1) Nobody ever provides any evidence that touchscreen based car interfaces are less safe. You might imagine having to briefly glance at a screen is less safe, but that's not evidence. The only thing I've ever seen people cite is some unscientific magazine article that claimed touchscreens take slightly longer to operate for certain strangely-chosen controls, which is not at all the same thing as measuring safety.
2) People never have a very good answer for which physical buttons cars like Teslas are missing. There's physical controls for all driving functions, volume, music play/pause, music next/previous. Adjusting climate is in a muscle-memoryable fixed position, not in some menu. You certainly aren't supposed to be adjusting your mirrors or something while driving.
> Nobody ever provides any evidence that touchscreen based car interfaces are less safe.
That's a bit like the old joke that the efficacy of parachutes at preventing free-fall deaths has never been proven scientifically. (Well, until this 2003 study[1])
Some chains of causality are so obvious that we don't need to prove them scientifically: Many people find touchscreens hard to use without taking their eyes off the road. Taking your eyes off the road can lead to crashes.
“We don’t need to prove it because I believe it” isn’t a compelling point. There’s many ways the answer could be counterintuitive. For example, perhaps people know they have to take their eyes off the road so they operate those controls during safer conditions. But most importantly, I don’t even think it’s true that there are cars where key controls are only on difficult to access touch screen! Hence my whole point about Teslas actually having all relevant physical controls. Plus, all these cars with zillions of physical controls now have big shitty touchscreens too. It’s not clear that’s a better UX, as many people in this thread complain about.
Tesla's windshield wiper controls are pretty obnoxious. I think the climate controls are pretty bizarre too, even if you can look at them while you operate them, and I don't know how well the music controls would work if they were reliable, but I found them to be so random I couldn't operate without looking.
Good thing is on a freeway you can engage auto-throttle and lane keeping which are good enough that you can look away from the road for a few seconds. It makes it ok for the rest of the UI to be bad, but that's not the same as it being good.
One physical button to wipe, without even leaving the wheel. How hard is that? And they wipe automatically otherwise. Not sure what you mean, unless you mistakenly think it’s necessary to go through some screen menus to find the controls.
This is not particularly relevant, the tested features are not really available as no-look controls in any car, nor are they the driving critical controls people imagine these touchscreens replace.
> Participants were required to use voice commands, touch screens and other interactive technologies to make a call, send a text message, program audio entertainment or program navigation, all while driving down the road.
2) People never have a very good answer for which physical buttons cars like Teslas are missing. There's physical controls for all driving functions, volume, music play/pause, music next/previous. Adjusting climate is in a muscle-memoryable fixed position, not in some menu. You certainly aren't supposed to be adjusting your mirrors or something while driving.