First, I have never driven a car with a huge screen, best is 8-9" screen with manual Blinkers, wipers, cruise control, headlights, radio station and volume (behind Steering wheel), and phone answer. All push button or stalk.
On my 10yo screen, I need to grasp the dash to hit the icons properly. It does not allow GPS in motion.
Government have made a huge deal of penalties for even touching a mobile phone.
They maintain that even two seconds can result in tragedy.
But they also claim that is takes 2 seconds to brake in response to an emergency.
Is it now OK to enter a phone number on a touch screen?
I'm not here to get into a debate about Touch screens. I know nothing.
.
But is it time the the Govt's reconciled their position with the actual market
The Difference between Mobile Phones and Touch Screens in Cars
Comments
Or better yet make some physical buttons mandatory like the hazard button.
AC fan control, temperature and volume to start with.- 2
They are doing something along those lines in Europe and China, Australia is more than likely going to copy.
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ANCAP already does an assessment based on physical controls for "critical vehicle functions" since the beginning of 2026. But they don't include AC controls in their criteria.
The functions they assess as critical are indicators, hazard lights, windscreen wipers, headlights and horn.
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Thanks, I didn't know that.
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ok
name checks out, not much else
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^^This
OP presents an age old argument.
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Or OP presents an argument due to old age.
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made a huge deal of penalties for even touching a mobile phone.
You are allowed to touch your mobile phone under certain conditions when it's in a purpose-built holder fixed to the car.
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I think the rationale stems from people checking messages and typing which is a big differentiator with touch screen head units and texts can sometimes be constant communication and therefore increased prolonged risk. I'm not a big fan of non tactile and feedbackless car controls.
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Fun fact, passengers are also distractions and some data suggests is worse than changing a song, switching stations etc…..
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Why is anybody touching themselves? Don't we all have Siri or similar these days to do that for us?
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i just do voice 2 text
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could be wrong but that's not as hands free as holding down the home/power/siri button.
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Why is anybody touching themselves? Don't we all have Siri or similar these days to do that for us?
Wait what…
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Why is anybody touching themselves?
Why would you whilst driving?
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I don't drive but whenever I can't type with both hands I use Siri to write me a message "to who" and then confirm to send "yes".
my friend who drives and he does the same. can't believe people are driving down the road typing out a message with their fingers. 😌
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A lot of people may have tried it and discovered it sucked. It has certainly improved but most people still have the impression it sucks and don't bother with it.
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that makes sense. usually I only have to message something short. like one or two sentences max and it works just fine for that length. usually the case isn't it for messages you want reply prompt like "omw ill be there soon". anything longer that requires thinking and can easily wait.
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@skibidigrimacmoggr67: I don't know why you got negged for stating your use case. Have an upvote to cancel out.
Siri really does suck in comparison to other agents (hi google!) but I also use it to send a brief "on my way" or whatever while I'm driving and it manages that well enough.- 0
I don't know why you got negged for stating your use case.
don't worry idc. when it's double digit negatives I know some people are upset. but usually when single digit I just assume it's a couple people touching while scrolling, I mean you can never really know why it's negative so it's not worth spending time thinking about.
yes I know Siri reputation for being a terrible assistant. but after coming back to iPhone recently I find it's better at dictation and I never have a issue with wrong word etc. i have iPhone 12 now previously I had iphone SE (basically iPhone 5) so a long time for software update improvement.
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Clickbait gonna click-bait, but here's the reasoning:
Phones can display anything you like. Many of the apps are deliberately designed to provide the user with distractions. Thus, allowing drivers to have unlimited use of phones in cars is therefore an obviously bad thing, and so we have laws against using phones while driving. Users are typically only permitted to touch their phone while mounted, and only for very few specific functions. To my knowledge, typing a phone number into your phone while operating a vehicle remains illegal in all states.
The large displays built into modern cars are required to have very specific limitations on what can be displayed while the car is being operated. There are a lot of cars capable of playing videos, and even games, while the car is parked - but those functions are disabled by the vehicle as soon as the car is taken out of park and/or the handbrake is released. While the car is being operated, any display visible to the driver is typically limited to displaying maps and navigation data, media playback and/or phone call graphics. Any activity which involves typing for entering information, text, numbers or symbols on a device are not permitted. The user may use voice controls for functions like navigation, making a call or responding to messages.
Some jurisdictions also have interpreted using a touchscreen for an "unreasonable amount of time" as driving without due care and attention, which is also an offence and the penalty can be significant.
ANCAP's 2026-onwards criteria for safety include provisions relating to this topic. To earn all available points, vehicles must provide physical controls or stalks for indicators, hazard lights, windscreen wipers, headlights and horn. Alternatively, the vehicle may have a fixed and permanent portion of the cabin display screen dedicated to the above functions.
I am not aware of any car that relies solely on touchscreen controls to operate any of those functions.
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Thanks for a constructive response. I was conerned that I may have offended the EV fandom here because there was so little blowback and negging. ANCAP is particularly important, and I apologise for missing your earlier post.
And. I don't do anything on my phone except call or SMS, so never had a concept of doing tiktok or any of the other distractions
One thing about ANCAP is that it ignores the Newtons laws of motion. In modern day english. "If big thing hits small thing, small thing is screwed" Did you see what the speeding porsche did when it T-boned a corolla in Point Cook this week, apart from killing two people.
I suspect if had hit a Landcruiser, they would still be looking for thePorsche drivers head- 0
One thing about ANCAP is that it ignores the Newtons laws of motion
That's really not true. Newton's laws are very much in action during their testing. But I can see what you're saying.
ANCAP's testing regime is necessarily regimented and standardized for perfect repeatability. It's a series of scientific tests intended to remove all variables except the ones being tested, and each test is applied in precisely the same way to every single vehicle so the results can be directly compared.
When ANCAP tests a car for occupant protection in a collision, they use the exact same speed of impact every time regardless of the size and weight of the car, and it crashes into the same solid, heavy immovable object. They then measure the forces experienced by the dummies and review the level of "injury" each of the dummy occupants suffer, and those results are what determine the vehicle's score for collision testing.
Obviously collisions in the real world are far less clinical, the angles are nowhere near as precise and there are lots of variables that a lab simulation can account for. And collisions often involve other vehicles, of varying weights and speeds. But that really doesn't matter - what actually matters is the amount of force delivered to the occupants of the car, and the level of protection it provides.
Yes, the force delivered by a 3 tonne SUV travelling at 110km/h is going to be somewhat higher than the forces seen in laboratory collision testing. But the collision avoidance features in a modern car can make a substantial difference to the outcome before it even happens by swerving or early heavy braking. The seatbelt pretensioners can secure the occupants in the proper position prior to impact. And the crumple zones and airbags and side intrusion bars can soak up, redirect and dissipate the energy of the collision. All of those things combined can make a massive difference to occupant survivability.
Pretending that ANCAP scores don't really matter in high speed collisions with large vehicles simply isn't accurate. They do matter, immensely. Getting a score of >80 on collision impact performance in ANCAP testing means that even in a collision at twice the speed of lab testing, the occupants have an excellent chance of survival regardless of what the car collides with. And they have a much better chance of survival compared to a similar car from 10 years earlier.
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Unfortunately I wouldn't let my daughters drive anything smaller than a falcon.
And I demonstrated this by getting them to tap an egg in a couple of places with a stone
Aren't ANBCAPS always and only done from direct head on?
Does that relate to TAC etc Crash statistics, point of impact, if there are any.
My guess for frontal impacts would be direct head on about 1%, vs offset of front , say 99%
Not looking for a debate here.
This thread has changed my perceptions of both mobile phones and touch screens- 0
Unfortunately I wouldn't let my daughters drive anything smaller than a falcon.
Smaller, or lighter? A Falcon has a long bonnet, but there's a dirty great chunk of near-solid metal (the engine) that can be pushed back into the cabin in a frontal collision. The actual crumple zone is quite a bit shorter than it looks - it's really only a little deeper than the distance between the front bumper and the drive belts on the engine - maybe 400mm total?
If you actually want good frontal crash performance, you want a car that's about as heavy as a Falcon, but with a much deeper crumple zone. The Tesla Model 3 and Model Y are excellent examples of this - their whole front is effectively empty space to absorb a frontal impact (over 1.2m). The most substantial thing in the front is a flimsy coolant radiator with plastic air-guides.
This same philosophy applies to most EV models. Nearly all of them have either a "frunk" used for storage, or small ancillary items like the AC compressor and power steering motor. Even with AWD EVs, the front motor is typically quite compact and low-slung, and would end up being pushed underneath the vehicle rather than into the passenger compartment.
Aren't ANBCAPS always and only done from direct head on?
No, that's only one of the 4 major destructive tests they do.
- Frontal offset test (simulates head-on collision)
- Full-width frontal test (simulates off-centre frontal collision)
- Side impact test (simulates T-bone collision)
- Oblique pole side impact test (simulates skidding sideways into a tree)
There's a great collection of diagrams here: https://www.whichcar.com.au/advice/ancap-crash-testing-expla…
They also use spare parts for a series of smaller tests for pedestrian strikes etc.
My guess for frontal impacts would be direct head on about 1%, vs offset of front , say 99%
ANCAP says 60% of all serious crashes are frontal impacts and more than half of all fatalities to seat belt-wearing drivers in frontal crashes occur at impact speeds of less than 55 km/h. That's why they have 2 different frontal impact tests.
This thread has changed my perceptions of both mobile phones and touch screens
What a wholesome conclusion.
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By the way those car selections were 25 years ago
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the size.
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The government has directed its enforcement at phones held in the hand not because they are necessarily worse, but because they can. Because a policeman or an AI camera looking into the car can you see you doing it. It is able to be enforced, and it generates a lot of revenue enforcing it, so it is enforced. It is easy to see and catch you doing it than a lot of other activities. If a number of similar things are a problem, and you can enforce one of them, you don't ignore it because other things are just as bad, you do what you can about the thing you can.
Drink driving was what got enforced when someone invented the breathalyser. Speeding was what got enforced when someone invented speed radar. And hand-held mobile phone use got enforced when someone invented an AI camera that could detect it. What drove what was done was what technology made possible.
Mobile phone calls, whether they are being done on a hand-held or a phone in a cradle, or through the car's entertainment system, do constitute a worse safety problem than other forms of distraction. Because when you are holding a conversation your attention wanders for deceptively long periods of time. Longer than speaking to someone in the car. Longer than operating a control in the car. Though perhaps no more than programming a destination manually into a navigation system without pulling over and doing it.
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Is your take seriously that drink driving is only bad because they can enforce it? If you think you're better off driving drunk than talking I have serious questions.
I dunno about you, but I can also talk and drive at the same time. If I hit a traffic issue that requires my attention, I focus on the call and tell the person I'm talking to that I can't talk to them because I'm dealing with something.
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Is your take seriously that drink driving is only bad because they can enforce it?
Didn't say that., What I said was that, like a number of other things, it started getting enforced seriously when the technology was created to enforce it. In fact, like a number of things, it got over-enforced when the technology made it easy. Maximum blood alcohol levels were lowered to substantially lower than the science said constituted a risk. Science said .08, now we have a .05 limit, because now we can detect when people have been drinking even if they don't smell or act drunk. Speeding got enforced seriously when speed detection devices when the technology made it easy. So we have people being booked for just a couple of km/h over the limit, which wouldn't have been noticed by an unaided human eye. And now the technology exists for AI cameras to see holding a mobile phone that is being disproportionately over-enforced and over-penalised, when it isn't any more unsafe than use of a mobile phone in a holder and other forms of distraction.
The history of road safety enforcement is that things go from being tacitly accepted - a few drinks as long as you're not obviously pissed, a few km/h over, etc - to demonised and milked for every dollar in revenue when technology is invented to detect them. While other things that no technology has been invented to detect, but are just as dangerous, continue to be ignored. Like fatigue.
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Ahh the old… we don't want to make things safer, we just want to make money off you argument.
People get fined because money is the biggest deterrent.
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They are both a distraction. I think you should get ancap points for physical switches, as finding settings in a menu if you want to change the aircon is clearly more dangerous than turning a knob.