Using Car Touchscreens Can Be As Distracting As Texting While Driving. Expect Buttons to Return Soon

Credit: Vladimir Srajber/Pexels. In recent years, the way drivers interact with cars has fundamentally changed. Physical buttons have gradually disappeared from dashboards as more functions have been transferred to touchscreens. Touchscreens in vehicle dashboards date back to the 1980s . But modern cars consolidate functions into these systems far beyond what we’ve seen before, to the point where a car feels mostly like a computer. This may create the impression of a modern, technologically advanced vehicle. However, scientific evidence increasingly points to touchscreens compromising our safety. In fact, ANCAP Safety, the independent car safety assessment program for Australia and New Zealand, has announced that from 2026 it will ask car manufacturers to “bring back buttons” for important driver controls, including headlights and windscreen wipers. Similar moves are underway in Europe. ANCAP Safety will explicitly assess how vehicle design supports safe driving, and not just how well occupants are protected in the event of a crash - which means calling time on touchscreens that control everything in your car. What human factors research says about distraction Decades of road-safety research show human error plays a role in the vast majority of crashes . And the design of in-vehicle interfaces can contribute to how often drivers make safety errors. Errors behind the wheel are often linked to driver distraction. But what exactly constitutes distraction, and how does it occur? In human factors research, distraction is typically classified as visual, manual, cognitive, or a combination of these. A distracting event or stimulus may take the driver’s eyes off the road, their hands off the wheel, their mind off the driving task - or all three. × Thank you! One more thing... Please check your inbox and confirm your subscription. This is why texting while driving is considered particularly dangerous: it uses our visual, manual and cognitive resources at the same time. The more types of attention a task demands, the greater the level of distraction it creates. Interactions with touchscreen menus can, in theory, produce comparable effects to texting. Adjusting a vehicle’s temperature using a sliding bar on a screen makes the driver divert visual attention from the road and allocate cognitive resources to the task . By contrast, a physical knob allows the same adjustment to be made with minimal or no visual input. Tactile feedback and muscle memory compensate for the lack of visual information and let you complete the task while keeping eyes on the road . How distracting are touchscreen features, really? Perhaps the clearest and most accessible evidence to date comes from a 2020 UK study conducted by TRL, an independent transport research company. Drivers completed simulated motorway drives while performing common in-car tasks. These included selecting music or navigating menus using touchscreen systems such as Apple CarPlay and Android Auto. Performance was compared against baseline driving with no secondary task, as well as voice-based interaction. When drivers interacted with touchscreens, their reaction times increased markedly. At motorway speeds, this delay in reaction time corresponds to a measurable...

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