Touchscreens in Cars are Still a Stupid Idea – But Help is on the Way

Guess what? The touchy topic of touchscreens in cars is back in the headlines. This week The Times reported on tests performed by car magazine Auto Express. The findings were much like previous findings from similar tests: touchscreens are dangerous.

These feature-packed capacitive displays have been with us for longer than many drivers have been on the road: you can trace the earliest touchscreen to the 1986 Buick Riviera.

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Called ‘Graphic Control Center’, Buick’s solution was a 9-inch cathode-ray tube system that displayed green on black commands for an impressive 91 functions. But the funny thing is, drivers hated it. They hated the annoying beeps it made to confirm you’d successfully pressed your index finger into the screen hard enough. And they hated the fact that it meant they had to take their eyes off the road to turn up the air conditioning or tune to their favourite country and western radio station.

It took a while for the idea to make a return, but when it did, BMW’s iDrive system, which combined a touchscreen with a rotary control knob, seemed like a reasonable compromise – and one that would be honed over time. Sensibly, many companies proceeded with caution when it came to touchscreens. Remember Jaguars and Land Rovers that would only show certain functions on their screen to the passenger? Or Toyota and Lexus models that wouldn’t allow functions to be adjusted unless the car was at a standstill with the handbrake applied? So far, so sensible.

Then came Tesla, with the 2012 Model S, and car makers the world over lost their minds. Suddenly it was decreed acceptable to have a TV-sized touchscreen in the car that displayed every bit of essential driving information and controlled every in-car function, including the whoopee cushion.

Rivals took notice. Market researchers, interior designers, software engineers, user experience designers and bean counters were told to put their heads together and examine the pros and cons of touchscreens, and for the manufacturers, there was a lot going for it – on-trend, easy to integrate, seemingly limitless functions, over-the-air updates. But what appealed most was the saving in cost versus developing, testing, homologating and manufacturing traditional switchgear.

And now? Touchscreens are everywhere. Research suggests 97 per cent of new cars released after 2023 had a touchscreen on the central dash area. Most will mimic a smartphone – Apple CarPlay and Android Auto – despite the fact we’re not legally allowed to handle and operate a smartphone when driving. And they’re positively crammed with features…

Auto Express tasked three drivers – an expert, an experienced motorist and an infrequent driver – and set them five seemingly straightforward tasks: turning off “lane keep assist”, starting navigation and selecting home as the destination, raising the cabin temperature by 2C, turning on the heated seats and programming the radio to BBC Radio 4. At this point, you know what’s coming, right? Over the 20mph-limited, simulated urban environment, carrying out each of the five tasks in a Hyundai Genesis took 13.6 seconds on average, with the lane assist test taking 22.6 seconds alone. Programming the sat-nav and the radio took 19.3 and 19.7 seconds respectively.

That is an alarmingly long time for a driver’s eyes to be off the road in a busy town environment. And then think how far you’d travel in that time on the motorway. When Sweden’s Vi Bilägare magazine performed a similar test and compared a 2005-era Volvo V70 – complete with many buttons and no touchscreen – a selection of tasks took a total of 10 second to perform, covering a distance of 306 metres. The worst touchscreen-enabled car took 47 seconds and travelled 1372 metres!

So we know beyond doubt that touchscreens are a menace. We also know that when a touchscreen fails in a car without physical buttons, you lose control of everything you took for granted. No more turning up the temperature on a chilly morning; no scrolling through your latest 101 Ways To Success podcast episodes; no streaming that playlist full of aging rockers; no navigation to get to that meeting you’re running late for. And don’t even dare think about the cost. If your warranty has run out on something like a Volkswagen Golf Mk8, it’s around £2500 to have a replacement infotainment unit fitted.

Clearly the answer is to start a new campaign: Bring Back Buttons! But actually, someone’s beaten me to it.

Euro NCAP, which has been helping raise the safety standards of cars since 1997 – we can all agree we’d rather have a crash in a modern car rather than an old one, right? – is changing its assessment criteria for 2026, and as part of that it will be awarding more points for… drum roll… buttons!

Euro NCAP says that from 2026, to gain top marks five important tasks in every car will have to be performed by actual buttons instead of by accessing a screen. Indicators, hazard warning lights, windscreen wipers, horn, and SOS features will have to be controlled by proper switches in order for cars to be granted Euro NCAP’s coveted five star safety rating.

It’s a promising start. But it doesn’t go far enough. Smartphones in cars and touchscreens are hugely distracting. (Those of us who own both classic and modern cars are all too aware of the hazard.) Making a hands-free phone call has been shown to be more dangerous than drink-driving. Yet the technology to disable phones while driving – and the touchscreens that mirror them – already exists. Apple patented a method of detecting when a phone was in use while driving and disabling it, more than a decade ago.

Until we stop treating our cars like our offices, living rooms and bedrooms, and end the countless distractions from the task of driving, there’s little chance of ending all road deaths and serious fatalities. But those Buick Riviera drivers could have told us that, nearly four decades ago.