NHTSA sought clearance to test phone projection against built-in cockpit software

The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration published a notice on August 21 submitting a new information collection request to the Office of Management and Budget, covering a one-time experimental study of what it calls portable electronic device integration systems: smartphone interfaces projected onto a vehicle’s built-in display.

The study, filed under Docket No. NHTSA-2025-0058, would compare three interfaces in the same vehicles: the manufacturer’s own native system, Apple CarPlay and Android Auto. Part one is an occlusion study run at Westat in the Washington DC area with up to 56 participants across up to three vehicles, in which subjects perform six to nine standardized tasks five times each while wearing goggles that shutter vision at 1.5-second intervals. The measure is Total Shutter Open Time, taken from the agency’s Visual-Manual Driver Distraction Guidelines for In-Vehicle Electronic Devices, together with error rates and error recovery.

Part two is a closed-course evaluation at Utah Motorsports Campus near Salt Lake City with 72 participants, collecting eye-tracking data, vehicle performance measures, task completion times and NASA-TLX workload ratings. Total estimated respondent burden is 531.4 hours.

A 60-day notice on the same collection ran on March 6 and drew two comments, and the agency carried the design forward unchanged. Comments on the submission close on September 21.

The notice is a research clearance request rather than a rulemaking, and changes no requirement on manufacturers. It does not name the three vehicles or their infotainment systems.