As cars go electric and become more technologically advanced, their interiors are increasingly built around prominent dashboard touchscreens.
Almost every automaker has moved controls for windshield wipers, headlights, air conditioning, gear selection, and other basic functions to these centralized touchscreens. It’s an industry-wide shift that’s most pronounced in, but not limited to, electric vehicles. Consumers have rightly complained that screens are harder to use than the intuitive physical buttons, dials and switches that cars have been equipped with for decades.
But the trend is not just a matter of consumer preference or convenience. It’s a matter of safety, because the time drivers spend clicking through elegant but difficult-to-navigate touch-screen menus is time they’re taking their eyes off the road.
So it’s welcome news that Europe’s influential car safety certification body is working on new standards that will counter car companies’ over-reliance on distracting touchscreens.
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Under new standards that the European New Car Assessment Program plans to introduce in 2026, carmakers will have to use separate physical buttons, dials or levers for critical functions such as turn signals, hazard lights, horns, wipers and emergency calls. to earn the independent organization’s top five-star safety rating.
It is time. Because the dominance of the touch screen in the interior of new cars has already gone too far. Tesla and other manufacturers devote much of their dashboard space to huge, center-mounted screens up to 18.5 inches in size. The Ford Expedition features an available 15.5-inch screen that replaces a number of audio and climate dials and buttons with touch controls. The Mercedes-Benz EQS features an all-dash “Hyperscreen” that spans almost the entire width of the car’s interior and controls almost everything from navigation and temperature to entertainment. These screens certainly add to the sleek aesthetics of these vehicles, and manufacturers are no doubt saving money by moving these features into one central touch screen.
But not everyone sees it as progress. Customer complaints have forced some automakers, including Volkswagen, to recall some of the manual buttons. Third-party companies see a ripe market for aftermarket buttons and dials to mount under Teslas’ touchscreens. Electric vehicle startup Olympian Motors is offering new models with retro, minimalist interiors with numbered dials to cater to screen-blind customers.
The reaction is understandable. The screenplay went too far when you can’t even change the speeds of the windshield wipers, turn on the headlights or put the car in park or drive without touchscreen navigation. In the name of driver distraction and safety, some functions are so critical to safe operation that they must remain physical and easily accessible without screens. …
We’d like to see US authorities follow suit and adopt their own standards to ensure that safety-critical functions in all new cars have physical controls in intuitive locations. When you’re in imminent danger, you want pressing the horn, hazards, or wipers to be easy and reflexive — not a task that requires you to take your hands off the wheel and tap an in-car app.
Safety authorities should be concerned that using touchscreens to control functions in vehicles is dangerous. According to the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, driver distraction led to at least 3,000 known deaths in 2019, the most recent year for which data is available. NHTSA is making significant updates to its five-star safety rating program, which may include measures to address driver distraction from in-vehicle controls and displays.
These ratings are designed to push the auto industry beyond minimum federal requirements by informing consumers about how safe new vehicles are. Clearly, driver interaction with dashboard technology is a rapidly evolving part of this equation, and it’s only fitting that these metrics change over time. In years past, concerns about distracted driving focused primarily on texting, but this has been overshadowed by the rapid shift to massive in-car infotainment panels that compete with the road for drivers’ attention.
Drivers have enough to worry about on the roads. They don’t have to spend time thinking about how to control the most basic functions of their cars.
