Early reports suggest motorists are generally complying with the ban on hand-held cellphone use while driving.
This should not come as a surprise.
While there will be those who, for whatever reason, remain ignorant of the law change and others who will choose to disregard it - just as they might the speed limit or various other road rules - a majority are probably wondering how they got away with it for so long.
This is because regardless of increasingly damning research, the law, for the most part, simply makes good sense.
The ban, which came into effect on Sunday, makes it an offence to use a hand-held phone on the open road, create send or read text messages, play games or email, or use a hand-held phone while stuck in "the normal flow of traffic" while driving.
It has been introduced under the Land Transport (Road User) Amendment Rule 2009 along with 18 other amendments and adjustments.
Some of the better publicised of these include wearing seatbelts correctly, giving way to pedestrians waiting at crossings, travelling no more than 50m while crossing a bus or cycle lane, and not exceeding 50kmh while towing another vehicle using a rope, straps or chains.
Among those that may come as a surprise and which, arguably, might have been better publicised by the Ministry of Transport and the New Zealand Transport Agency, are new rules concerning the signalling of cyclists at rounabouts, child locks in taxis, the approach of passenger service vehicles at level crossings, the use of safety chains on light trailers and the visibility of lights on cycles.
Understandably, it is the non-use of cellphones that has received most publicity.
In some quarters this has come to be regarded as a de facto "right" which has now been removed, the consequences of defying the prohibition adding insult to injury.
Those caught breaking the ban face $80 fines and 20 demerit points.
In other, more authorative opinions, it has been suggested that the new laws do not go far enough.
No less an august motoring body than the Automobile Association suggests the Government has "missed the point" by banning cellphone use but continuing to allow the use of cellphones appended to hands-free kits.
AA general manager Mike Noon said that an education campaign was needed to remind drivers that a ringing cellphone could be a fatal temptation - a view reinforced by Australian expert Prof Mark Stevenson who maintains his research shows hands-free kits are just as distracting as holding the phone.
The corollary of such positions is that cellphone use in cars should be banned entirely.
As it stands, besides the use of hands-free devices, use is permitted to make emergency 111 calls, or if a road is blocked by an accident.
Time will tell whether the changes will be effective in reducing road fatalities and injuries.
All the evidence to date suggests they will.
Deaths and injuries caused by drivers using cellphones while driving have risen sharply in the past 12 years.
Between 2002 and last year cellphone-distracted motorists caused 26 fatalities and 411 injury crashes.
Last year, 139 people were killed or injured in such crashes - up from 120 in 2006 and 101 in 2005.
In 1996, just eight minor injuries were recorded.
Extrapolating from evidence, the Ministry of Transport has suggested drivers are four times more likely to die if they text or talk on phones while driving; and overseas research has shown that using a hand-held mobile phone can be as dangerous as driving at the legal blood-alcohol limit and increases the risk of being involved in a crash by 400%.
These are compelling and disturbing statistics, compounded by the unpalatable reality that those drivers guilty of cellphone use are as likely to cause death or injury to their passengers and to occupants of oncoming vehicles, as they are to themselves.
There has been publicity recently surrounding the escalating costs of ACC including, doubtless, the costs of accounting for victims of road accidents.
Anything that helps to reduce such costs is to be welcomed.
But this is, in the end, an added bonus to a rule which should help save lives and reduce the incidence of tragic road-accident injuries - an aspiration with its own inescapable logic.
