Matt Prior: the rise of distracting in-car screens must be stopped

Our man is fed up with having to take his eyes off of the road to use essential in-car functions

Now look here, car companies. I know that using lots of buttons is expensive and they can look cluttered on the dashboard, and that touchscreens are so much tidier and cheaper. And I know that touchscreens are much more accommodating to over-the-air updates than buttons, and that they’re oh so versatile for giving access to lots of different features, and that they’re very easy to personalise.

But maybe we haven’t told you this enough, although it feels like we all have: can you honestly please just stop it? These screens are being asked to do too much. It’s distracting. It’s – and I don’t use this word lightly – dangerous.

Recently I drove the Citroën C5 X, and I like the car. It’s comfy, spacious and good value. One of its engineers said the touchscreen layout was based on a similar principle to a smartphone. I like smartphones too. Mine is very easy to use. Certainly no harder than a bunch of static buttons or a control wheel – while I’m sitting on my sofa, but not while I’m driving.

It’s illegal to use a smartphone, for very good reasons, while I’m doing 70mph. Because at that point, I should primarily be looking at something else. Knob-twiddling or button-pushing are things that I can do without taking my eyes away from the road for too long. A normal button or control wheel or dial lets me do this. A touchscreen doesn’t.

I’m not singling out the C5 X, by the way; it’s just my most recent example. Actually, with a customisable display, big buttons and separate controls for air-con, it’s not bad by most standards.

The current worst protagonist is probably Volkswagen, particularly as it has put the heater controls just where you would choose to rest your hand to use the infernal screen – and doesn’t backlight them at night. But Mercedes-Benz is pretty poor too.

That’s two sometime paragons of ergonomic excellence, then, making infuriating interiors. There are others. Tesla, which maybe started it all, Volvo, Ford... Basically, just about everyone.

An exception is BMW, which uses a very big touchscreen but also retains its iDrive rotary controller, which allows things on the screen to be highlighted and clicked at a glance. As it should be.

Erstwhile BMW exec Ian Robertson once spoke at an Autocar Awards, at a time when new EV start-ups seemed to be appearing every 30 seconds. His gist was that before people wrote off the ‘legacy makers’, they should remember that they were very good at the essential concept of vehicle engineering.

It would benefit a lot of cars if their manufacturers remembered it too.

*Trouble on the tracks*

In the face of rising fuel costs, I read today that Germany is to heavily subsidise public transport. Good news. Take that, profiteering oil companies.

In the UK? Well, not so much. When I buy a train ticket, the profits from Chiltern Railways filter to its parent company, Arriva Group, which is in turn owned by Deutsche Bahn, which is in turn owned by the German state. So basically, buy a train ticket in the UK and help subsidise German commuting.

I know some car companies have partial state ownership (Volkswagen and Renault, for example), but if that particularly irks you (seems unlikely), you can choose not to buy from them. Not so if shelling out £69 for a standard day return from my place to London.