Modern vehicles increasingly resemble rolling smartphones, with massive touchscreens dominating dashboards and controlling everything from climate settings to windshield wipers. Auto manufacturers have embraced this sleek, minimalist aesthetic with enthusiasm, touting the flexibility and futuristic appeal of touchscreen-based controls. However, a growing body of research reveals a troubling reality: these same touchscreens that appear impressive in showrooms pose serious safety hazards on actual roads.
The question is no longer whether touchscreens distract drivers more than traditional buttons. Scientific studies, consumer surveys, and accident data have answered that question definitively. The real issue now involves how quickly the automotive industry will respond to clear evidence that touchscreen-heavy designs compromise road safety in measurable and significant ways.
The Science of Distraction
In human factors research, distraction is typically classified as visual, manual, cognitive, or a combination of these. Visual distraction occurs when you look away from the road; manual distraction occurs when you take your hands off the wheel; and cognitive distraction involves diverting mental attention from driving tasks.
This is why texting while driving is considered particularly dangerous: it uses our visual, manual, and cognitive resources at the same time, and the more types of attention a task demands, the greater the level of distraction it creates. The alarming finding from recent research shows that touchscreen interactions create nearly identical distraction patterns.
Interactions with touchscreen menus can, in theory, produce comparable effects to texting. 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. This comparison should shock anyone who understands the well-documented dangers of texting behind the wheel.
Measured Time Differences
A 2020 study by the Swedish car magazine Vi Bilägare compared touchscreens to traditional physical buttons and found that drivers required 4.6 times more time to perform basic tasks on a touchscreen compared to physical controls. This isn’t a marginal difference; drivers need more than four times longer to complete the same simple tasks they could accomplish quickly with buttons.
Vi Bilägare found in a series of tests that drivers took up to thirty seconds longer to carry out driving-related tasks in touchscreen cars as they did in cars with traditional buttons and levers. When traveling at highway speeds, thirty seconds represents a dangerous amount of time to spend focused on adjusting your climate control or changing the radio station.
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. Those extra car lengths can mean the difference between avoiding an accident and causing one.
How Physical Buttons Reduce Risk
A physical knob allows the same adjustment to be made with minimal or no visual input, as tactile feedback and muscle memory compensate for the lack of visual information and let you complete the task while keeping eyes on the road. This fundamental difference explains why buttons prove safer than touchscreens.
Physical buttons provide immediate tactile confirmation, and drivers can feel when a button is pressed without needing visual confirmation, which is impossible with touchscreens. When you turn a physical volume knob, you feel it click or rotate, confirming your action without requiring visual verification. Touchscreens provide no such feedback until you look at the screen to confirm your finger landed in the right place.
With regular use, drivers develop muscle memory for physical controls, and this familiarity significantly reduces the time spent interacting with in-car systems. After driving your car for a few weeks, your hand automatically reaches for the climate control knob in exactly the right position. You know precisely how far to turn it to achieve your desired temperature. This unconscious competence disappears when those same functions move to a touchscreen menu.
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. You must look at the screen, find the correct icon, possibly navigate through menus, locate the slider, and then carefully position your finger to adjust it accurately. Each step demands visual and cognitive attention that should remain focused on driving.
The Problem of Menu Navigation
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. Modern touchscreen systems often hide frequently-used functions behind multiple layers of menus, requiring drivers to tap through several screens just to activate heated seats or adjust fan speed.
Touchscreen operation of infotainment systems is especially distracting if they are slow to respond or hide frequently used functions in sub-menus that are fiddly and time-consuming to navigate. The complexity compounds when systems lag or freeze, forcing drivers to repeatedly jab at unresponsive screens while traveling at highway speeds.
According to Vi Bilägare, the BMW iX’s system is one of the most complicated ever designed, and the lack of a backlight on the SEAT Leon’s touch-sensitive climate controls makes them harder to use. Design choices that look sleek in marketing photos create genuine hazards in real-world driving conditions.
Additional Touchscreen Vulnerabilities
Unlike touchscreens, physical buttons are unaffected by smudges, sunlight glare, or software glitches, common issues that can hinder touchscreen usability. Anyone who has tried to use a smartphone in direct sunlight understands this problem. Automotive touchscreens suffer from the same limitations, becoming difficult or impossible to read when sunlight hits them at certain angles.
Fingerprints, dust, and smudges accumulate on touchscreens, reducing visibility and responsiveness. Physical buttons don’t suffer from these problems. A knob covered in dust still turns reliably; a touchscreen covered in fingerprints becomes frustratingly unresponsive.
Software crashes, freezes, and glitches represent another vulnerability unique to touchscreens. When your touchscreen system crashes, you may lose access to essential functions such as climate control, defrosting, or even vehicle settings. Physical buttons simply don’t crash.
Consumer Dissatisfaction
Data from a recent survey of 92,000 US buyers indicate that infotainment systems remain the most problematic feature in new cars, and the survey shows infotainment systems lead to more complaints in the first 90 days of ownership than any other vehicle system. The very technology manufacturers believed would impress customers instead frustrates them.
Almost nine in ten motorists said they preferred driving a car with buttons instead of screens, saying buttons were safer because they did not have to take their eyes off the road. The study also found that 60 percent of prospective buyers would be deterred from buying a new vehicle with touchscreen controls instead of physical ones.
In Hyundai’s case, the company is responding directly to customer feedback it received through focus groups, where drivers reportedly complained about touchscreen systems adding annoying levels of friction to simple functions such as climate control and music. The market is clearly communicating its preferences, and those preferences favor the return of physical controls.
Accident Statistics and Regulatory Response
Statistics from the Department for Transport show that driver distraction was a contributing factor in 29 percent of all road deaths in 2022, up from 23 percent in 2013. This increase in distraction-related fatalities coincides with the proliferation of touchscreen-heavy vehicle designs.
In a 2019 report, NHTSA emphasized that touchscreens often create a visual-manual distraction that doubles the likelihood of crashes compared to using physical controls. Doubling the crash likelihood represents an unacceptable safety compromise, particularly when the alternative technology already exists and costs manufacturers less to produce.
Safety organizations have begun taking action. 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 windshield wipers.
Under new NCAP rules being introduced in 2026, cars seeking the highest safety rating of five stars must use buttons, stalks, or dials for five main tasks: turning on the indicators, activating the hazard lights, sounding the horn, operating windshield wipers, and activating the EU-mandated SOS function. This regulatory shift acknowledges that certain controls are too important to bury in touchscreen menus.
The Industry Response
Some manufacturers have already begun reversing course. Porsche revealed it would move away from fully touch-based experiences and add back more physical controls for its Cayenne SUV, and Volkswagen announced it would do away with touch-sensitive controls on its steering wheels and replace them with physical buttons following complaints.
Volkswagen, after extensive customer feedback and a noticeable backlash, announced plans to reintegrate physical buttons into upcoming models, and companies are realizing that futuristic interiors lose their appeal when they compromise usability. The pendulum appears to be swinging back toward a more balanced approach.
However, the transition won’t happen overnight. Manufacturers have invested heavily in touchscreen-based designs, and some remain committed to screen-heavy interfaces despite the safety evidence. Tesla, for instance, continues to pursue an all-touchscreen approach, even placing gear selection and windshield wiper controls on the center screen.
The Right Balance
Controls we frequently use while driving, including temperature, fan speed, windscreen demisting, volume, and many others, should remain tactile, and the driver shouldn’t have to divert their visual attention from the road to control these. This represents the consensus emerging from safety research, consumer feedback, and regulatory action.
Touchscreens are better suited to secondary functions and settings typically adjusted before driving, such as navigation setup, media selection, and vehicle customization. Using touchscreens for these pre-drive settings makes sense. The problems arise when manufacturers force drivers to use touchscreens for functions they need to adjust while moving.
A mixture of both and a good user interface is what’s needed. The ideal dashboard combines touchscreen technology for appropriate applications with physical buttons and knobs for frequently-used driving controls. This hybrid approach offers the flexibility touchscreens provide while maintaining the safety advantages physical controls deliver.
The Bottom Line
The evidence overwhelmingly demonstrates that touchscreens in cars are indeed more dangerous than physical buttons for functions drivers need to access while driving. The time penalty, the visual distraction, the loss of muscle memory, and the vulnerability to glitches and glare all contribute to measurably increased accident risk.
UK research showed that touchscreen use hampers driving nearly as much as being over the legal drink-drive limit. This striking comparison should give pause to anyone who has casually poked at a touchscreen while driving, believing it represents a minor distraction.
The automotive industry’s embrace of touchscreens stemmed from understandable motivations: reducing manufacturing costs, creating a modern aesthetic, and providing flexibility for software updates. However, these benefits don’t justify compromising driver safety. As manufacturers increasingly acknowledge this reality and regulators demand change, the era of all-touchscreen dashboards appears to be ending.
For consumers shopping for vehicles, prioritize models that retain physical controls for essential functions. Test the interface thoroughly before buying, attempting to adjust climate settings, radio volume, and other common functions to see how intuitive and accessible they are. Your safety on the road depends on your ability to perform these tasks without taking your eyes off traffic ahead, and physical buttons enable that safety in ways touchscreens fundamentally cannot match.
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