Look, Ma! No Hands...Crunch!!!

Those wonderful hands-free communications capabilities now available in automobiles may carry the promise of making driving safer, but they're not fulfilling it, according to two studies conducted jointly by the University of Utah and the AAA Foundation for Traffic Safety.

And forget about using your iPhone's Siri in the car, even hands-free -- it might endanger your life.

Led by cognitive distraction expert David Strayer, researchers measured the brainwaves, eye movement, heart rates and other data from more than 160 subjects to arrive at their findings.

They used cars sold in 2012 and 2013 equipped with cameras mounted inside to track subjects' head and eye movements, a detection-response-task device to record driver reaction time in response to triggers of red and green lights added to their field of vision, and a special electroencephalographic-configured skullcap on subjects' heads to record their brain activity to determine their mental workload.

The subjects' unfamiliarity with the systems might have to be taken into account, the researchers acknowledged. Also, one might question whether using older-model cars might have skewed the results, as 2014 models are likely to have better in-vehicle infotainment systems than earlier models.

"We're in the midst of rerunning the tests using 2015 vehicles, but that's an ongoing thing," said Joel Cooper, assistant professor of psychology at Utah U and a member of Strayer's team.

"These studies are misguided, largely because they operate in a vacuum," said Rob Enderle, principal analyst at the Enderle Group.

"People are going to talk to others in their car, and finding a station on a manual radio or pulling out a map and trying to figure out where you're going is likely more distracting than what they're worried about," he told TechNewsWorld.