I am an engineer for a gas and electric utility and while we do have radios, or walkie talkies as you refer to them, in each company vehicle, employee cell phone use is a much larger concern for my company. While I agree that both have the ability to be equally distracting, our employees communicate by cell phone way, way more often than radios. Our radios are wired in each truck, and with employees in and out of the vehicle all day long, a phone call is a much more successful way to get in touch. Plus, a lot of the communication made throughout the day does not need to involve everyone on the radio channel, which makes the phone the preferred device again. So while the radios have their purpose at my company, they’ve mostly been limited to a few very specific situations/tasks. This being said, I find it hard to believe that we do things a whole lot different than others in the industry.
I’ve pitched this tech to our fleet manager in hopes that the company will be proactive and invest in this product. We’ll see what happens. While equipping our entire fleet with this tech would be a sizable investment, it’s potentially less than the cost and pr associated with one severe accident. With it not being a matter of if, but when, someone in our company has that first severe DD accident, this tech or something similar will be in place at some point.

Personally, my oldest is still a number of years away from driving and if tech like this isn’t required by the time she turns legal, it will be for this Dad. My decision at that time won’t come down to the $200-$250 cost but instead tech options and capabilities of different products on the market. It’s immensely important to me that I get alerts when the tech is turned off as I was a kid once and know exactly what I would have done if parents wouldn’t know whether or not I was actually using it as intended. This to me is what should sell bSafe and a good sales person should be able to close the deal by highlighting the monitoring.