Imagine losing a loved one or a friend in a car accident caused by someone else who was texting/surfing while driving. Imagine being severely injured by such a driver -- and losing all of your life savings to medical bills you never expected you'd have to pay that resulted from someone else's irresponsibility and selfishness.

That's what happened to people interviewed for this powerful video segment (see video embedded at top of this entry) on Rock Center with Brian Williams about the texting/surfing while driving epidemic. Its an epidemic that's killing thousands of people and injuring hundreds of thousands every year in the United States.

I'm on a roll on the don't text and drive thing, sorry.

In fact, I could do a whole web site on texting/surfing and driving and I've actually contemplated starting one -- but then reality hits: There's no way I'd have time for that. I struggle to get new content up on SolarChargedDriving.Com as it is.

So, I'll continue to use SolarChargedDriving.Com as an outlet to fight the crucial battle against the texting/surfing and driving epidemic. And, of course, solar-charged or not, a 4,000 pound vehicle moving at high rates of speeds is a deadly weapon, one whose navigation requires 100 percent of our attention all of the time.

I can’t think of a single thing that gets me more hot under the collar than selfish, short-sighted drivers who spend more of their time texting and surfing the internet than concentrating on driving and who, in increasing numbers, are killing themselves, and, worse, others as a result of their stupidity.

And, no, I don’t care if you are driving a solar-charged EV when you’re texting/surfing: Your actions are every bit as dangerous and inexcusable as those of the texting/surfing driver in a gasoline car!

We at SolarChargedDriving.Com are very much for safe driving and therefore very much against texting and surfing while driving. There are plenty of sobering stats to show that texting or surfing while driving is incredibly dangerous and that we, in the U.S., are in the midst of a distracted driving epidemic, the proportions of which we’ve never seen.

Take the nearly 200 billion text messages sent or received last year in the month of June alone in the U.S. and you get the picture.

Not only is texting while driving a qualitatively different form of distraction than, say, talking to someone next to you in the car, it’s quantitatively different than, for example, putting on make-up while driving.

It's hard to imagine anyone applying make-up hundreds of times a day while driving. In contrast, there are surely thousands and thousands who send and receive hundreds of texts a day while driving.