this post was submitted on 17 Jul 2026
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In case you don't yet know, touchscreens are mostly cost saving measures. They're incredibly cheaper than physical controls, and so every company wants them.
There's also quite a bit of reliable data on touchscreens negatively impacting drivers' performance, as well as substantially increasing the likelihood of crashes. Which only the EU and China seem to care about.
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S2590198226000382
Welcome to 2026, where China actually looks at academic research, and introduces safety laws, while the US disregards anything but billionaires' profits.
In my opinion, touchscreens in cars are very cool, but only for navigation and minor features such as radio or ambient lighting controls. I know a lot of people might crucify me for calling radio a minor feature, but it's not critical for the driver's ability to drive safely.
Yep. You can memorize where knobs and physical buttons are, because its a field of tactile feedback that you can navigate by pure touch, and once you are familiar with it, without even having to think about it.
but a touch screen? Theres no tactile feedback, no nothing. Every time you have to do anything, you have to take your eyes off the road to read screens and navigate menus.
Honestly, I wish they'd make touchscreen interfaces illegal for everything but privately owned tablets/phones. It has no business being the way a driver interacts with a car, or a customer interacts with a store, or anything else.
Just to add to what others are saying, I live in canada, where we have to drive with gloves. All meaningful controls need to be chunky physical features.
Doesn't that basically mean you can't fully drive a car like Tesla? lol
Any vehicle that cannot be controlled while wearing gloves is grotesquely inconvenient in Canada.
I wish I didn't have to look at or touch my phone for navigation. No clue why, with modern tech, I can't communicate with my phone verbally star trek style to ask questions about upcoming turns, alternate routes, adding stops, etc.
My previous employer upgraded everyone's work phones early this year. Some sort of MOTO phone. Im dispatched, this phone is given to me for navigation. This thing was so overloaded with ads that I couldn't use Google maps for a single trip without giant full screen ads popping up for some MOTO shit. It's the actual phone manufacturer shoving ads up while a navigation app has the screen forced on.
I'm no phone dev, but there's no way the phone manufacturer who modifies the boot image and packs 20 uninstallable apps DOESNT know when the phone is being used for navigation. I would say the opposite, I bet android makes it very clear why the screen is stuck on. And the phone manufacturer says hey let's advertise right now, it's the perfect time.
How many deaths can be directly tied to this advertising campaign. Like so wildly directly, I'm not sure how advertising can more directly and immediately cause death like this. There's a MOTO dev somewhere that should be looking at hard time
Good solutions are actually possible (and available!), but for some reason almost no car companies adopt them. Or they do for a single model, never to touch it again.
I know at least one model of Skoda Fabia has a feature, where you can connect your phone (via cable or bluetooth), and it'll take the phone's Google maps and display them on the car's bigger screen.
Not a perfect solution, but infinitely better than just using a phone or the car's most likely outdated navigation. Entirely possible, but very rare.
Wait, how come touchscreens are cheaper than buttons?
It's generally much cheaper to produce a tablet than it is to produce 30 physical buttons and knobs. Fewer wires are required too, and the same setup may be easily reused across many models.
https://www.bimmer-mag.com/touchscreen-vs-buttons/#Cost-Saving_Measures