Are we falling out of love with touchscreens?

Fashion is a fickle mistress. Indeed, the trend for a button-festooned interior is long gone, replaced by a desire to keep the fascia as clean, uncluttered and airy as possible. This has posed a huge problem for car designers, especially as the burgeoning quantity of electronic features, so beloved by marketeers and legislators, need somewhere to call home.

The LCD touchscreen provided the answer, or at least so it seemed. Here, features could be controlled within electronic menus and the rest of the dashboard could be freed of numerous controls that upset designer preference for the minimalist.

Unfortunately, this digital-led solution has introduced practical problems, not least the smear-fest of skin oils that build so quickly upon the hard surface. While some new car reviewers in the pre-touchscreen era criticised numerous physical buttons and controls on certain models, they forgot that actual car owners have more time to get used to the controls by touch, while not diverting their attention from the road. This is not the case with the LCD alternative, where focus is more likely to be switched from the road to the screen during repeated finger jabs. The issue is not helped by some very poor software designs, where even adjusting the climate control has become a convoluted and frustrating experience.

The problem is compounded by automotive touchscreens having to last longer and endure a wider range of operating conditions (such as temperature and vibration) than domestic units. One consequence of this is that they can be relatively sluggish to react, when touched.

Are touchscreens unsafe?

It would appear so. When the Transport Research Laboratory (TRL) looked into this issue in 2020, it found that drivers needed almost 60% more time to respond to an incident on the road ahead, when operating a touch screen. This makes using a touchscreen while driving more distracting than breaking the law, by talking and even texting on a mobile 'phone. Taking comparisons to the extreme, it found that a drunk driver needed 12% more time and a drug user, 21% more.

As TRL found that driver distraction accounts for an average of a fifth of all road accidents, this is a sobering finding. While one would have thought that voice-activated systems would provide a solution to reintroducing buttons, the research showed that even voice-activated systems increase drivers' reaction times. Therefore, TRL recommended developing a framework to make them more user-friendly, such as improving voice activation by using Artificial intelligence.

For more information, see: https://trl.co.uk/news/trl-calls-for-safer-voice-controlled-systems-in-vehicles

Since the findings in 2020, it appears that little has changed and even new models are still being criticised for dim-witted and poorly-designed touchscreen systems. For instance, road testers have even criticised Volvo, that very sensible bastion of road safety, for its small BEV's touchscreen taking drivers' attention away from the road. See this Autocar review of the EX30 as a typical example, where the touchscreen features were deemed unacceptable.

Will dashboard buttons make a comeback?

Four years after TRL's research, Euro NCAP (**https://www.euroncap.com/en**) reports that the overuse of touchscreens remains an industry-wide problem, citing them as especially distracting, because they are slow to respond, or badly designed.

As driver distraction, being a contributory factor in road traffic incidents, has increased from 17% in 2022, up 4% in a decade, Euro NCAP has decided to act. Its new vehicle assessment tests will encourage manufacturers to fit cars with physical controls, separate from the touchscreen. The result, the organisation reasons, will reduce eyes-off-road time and, therefore, promote safer driving.

If this does not work, maybe car makers will listen to customers. What Car? magazine surveyed over 1,400 drivers, 89% of whom reported that they would prefer a return to traditional physical controls. The current fixation with increasingly large and all-encompassing touchscreens is also dissuading almost 60% of new car buyers from choosing their latest vehicle.

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