Touchscreens are making cars more dangerous

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 programme 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.

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?

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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.

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.

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 increase in stopping distance, meaning a driver would travel several additional car lengths before responding to a hazard.

Lane keeping and overall driving performance deteriorated too as a result of interaction with touchscreens.

Complaints

The most striking aspect of this study is that touchscreen interaction was as distracting and, in some cases, even more distracting than texting while driving or having a handheld phone call.

Concerns about touchscreen-heavy design are not limited to lab studies. They have also shown up clearly in overseas consumer surveys. Data from a recent survey of 92 000 US buyers indicates that infotainment systems – the official term for that touchscreen in the centre of the dashboard – remain the most problematic feature in new cars.

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The survey shows infotainment systems lead to more complaints in the first 90 days of ownership than any other vehicle system.

Most complaints relate to usability. Drivers report frustration with basic controls that have been moved to touchscreens – such as lights, windshield wipers, temperature – and now require multiple steps and visual attention to operate while driving.

Voice recognition is often presented as a safer alternative to touchscreens because it removes the need to look away from the road. But evidence suggests it’s not completely risk free either.

A large meta-analysis of experimental studies examined how drivers perform while using in-vehicle and smartphone voice-recognition systems, combining results from 43 different studies.

Across the evidence base, voice interaction worsens driving performance compared with driving without any secondary task. It increases reaction times and negatively influences lane keeping and hazard detection.

When voice systems are compared with visual-manual systems, performance is slightly better with voice control. But even though voice recognition is less distracting than touchscreens, it’s still measurably more distracting compared to baseline driving where drivers don’t need to interact with any menus or change settings.

The evidence is clear: controls we frequently use while driving – temperature, fan speed, windscreen demisting, volume and many others – should remain tactile.

The driver shouldn’t have to divert their visual attention from the road to control these. It’s especially problematic when such controls are buried in layered menus, so you need to tap several times just to find the function you want to change.

Bring back the buttons

Touchscreens are better suited to secondary functions and settings typically adjusted before driving, such as navigation setup, media selection and vehicle customisation.

The good news is the evidence is being translated into car safety assessment programmes. From this year, Ancap Safety and its counterpart in the EU, Euro NCAP, will require physical controls for certain features to award the highest safety rating for new vehicles.

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It’s up to manufacturers to decide whether to comply. However, some car makers, such as Volkswagen and Hyundai, have already been responding to these requirements and to pressure from consumers to bring the buttons back.

• The author,  Milad Haghani, is associate professor and principal fellow in urban risk and resilience at The University of Melbourne
• This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons licence. Read the original article