National No Texting While Driving Pledge Day was celebrated on September 19, 2012. More recently, October 14-20th marks National Teen Driver Awareness Week. Both of these occasions reminded me of when I took a ride in AT&T’s state-of-the-art virtual reality simulator at the League of United Latin American Citizen’s (LULAC) conference in Orlando, this summer. 

The simulator, a car with a video screen inside, demonstrates the dangers associated with texting while driving. The experience allowed participants to pretend driving a car while typing out a text message on a phone. The results were staggering! The level of distraction was not what I expected and in fact, most people came out of it quite changed.  Everyone seemed to walk away with a vivid lesson of how just one text could easily end in tragedy.