if one of their hands leaves the steering wheel. This favors defensive driving and ensures there’s little chance of using a smartphone while behind the wheel of a car. Thanks to the tampering feature, the Smartwheel detects if a user takes it off and keeps driving.

Basically, the Smartwheel is a smart steering wheel cover, meant to aid the driver in being a safer road user. In case a car doesn’t have steering wheel controls, the device could be used to adjust the audio system, control a GPS, answer or make a phone call, activate Siri or other voice assistants, and more.

If this device becomes popular, it could eventually bring insurance bonuses for those who are safer than others and refrain from driving with only one hand on the steering wheel and for those who don’t text, surf, tweet, or use Facebook while driving. If you’re one of these people, please focus on driving, you could kill somebody.