It might happen when statistics actually show cars with touchscreens are measurably less safe.

It'd be even safer if we removed the radio all together, and banned any physical controls that aren't on the steering wheel (to ensure you don't have to take your hand off the wheel to use them).

Why do we only care about public safety in one circumstance but not the other?

>Why do we only care about public safety in one circumstance but not the other?

Outside of armchair theorists online, I'm not convinced anyone in charge of car design actually cares about car safety at all.

Car accidents are the leading cause of death for people age 15-29 and the second leading cause of death for people age 5-14. Nearly 3,300 people die every day in car accidents, and double that number are permanently disabled.

If people actually cared about car safety, it feels like these numbers would have gone down in the last 30 years. They haven't. [1]

[1] https://i.imgur.com/FE6lZu4.png

They probably have gone down per capita, right? We just have a lot more people than we did 30 years ago. A car built today is certainly safer than one from 30 years ago.

My hope is that driverless cars end up solving this faster than we otherwise could politically, but obviously that may be a bit ambitious.

Forget about the radio. Climate controls are needed, full stop, and they are distracting if touchscreen-driven.

Not for me. I'm quite content setting a target temperature and leaving the rest on "auto", although I know for many drivers that's not the case. And obviously it's still in my interests that other drivers not be distracted.

But those, too, could be controlled by physical buttons on the steering wheel and/or voice commands.

Mazda believes we're there now.

Nokia believed we'd mostly prefer smartphones with physical keyboards.

And some of us would have done. Trying to write anything longer than a brief text message or Tweet using any modern touchscreen phone is excruciating. Swipe-style keyboards have made entering text tolerable, but correcting the mis-reads or even the most basic editing takes orders of magnitude longer than it needs to. Admittedly, modern phones do provide a neat demonstration of various technologies designed to correct the errors caused by an otherwise slow and inaccurate input device.