So how are touchscreens OK, but using smartphones while driving isn't OK? I mean, I got pulled over once for a little lane wandering while adjusting the radio. Which had knobs.
The skeptical side of me thinks that car manufacturers are simply preparing us slowly to accept screens in the car so that the next generation accepts it by default.
I recently switched to a car which is the outgoing generation of that particular model and (almost ironically) has a physical button on the dashboard to simply stow the screen away. One cannot even tell that there could be a screen there !
There still is a screen in the instrument clsuter but it's monochromatic and I have set it up to display the speed and a "sub-readout screen ?" to display fuel consumption. The instrument cluster screen is also capable of showing GPS direction instructions as well if the main screen is stowed away.
Everything else has a physical switch. The HVAC status is dispayed on it's dedicated LCD on the center console.
I like the outdated tech in my "new" car.
I'm not quite this cynical. I think car manufactures got all excited by the tech (in part due to Tesla just lazily slapping in a huge touchscreen and getting lots of coolness points for it, and in part due to the massive success of Android / iPhone / iPad), and decided they wanted cars to have that too. Car manufacturers are roughly 5 years behind current tech, so they rushed into touchscreens and by the time they got their products to market, the tech felt dated and the UX was never well thought out.
However, smarter car manufacturers learned from that and are now moving away from the touchscreen-only controls now, using them just for auxiliary needs or for things that really require them (like GPS navigation).
Consider the the Gen 1 Volt, where 99% of all buttons are identical touch-only pads. http://hanabi.autoweek.com/sites/default/files/styles/gen-12... As much as I love this car, this console is a huge UX disaster every bit as bad as a touchscreen-only car, and doesn't even earn any 'coolness' points for doing it.
Then in the Gen 2 Volt, they went back and put in lots of distinct physical buttons and dials for those previously-touch-only actions https://electromotivela.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/10/chevy... Not perfect, but this is a massive improvement over the prior model.
But I do hope the manufacturers do realise that having touch screens only is incorrect and physical controls which can be operated by muscle memory are safer.
But more obviously: the current state of your air con isn't as deeply absorbing and distracting as, say, your Facebook feed. So one is pretty bad to be looking at while drive, the other is lethally dangerous.
The process of vehicle validation should be extended also to user interface besides drive-train.