At first, I didn’t mind touchscreens in our cars – but then they took over, pushed out the buttons and left us in lethal danger!
I’ve been reviewing cars long enough to remember when car dashboards had more buttons than Nasa’s Space Shuttle! You could reach out, jab a button, twist a knob or flip a toggle, without looking, barely using any brain processing power and still get the job done.
Today it’s swipe up, left, right or down, tap a menu, navigate a load of icons, drill down the page and finally you… crash into a pier and die. All for the sake of turning on the bum heater.
You see the latest cars square up to each other and measure their superiority not by the 2.5-litre badges on the back, but in terms of inches. Size matters, and 7 inches is for pussies. We’re talking 10, 12, 14-plus. Think you can handle it? Trouble is, you can hardly get your palm across it
We’re not talking knobs, of course; it’s the proliferation of touch screens that has seen buttons made redundant and relegated to the discarded pile.
Oh the humanity…
As a car company exec extols the virtues of fitting the entire infotainment, sat nav, climate control and even the glovebox opener onto a ginormous digital screen, somewhere a long-standing supplier of buttons has shuttered up his business forever. Banks have repossessed the premises, the owner’s family starves, and he is found dead at his desk in front of pictures of his ancestors with a note apologising to them for ruining their company.
Okay… slight tangent. But the point is, the carnage doesn’t end there; it extends to us, the drivers. Because while these high-pixel tablets look great in the brochure, when you’re on the move, they’re not just annoying, they’re downright dangerous!
And no, that’s not just me being a grumpy old petrolhead nostalgic for the good old days of the Honda S2000 (no screens, driver-oriented control pods, pure joy).
There’s hard data to back this up. Brace yourself: using a car touchscreen can slow your reaction time by 57%. That’s not a typo. Especially when you realise that that’s slower than being drunk (12% slower) or even high on cannabis (21% slower).
In other words, it’s safer to have a pint and a spliff (don’t actually do that, please) while driving, than finding your favourite Oasis song in your Apple CarPlay – don’t bother, they’re overrated anyway!
Driving Blind… Literally
Alarmed? Oh, I haven’t begun to terrify the pants off you… or should that be football shorts? Eh?
Well you see, one study found that drivers using these systems were taking their eyes off the road for up to 16 seconds. At 70mph, that means you’ve just driven almost 500 metres blind. That’s the length of five football pitches! How far do you think you’d get before the referee booked you with a Red Card?
Imagine bombing down the M1 with your head buried in sat-nav menus. You’ve already picked your Final Destination, and I’m sorry to say, it ain’t home.
There’s more for your obituary: lane deviation increases by half a metre when you’re faffing with CarPlay or Android Auto, and stopping distances stretch by four to five car lengths. That’s the difference between staying in lane and braking to avoid a pile-up or ending up as paste on the pavement.
Old Volvo vs Modern SUV – The Swedish Showdown
Another stat comes from a test in Sweden in 2022. They asked drivers to complete the same set of tasks in two different cars:
- 2005 Volvo with buttons: it took 10 seconds with 306 metres travelled.
- Modern SUV with touchscreens: yep, driver needed a far longer 45 seconds and had travelled 1.3km.
That’s four times longer, four times further, four times more dangerous. Basically, the Volvo driver had finished twiddling their knobs while the poor SUV driver was still scrolling through sub-menus halfway to Norway.
Why Car Companies Love Screens
So why do manufacturers insist on cramming in these shiny slabs on our dashes? Simple: they’re cheap. Buttons cost money to design, engineer, and build. A big iPad glued to the dashboard? Job done. Tesla made it trendy, and everyone else copied. Form over function – or should that be form over funeral. I feel like we need Vincent Price’s iconic laugh from the end of Thriller here.
Even Ferrari has admitted it got it wrong. Yes, Ferrari! The supercar maker is bringing back physical buttons after owners complained. When a company that sells sexy beasts to billionaires admits it messed up, you know this touchscreen fad has jumped the shark.
Meanwhile, EuroNCAP is pondering whether to pull down the crash safety ratings of cars that swap a profusion of buttons for a TV in your eyeline that buries functionality so deep it would have left Steve Jobs apoplectic!
My Own Nightmare
Honestly, I’ve lived this. Reviewing cars recently, I found myself having to dig through three menus just to adjust the side mirrors. Side mirrors! Something that used to be a simple flick of the thumb on the armrest now requires a mini-IT degree and the talent of an ethical hacker. And don’t get me started on climate controls – I just want to turn the fan down, not scroll through which type of pollen I want to filter.
Sometimes I wake up in a cold sweat, haunted by glowing infotainment screens hovering over my bed, taunting me: “Function Not Found. Menu Not Available. Please Try Again.”
The Human Factor
Up to 25% of crashes in Europe are caused by distraction. And the ugly truth? We think we can multitask, but our brains simply can’t process menus, maps, and motorway traffic all at once. Buttons are tactile, instinctive, muscle-memory friendly. You don’t even need to look at them. Screens demand your eyes, your focus, and your sanity.
Buttons let you drive. Screens make you scroll.
The Way Forward
I’m not saying scrap touchscreens altogether. They’re fine when you’re parked up, setting the sat-nav, or browsing playlists before you set off. In fact they’re great at that.
But once you’re moving, we need proper tactile controls back. Big, chunky, clicky buttons. Give drivers the choice.
Because the stats don’t lie: touchscreens will kill you. They’re worse than driving drunk or high. And carmakers know it. So bring back the buttons. Save lives. And end my nightmares – “the screens, the screens!!”
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