Nissan’s Signal Shield anti-distraction system is a vehicular Faraday cage

YOU know it’s bad. You know you shouldn’t be furtively glancing down at your phone while you’re stopped at the lights – or even worse, while you’re in motion – but you Just. Can’t. Stop. Looking. At. Your. Damn. Phone.

Nissan reckons it has the answer, and it’s a freaking Faraday cage in a Nissan Juke.

A Farawhat? If you weren’t paying attention in high school physics you may not be familiar with the term, but more studious types will know that a Faraday cage is a fairly old invention that blocks electromagnetic fields – the same fields that mobile phones use to communicate with cellular towers, and thus other phones and the Internet.

It’ll also stop Bluetooth signals, meaning putting your phone within the cage, essentially makes it a brick. You may as well turn it off entirely.

But Nissan’s concept, an initiative of Nissan UK that’s been dubbed ‘Signal Shield’, means you can quickly render your phone completely incommunicado with the outside world by popping it into a steel mesh-lined armrest and closing the lid.

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Need to urgently make a call? Have you pulled over and put your handbrake on like the responsible motorist that you are? Then just lift the lid and take your phone out.

It’s not completely unusable while in the Signal Shield box, however. The phone can still be plugged into the car’s infotainment system via USB cable, and transmit stored music through a hard wire. Streaming music apps is, obviously, a no-go.

Signal Shield is a concept for now, but is intended to draw attention to the road safety issue of distracted driving. According to a 2015 survey by the Transport Accident Commission, Some 90 percent of Aussies recognise the issue as a major problem on our roads, yet around 60 percent admit to using phones while driving.

And in the UK, the number of drivers surveyed by the RAC who admitted handling their phone while driving has increased from just eight percent in 2014, to 31 percent in 2016.