Drivers Perform Better With Buttons Than With Touch Screens, Study Finds

Drivers can perform simple tasks quicker with buttons, knobs, and other physical controls instead of smartphone-inspired systems that rely on touch screens, according to a new study.

Swedish car magazine Vi Bilägare(Opens in a new window) had drivers perform four actions—reset the trip odometer; “activate the heated seat, increase temperature by two degrees, and start the defroster”; turn on the radio and tune it to a specific channel; and “lower the instrument lighting to the lowest level and turn off the center display”—on 12 cars while the vehicle was moving at 68mph (110 km/h).

Eleven of those cars featured touch-screen-based control systems; one was equipped with more traditional controls. (Drivers were able to familiarize themselves with each system before the experiment, Vi Bilägare says, to make the comparison more fair.) Each system’s performance was then judged based on how long it took drivers to complete the specified tasks.

Drivers performed the best with more traditional controls, and for the most part, it wasn’t even close, Vi Bilägare says. Drivers completed all four tasks in 10 seconds flat with the Volvo V70’s physical controls. Only the Dacia Sandero (13.5s), Volvo C40 (13.7), and Subaru Outback (19.4s) came within 10 seconds of the V70. The others came in between 20.2 and 44.9 seconds.

That means the vehicles traveled as far as 0.85 miles before drivers completed all four tasks.

(Credit: Vi Bilägare)

These findings don’t measure other problems with touch-screen-based controls. Vi Bilägare notes that some of the systems don’t feature backlighting for certain functions, such as climate controls, which makes them difficult to use at night. Others rely on large screens that force drivers to look further away from the road than systems that rely on physical buttons (or smaller touch screens).

One issue that Vi Bilägare doesn’t note: touch-screen-based controls can be changed at any time. Tesla modified the controls(Opens in a new window) for the Model 3 with a software update in January, for example, and other manufacturers could do the same. That means drivers accustomed to finding controls in specific places can suddenly find themselves having to navigate an unfamiliar system.

In drive-tests for PCMag’s 2022 Best Mobile Networks story, Rob Pegoraro was one of three drivers who completed their routes in a Tesla Model 3. The touch-screen console was one of the electric vehicle’s drawbacks, he found.

The right two-thirds of the car’s 15-inch display “combines too-small target areas for on-screen controls with a menu hierarchy hiding things as basic as the odometer and side-mirror adjustments,” Pegoraro wrote. “Worse yet, the system let me interact with complicated apps like the navigation system—and even open a web browser—while driving. This is despite the car being able to tell (by way of the inactivated passenger airbag) that only a driver was up front.”