Touchscreens are no longer a reluctant add-on or an innovative auto perk; they’re table stakes.
Most were grudgingly added by automakers in anticipation of a US mandate on backup cameras, or an early response to Elon Musk, who dropped a 17in monitor into a Tesla in 2012. Destinations were largely DIY, mapped on a plugged-in GPS device or chirped from an iPhone jammed in the cupholder.
“The size of screens has tripled from what I thought was huge,” says Gartner Inc. analyst Mike Ramsey. “Some threshold was reached ... where the car companies said, ‘Distraction be damned, we’ve got to have bigger screens’.” General Motors also dialed the screen to 11 for its Hummer EV. There’s a 13.4in display in the center of the cockpit and another 12.3in pane in front of the driver. Change the drive mode and the screens play a short animated video of the truck crawling over obstacles like a football robot in an NFL promo.
"You’re constantly bombarded by these features you may not be using every day,” Fisher says."How do you justify the price of a US$100k vehicle? You say: ‘Well look, your Honda doesn’t do that.’” Strayer’s lab studies how easy it is to accomplish simple tasks – calling a friend, for example – in a range of vehicles. It developed a system to measure visual and mental distraction while recording how much time each task requires. All three factors are then mashed into an index score and compared to a threshold of what might be considered safe. Today, the scores for many vehicles breach that benchmark level all the time.
“We are really cautious about distraction,” says BMW’s Durach."Our highest priority is eyes on the road and hands on the wheel. We don’t even like the saying that a car is an iPhone on wheels.”
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