According to a new MIT study, many of the fabulous new technologies intended to take the awareness and the work out of driving-like blind-spot warnings, lane-departure shepherds, crash-avoidance nannies, and so on-may actually make drivers more likely to cause accidents due to distraction. It's true, a lot of those bells and whistles take a lot of your attention, especially the first time they get you: I was genuinely startled when one of my press cars (I'm pretty sure it was the gadget-bedeviled M37S) chimed while I was driving on the highway and flashed a billboard in the gauge cluster that shouted "BRAKE"-when there was nothing in front of me. Furthermore, they give you a false sense of confidence: if the blindspot beeper doesn't chirp, you're clear to change lanes without shoulder-checking, right? And if you're glued to the video image coming from your backup camera, you can forget to remember that the truck coming down the street to t-bone you while you're backing out of the driveway would actually be in your peripheral vision. This is really what's most annoying about the new automotive technologies: they distance you from the experience of driving, they reduce your visibility, they dull your situational awareness-and then they purport to sell these things back to you in the form of expensive and failure-prone gadgetry. But clearly, all this junk is here to stay, and consumers clamor for it constantly, so it's really up to the automakers to implement it in a way that doesn't make a distracted driving public even more inept at the task of driving.