Are touchscreens in cars dangerous?

> An analysis published in 2020 by the Transport Research Laboratory, a British organisation, found that touchscreens impaired a driver’s reaction time more than driving over the legal alcohol limit.

The question isn't whether they're dangerous, anymore.

The question is, when is safety legislation going to be passed that prevents them from being used for any routine adjustments while driving. I.e. windshield wipers, AC, change volume, skip to next track, etc.

Like it's fine if you still use them to input a GPS destination, change long-term car settings, connect a Bluetooth device, etc.

But we need to separate out the actions routinely used during driving and legislate physical controls. Why is there not legislation for this already?

anecdotal experience: I rent cars quite often and most of them are now touch screen to some extent.

Touchscreens are extremely distracting for me. I have to look at the screen to make sure I am touching it at the right spot. Often I have to select the "page" the necessary buttons is on, even for very simple things like adjusting the temperature or turning the fan up or down. In some cars this takes several touches.

Android Auto and Apple CarPlay are just as bad. for some reason the interface is inconsistent enough across vehicles that requires me to look at the screen. I no longer connect my phones to the vehicle. This of course creates another problem. Most "smart" cars no longer have radios; the expectation is that a paired phone will stream the audio. On pre-"smart" vehicles, I could turn on and off the radio, select stations, without looking even in unfamiliar vehicles after a few initial glances. Not so with "smart" cars. Either I will have to fiddle with the phone, or with the "touch" screen, which triggers the multiple taps to find the place where the "radio"/audio is located.

Some big auto manufacturers plan to drop Android Auto and Apple CarPlay because they want that sweet, sweet personal data juices flowing to them.

I have also noticed that some of my senior friends struggle reading the screen, be it glare or text site, or icons that they do not understand.

I think voice recognition is a viable path for people who can speak clearly (my voice sounds like a '46 Cletrac Crawler on full power, should see the AI driven transcription!)

I find using CarPlay more dangerous than my phone. At least with my phone I’m using a familiar interface and I can use at any angle. With CarPlay my panel is awkwardly positioned, the UI is confusing, and I have to pay far more attention to what I’m doing.

I’m not suggesting at all it’s ok to use your phone while driving, and is unlawful for a good reason. Yet CarPlay, a dumbed down phone bolted to your dash, is totally fine, despite being no more safe IMO

Touchscreens are like "secret handshakes":

When driving I may need to fine-tune a setting in a range, OR seek a specific touch- or switch-point amongst a field of identically sized levers or buttons.

My solution is to seek an anchor point with my hand while other fingers do the work. I like hanging my hand on physical knob controls, e.g. for volume, in a non-input direction and without motivating force to change the underlying value.

The problem with anchoring is that my arms jiggle like bouncy bridges, when driving over any kind of bump. This external force disrupts my solution. It can be somewhat solved by tighter grip on the knob or non-input region of the control.

Additional problems come from having touch-screens - they create an extra physical problem of reducing the anchor-safe areas on the dashboard.

And, I workaround touch-screen's problem of "need to anchor" vs "can't touch without committing to change" by tenting my hand on dead-zones of the screen, or around the bezel or surrounding non-input surface.

So touchscreens, for me, add complexity to using the vehicle as a tool to accomplish the deed. Like "secret handshakes" are to greeting.

Anecdotal evidence, but I’ve been driven into twice over the course of the last two weeks after driving every day for ten years and never having had a crash. Whether it’s touch screens mounted in the car or people being on their phone, something has to be done about people being distracted while driving.

I’m in Germany and using your phone while driving can lead to your license being revoked - the problem is that it’s not really enforced at all in my experience. Maybe it should be.

Rant over, I’m just honestly pissed about my car being wrecked TWICE and me being paranoid looking in the rear view mirror every time I’m stood still because people apparently can’t register a car standing at a signal.

Depends enormously on the implementation and use case. My daily driver is a Tesla Model 3, which has a big, beautiful touch screen. But I almost never touch it while I'm driving. Anything I need to control can be handled by voice command ("set temp to 70") or the scroll wheels in the steering wheel. (The one irritating exception is the windshield wipers.)

Interesting point about touchscreens..I think it highlights a bigger issue with “safety” features sometimes backfiring. For example, that relentless beeping when the passenger seat detects weight but it’s just a backpack or groceries. I wonder how many drivers have been more distracted trying to silence the alarm than they would’ve been just ignoring the bag in the first place. Feels like we’ve traded one kind of risk for another. Do they really research this, or is it more of a gimmmic

I think that touchscreens are dangerous in cars but I’m open-minded and can imagine implementations that wouldn’t be unsafe…

What I am absolutely convinced of is that touchscreens are cheap and tacky.

The current trend of so-called “luxury” cars with wrapping screens all the way around the passenger is terrible.

A high end, or luxury, car should have physical controls and physical dials/gauges.

I’m reminded of a quote I heard describing the then new Bentley SUV: “what a poor person thinks a rich person’s car looks like”.

Un-paywalled: https://archive.is/u1OqX

In short: various studies show that touchscreens draw attention of the driver for longer, so they are more dangerous at speed.

European agencies noticed and started requiring physical dedicated switches for certain most important functions to get a full safety rating.

Car makers also gradually revert to physical switches, and also push voice control for certain functions.

Unequivocally, yes. They are absolutely dangerous.

Anything that takes attention away from driving increases danger.

Are they more dangerous than older interfaces? My feeling is overwhelmingly yes, but I would be willing to see a study or hear arguments that some touchscreens are an improvement. A touch interface is fine (not great) as long as it never changes. As soon as you have to search for a control or menu you are dividing your attention away from driving.

It means taking eyes off road while navigating a possibly multi-level menu.

Contrast that with old school radios that had physically distinct feeling buttons (and physically elevated dots - like on the f and j key on keyboards) and yeah absolutely.

I'd be much more interested in how an HUD and say voice control compares. I could see that being very competitive safety wise

Touchscreen are incredibly dangerous in car. I have clear memory of operating controls in my car without looking at them (meaning: i could keep my eyes on the road) because of muscle memory and tactile feedback.

Basically: if i hit the button row that controls the radio i can recognize it using my fingers. I know the third button is "next station". I remember the dial at the left of that button rows is for volume. I don't need to look. I can keep my eyes on the road.

But with touch screens? Everything goes away. Not only i cannot employ any kind of memory anymore, i also might do things i don't want to do, because the control changes (different UIs) and i cannot be sure in what UI the touch screen currently is without looking at it (and taking my eyes off the road).

It's crazy that modern cars have 10/13/14 inches display right at the driver side.

I suspect that many of the accidents that happen with touchscreens are frontal collisions with slowed down cars when the driver is distracted with the touchscreen. A few regulations that might help with this:

All cars with touchscreens need to have automatic forward collision detection and emergency braking, and if it's not enabled, the touch screen should have very limited functionality. No scrolling music, no sending texts, etc.

A car with forward collision detection should show a clear warning a few seconds before it triggers the brakes, and indicate the warning on the screen. Chevy is already doing this by showing a "seconds before collision" indicator on the display in front of the driver. They should make it even louder (visually) and disable the touchscreen if it falls below 2 seconds.

They're quite difficult to use without looking at them, and I've got better things to look at while driving. Better buttons that don't move and have "presence" than I can feel without looking.

Driving a 2002 Mini here with fully analog controls everywhere. I don't need to look at anything and I love it. Since I hardly drive anywhere this should last me a while.

Fun thing is that this car has volume and radio channel change buttons on the BACK of the steering wheel so you can do change things with just a flip of a finger without moving anywhere. I told my little kids it had voice recognition to change volume and radio but it could only understand russian. They only figured that out once they started to try to drive it. They still laugh about it.

It isn't just the touch aspect, but also the "ruin your night vision" aspect. Most pedestrians don't carry lights around, or even wear light-colored clothing at night.

Anybody who has used a touchscreen and spent an extra moment fiddling on the screen, and then had to adjust the steering knows that touchscreens are dangerous. In my cars touchscreens are only for Android Auto, which is managable, all the core driving stuff is traditional knobs and buttons. I'd never buy a fully touchscreen car like a Tesla. Sitting in them for Uber drives is more than enough for me..

Many years ago, I saw a video of a touchscreen input demo where the touchscreen could tell how many fingers you were placed on the screen, i.e. track each finger independently. So, for example, you might imagine that two finger scrolling up/down controls the volume, three fingers controls the AC strength, etc.

This also gave you another two degrees of freedom: expansion vs contraction and rotation. So, you might start with three fingers close together and expand out. Or you might rotate three fingers clockwise to proceed to the next track.

This gives you enough degrees of freedom to never need to look at the screen for routine actions! Sadly, I haven't seen anything about it since then. Large changes like this to UX are going to be inherently hard to introduce into cars, but alas, feels like a missed opportunity.

I own an older Lexus RX350, which I upgraded the stereo head unit from an outdated cassette/CD player to an Alpine unit with Android Auto/Apple Car Play. While it certainly packs more features, needing to look down to do things like frequency search is inherently dangerous because it takes my eyes off the road. Compounding the matter is if I hit a bump, and it makes my finger bounce and I end up hitting the wrong button and spending MORE time looking at the screen to make a correction. I do my best to use voice recognition while in motion, but sometimes it just doesn't work. For routine items like fan, temperature, volume, etc, hard buttons make sense. But things like updating maps are much harder to do via hard buttons.

I agree that touchscreens in cars are dangerous. But the real problem is that complex actions that can't be done quickly by feel and familiarity are more distracting, so replacing them with difficult to use combinations of buttons and lights would be no better. I suspect some safety measures integrated into phones and car interfaces to prevent certain actions also could cause frustration and distraction.

But these things may be only a temporary problem. Self-driving vehicles may soon become the norm.

Touchscreens are great! You can put intuitive UIs on them, so if you need to reset the TPMS setting, change the backlight color, set "coming home" light duration, cabin illumination delay, etc., it's much easier to do so on a touchscreen than to fiddle with a menu in a single line, or even worse, hold some weird key combination when powering on the car.

But for basic radio controls, AC control, windows, etc., physical buttons are the way to go!

Part of the reason I’ve held onto my Jetta for far too long is that is has about 2 dozen physical buttons on the dash, and almost half of them are wired to the entertainment system. Including a handful on the steering wheel.

Every time I eyeball an electric vehicle it’s a clown car from a UX perspective and I have people who would be pretty upset if I died trying to change the song on my stereo.

cars statistically ARE DANGEROUS. The public has just been brainwashed into believing this yearly sacrifice is okay.

Or phrased in a different way: "Is an interface that forces drivers to look away from the road dangerous?"

To which the honest and obvious answer is that it is hard to imagine it wouldn't. My old 90s VW Polo could be operated completely blindly after driving it 10 times, any new car is much harder to operate blindly.

Touchscreens are only useful in instances where I don't want to carry around peripherals; i.e. mobile devices. If it's installed in the dash of a car, it's not mobile and there is a better way to interface w/ it.

They should be replaced with multi-function displays like aircraft. Keep the contextual screen, just require a handful of physical controls along the side and bottom of the display. This allows people to interact with them without taking their eyes and attention off the road.

I didn’t want any touchscreens in my car when moving on from my ‘01 Integra (RIP). Got a 2021 Mazda3, and I think the layout is fantastic with the wheel and physical buttons. It also comes in manual :)

Anecdotally, looking through the car windows of the miriad of lunatic drivers who've sped through zebra crossings without stopping at my local crossing, they're much more likely to be fiddling with their car screen than average.

And don't replace them with fake buttons that are also distracting. Buttons and knobs need to be designed so you can quickly glance to target them, but from then on, you can feel or hear how you are interacting with them.

A Tesla without head up display is just ridicules. No speedometer than on center display

Something like Tesla could improve on this by having a shortcuts type system the user could set up.

For example on nice days I want to vent the outside air into the car instead of ac or heat and it’s a good five+ buttons to click.

Voice control is the safest, and Tesla's voice control is good.

You’d tbink would at least be some design guides for the UI to be bigger and more forgiving.

Why make people try to hit tiny targets while they’re driving? Every button could be a square inch.

Touchscreens on older cars used to disable themselves if the car was in motion. I think how the safety of in-car controls is perceived has changed since then.

I read somewhere a statistic that using CarPlay increased reaction times more than texting, which is a bit terrifying.

I’ve been in cars with really dumb selector wheels in the centre console and I imagine they can be just as distracting.

What happens when water drops into these touchscreens? Do they have the same issues mobile phones have?

Traditional buttons and knobs are not the solution. Voice control with local LLM will be the future.

Of course they are. I don't know why they were ever allowed

Dial based navigation for the screen is best. You can use it by muscle memory on cars that have it. While we’re at it let’s also get rid of auto start stop, which is frustrating, saves little, and harms long term durability.

The most dangerous about the touch screen in my car is a warning message that come up first when the entertainment system boots, warning about using the screen while driving that i need to accept.

Simple answer is an unequivocal yes but people are also dangerous. If it’s not a touchscreen, it will be something else.

Human driving is the thing that is dangerous and will soon be banned. Enjoy it while it lasts.

Short answer: yeah.

Well duh.

https://www.vibilagare.se/english/physical-buttons-outperfor...

Yes.

Lex Fridman lied. People Died.

Dangerous, probably, fucking stupid, definitely.

I'll save you the read: yes

Yes, and terrible UX to boot.

And with Apple’s brain dead idea to project interactive widgets that were designed for the iPhone onto CarPlay, it’s gotten less safe.

No matter what you think about Apple’s “wall garden” for safety reasons Apple use to be very strict about the interface for CarPlay apps and responsible app developers were thoughtful about their CarPlay interface.

Now developers widgets will end up on CarPlay even when they didn’t intend it.