You’ve got your eyes glued to the rear bumper of the car in front of you as the slow-moving mass of cars plays gridlock Tetris down the highway. Purring along at just a few miles per hour, you want to change the radio station or turn up the air conditioning.
And so you reach for the controls without moving your eyes off the road, because safety first. Mission accomplished. You’re probably driving a car that left the factory floor years ago because it has physical buttons, not a single touchscreen that does everything like cars nowadays.
There’s a new study out that proves what’s long been known to everybody who’s driven a modern car with an overreliance on a dashboard touchscreen: They’re harder to use without taking your eyes off the road compared to good, old-fashioned physical buttons.
Better late than never…
The study comes courtesy of the University of Washington and Toyota Research Institute. I have no ill will toward the authors for tackling the topic, but rather an annoyance at the interior designers for most car companies, who’ve pushed this trend for years.
There are loads of news stories that make me want to yell out that they’ve only proven the obvious, but none all year long has made me want to go to my window, open it, stick my head out, and scream “No s—t!” into the nighttime ether as much as this one.
I drive a lot, and that’s included bouts of testing the latest cars as an automotive journalist. In my spare time, I fix up old cars. That gives me a decent spread of driving cars from the 1960s to those currently made and on display in dealer showrooms, from entirely analog to very, very digital.
When it comes to driving, I don’t want to have to look down and away from the windshield (or rearview mirrors) any more often than I have to. And for that simple, crucial task, the older cars have the newer ones beat.
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