Touchscreens have been helpful tools in cars for years. These days it’s hard for some people to imagine planning a road trip to a new city without the GPS projected on to the built in screen on the dash, or parallel parking into a tight spot without the aid of your trusty back-up camera. With increasingly integrated technology, however, the screens have become more of a problem in recent years. Not only have even more functions been built into them—with some systems you basically have your whole smartphone in there—but more screens contain things that have no business being integrated into a screen. Like the heat and AC. And it’s not a good thing.
When The Infotainment Screen Contains Too Much Info
If you end up in many of the cars that are being manufactured these days, especially those on the higher end, you will notice something important missing—knobs. With the advent of Tesla’s everything on the screen approach to driving a car, more and more companies are packing the controls of everything into that central infotainment screen, whether those controls really should be there or not.
Picture this—you are driving on one of the less than perfectly smooth highways in Ohio. The angle of the sun through your windshield means that you are slowly being boiled alive, and you want to make your AC cooler so you can stay comfy. But instead of reaching down with a half-second glance at the tactile knobs and buttons on your dash and adjusting it after your eyes are already back on the road, you have to use the screen. Not only do you have to keep your eyes on the screen the entire time that you are making your selection so that you hit the correct part of the screen, but every jounce and pothole makes your extended arm shake just enough to make actually selecting the correct icon a chore.
Keep Your Eyes on the Road and Away From The Screen
A recent test done by Swedish car magazine Vi Bilägare compared how long it took for drivers to complete a series of 4 tasks in a moving car. Unsurprisingly they found that the cars which required extensive use of the screen to complete the tasks took far longer than those that could be accomplished with knobs. It took the driver of the car with the simplest interface—a 2005 Volvo V70—a mere 10 seconds to complete all of their tasks. Of the remaining cars tested, the times to accomplish the tasks ranged from the reasonable 13.5 seconds (on the Dacia Sandero) all the way up to 44.9 seconds on the Chinese MG Marvel R. And this time was despite the fact that the drivers were familiar with the interfaces that controlled these tasks.
44.9 seconds is an incredible amount of time to be looking away from the road while you are driving. To put it in perspective, they also tracked the amount of distance that each car traveled while completing the tasks. The 2005 Volvo traveled a little over 1000 feet (306 m) during those 10 seconds. In 44.9 seconds, the MG Marvel travelled over 4,500 feet (1372 m). For those keeping score at home, this is the equivalent of driving more than three-quarters of a mile while not looking at the road at all, while also driving down it at 68 mph (110km/h).
Distracted Driving Doesn’t Require Fiddling With a Phone
But what about voice command features? It has been proven over and over again that talking on the phone while driving degrades the amount of attention that you are paying to the road. And though hands-free laws have been passed in a number of states, studies show that it is the talking part that is doing the main part of the distraction and not just holding the phone in your hand. So where does this leave using voice commands to take care of these same types of tasks? It’s also not great.
The University of Utah worked with AAA to put together a study looking at how long it takes a driver to focus back on the task of driving after issuing voice commands to your phone or car. Depending on the system, it took drivers up to 27 seconds to fully return their attention to the task at hand—that is the task of driving the car. In those 27 seconds a car that was only going “25 mph would cover the length of three football fields before regaining full attention.” Though, like the Swedish test, the amount of distraction depended heavily on the car and voice command system being used, it still demonstrates that voice control really isn’t an ideal solution to the distracted driving problem.
The Cost of A Modern Car Gets Paid in Easy-to-Use Knobs
There are likely two main reasons that our dials and knobs are being taken away. One is that it is cheaper to produce a vehicle that doesn’t have separate switches for everything. All of the capabilities of controlling are already built in the touchscreen, you just have to make the connections, and program it to control what you need. The other reason is that people like a sleek looking dashboard. When you can reduce the clutter of a dozen knobs, buttons, and dials into one smooth screen, it can make an interior look clean and crisp at the cost of functionality.
The bad news is that it is that the problem will likely get worse before it gets better. Some car manufacturers are even asking you to pay a monthly premium to pay for functions that are already built into your car because the functions are controlled by that screen—and they can. Hopefully one day someone will sit behind the wheel of a beautiful luxury or import car from a previous decade and realize that there was something pretty great about all of those buttons, and slowly start to bring them back.
