As vehicle dashboards rely more heavily on touchscreens, concerns are growing about driver distraction.

The body that oversees the safety of vehicles in Australia and New Zealand said it will now reward higher safety ratings to cars that reintroduce physical buttons for basic functions.

ANCAP hoped it would encourage drivers to keep their eyes on the road.

NZ Autocar magazine managing director Richard Edwards told RNZ’s Morning Report there were cars on the market where everything was set through the screen.

“There are pretty much no physical buttons other than a few on the steering wheel, everything right down to windscreen wiper settings and the headlight settings and safety feature settings are all within the screen,” he said.

“Now, that’s not every car, that’s only a very small number of cars that have done that. I think we’re in a period where they’re trying to find the balance as to what you can put on the screen and what you can’t.”

He said there had been studies showing that interacting with touchscreens extended reaction times, which could explain ANCAP’s reasoning.

“I think also they’re getting a lot of feedback from people out there and the media, who are noting that sometimes these changes in design are going a little bit too far.”

ANCAP has a very qualified and experienced team of engineers that do look at these things “well beyond my pay grade”, who no doubt have some reasons for that decision, Edwards said.

Edwards said the European ANCAP scheme was also looking at awarding higher safety ratings for buttons.

“ANCAP itself, its biggest influence is really across the Tasman, in that a lot of major fleets will not buy vehicles that don’t have a five-star rating,” he said.

“If vehicles start falling from that five-star rating, the sales will likely go down because fleets and governments and so forth are the biggest buyers of vehicles.

“They do a lot of effort to encourage consumers to buy five-star cars too, and I think there is a very strong feeling within the community that if you’re buying a car, particularly if you put your family in it, or for a business group of staff, that a five-star is what you need to have. So, a five-star is very, very important.”

However, Edwards said there had been discussion in recent years that perhaps ANCAP was making it too hard to get those ratings.

He said ANCAP may be pushing too far with what it is asking for from companies.

“Particularly in the context that New Zealand and Australia have such a small market that it’s very difficult for a car company to build specifically for what our markets want in the context of what they have to build overall worldwide.”

Edwards said if manufacturers were to make the changes, the development cycle for vehicles in Europe and Japan was somewhere between four and eight years.

He said that was how long it would take to make physical hardware changes, depending on where they were with the cycle.

But the Chinese development cycle was a lot shorter.

“It’s two to three years. So theoretically, they could come out with those buttons or changes a lot quicker, and the Chinese market particularly are the ones who have shifted very strongly into a screen-only driving environment,” Edwards said.

RNZ