Are high tech cars distracting drivers?

DETROIT (WOOD) - Nowadays, a car isn't just for getting from Point A to Point B. In fact, the in-car map can plot your route from Point A to Point B while you make a phone call and listen to your favorite music.

Technology inside autos increases every model year.

Consider Ford's Sync technology.

Ford engineer Ken Williams told 24 Hour News 8 the performance upgrade for their Sync Gen Two system includes the ability to change your radio station simply by saying the frequency of the station out loud.

But the video screen in the middle of the dash goes well beyond allowing the driver to pick a radio station or make a hands-free phone call.

"You can receive text messages," Williams said. "You don't have to do anything other than drive the car and use voice commands. On the screen it will have a button, or you can use the voice command 'Listen to text message' and it will read it back to you. You can also respond with one of 20 messages that we have in the system."

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Photos: 2012 Detroit Auto Show

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Texting-while-driving is just one of the many distractions safety groups have been warning drivers about. The US Department of Transportation blames distracted driving for thousands of deaths and nearly 500,000 injuries every year.

Ford Sync engineers say the hands-free version is a safer approach to something people are going to do, regardless of the concerns.

"People are going to get text messages while they're driving down the road, and their tendency is they're going to want to look at it," he said. "So it makes it easier for you by actually having it read it to you instead of you fumbling on your phone and looking at the text message."

Some safety experts, though, doubt voice-activation alleviates the risk.

The Transportation Department, on their website distraction.com , suggests hands-free activation still causes drivers to miss important visual and audio cues. The mind can only concentrate on so many tasks at one time.

While automakers have tried to integrate safety into technology, they face another dilemma - customer satisfaction.

Customers are "demanding it," said auto analyst Mike Wall with IHS Worldwide . "You look at Pandora, you look at 'speak to text,' reading your text, posting on Facebook from inside your car. Consumers her about that. They want to get (those features) in their vehicle.

"So the automaker has to balance that with, 'OK, if we want to be able to do this, we need to have some safeguards in place. You know (things like) you can't do this when it's driving, in motion.' Whatever the case may be. It's a balancing act."

Ford and other automakers say they are achieving that balance.

"I think we're always thinking of ways to avoid distraction," Williams said. "There are things that we lock out on the system while you're driving down the road because we don't want you to be able to do that."

The real challenge for automakers is to give the public what it wants -- and still keep them on the road.