Auto makers have gone to some pretty far lengths to keep us from having to fiddle with our phones while driving. Connectivity in the past few years has become very impressive. I travel for work frequently, so I'm always driving different cars which are all newer than my own. These days, I can get into a newish rental car I have never seen, and within five minutes, I've got my phone synced up, my contacts downloaded, streaming my favorite music, and I've got verbal and visual GPS navigation to my hotel.
I can make phone calls, send and receive texts, and update navigation without taking my hands off the wheel, or my eyes off the road. As others have mentioned, I think it's just a matter of boredom. We're being pelted with multiple forms of communication constantly these days. Sitting in a car and just driving it somewhere is boring. We need to be doing something else at the same time, all the time. Whether it's eating, drinking, watching a video, or whatever else.
Heck, I'm not immune to it. My ride to work is a 15 minute commute. I still need something else going on in that short time, so I have an earbud playing the news in the background. Six times out of ten, most of that ride is just a bunch of commercials which I can mute out, so maybe I get five minutes of news. If I'm driving a truck cross country, I'll download a bunch of documentaries on my phone, so I can listen to them while I drive. I knocked out the whole Ken Burns WW2 series on a trip to Indy earlier this year, and his national parks series on the way home.
