Here’s the Trending team’s main character of the week: It's touchscreens in cars.
Americans are car people. We’re also obsessed with technology. Don’t believe me? How many times have you checked your phone since you got up this morning?
Touchscreen controls are where our love of cars and technology meet.
But are they safe? My latest investigation answers this question in depth.
In short, no, they are not.
Let’s get into it.
Tesla is credited (some might say blamed) for launching the era of the touchscreen. Since Tesla rolled out the first “computer on wheels” in 2012, touchscreen controls have taken over our dashboards. Consumers love them and carmakers do too.
The first touchscreen actually debuted decades before Elon Musk took credit for some other dudes’ invention, however. It was in the 1986 Buick Riviera.
Today’s touchscreens are light years beyond that old Buick’s. They’re sophisticated, stylish, and increasingly in charge of essential vehicle controls.
Therein lies the problem.
It’s one thing to control your GPS or radio with a touchscreen. Even that can be unsafe. But it’s entirely another thing to navigate through multiple screens to change gears, activate the turn signal, or honk the horn.
For a society well-versed in the risks of distracted driving, it’s ironic that we seem to have no problem taking our eyes, hands, and attention off the road to turn the windshield wipers on via touchscreen.
A vocal minority of consumers are starting to rebel. An influential European auto safety rating organization is pushing back, too.
But neither the American government nor our own safety rating organizations have done anything about those mesmerizing screens in our cars.
Distracted driving kills nine people that we know of every day. Touchscreens are clearly a distraction. So the question becomes: How many more will die before regulators or manufacturers give us back buttons, knobs, and stalks?
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