Touch-sensitive screens replacing traditional buttons have an impact on traffic safety, as it is now impossible to change even the simplest functions without taking your attention off the road in some cars.
As a result, Euro NCAP has decided that it will soon add to its requirements and when testing car safety, the overall score will be reduced if the most important functions in the car, such as wipers, climate control or lights, are activated via touch-sensitive screens.
The Euro NCAP organization has been operating since 1997 and updates its safety requirements every few years. This ranking has a significant impact on car manufacturers as they try to take into account the research results. The requirements were last updated three years ago.
In recent years, there has been an increased focus on active safety systems, resulting in some cars receiving higher scores due to the abundance of active electronics, even though the overall passive safety score was relatively low.
The Insurance Institute for Highway Safety, an analogous organization operating in North America at that time, which also conducts its own safety tests of new cars, operates a little more strictly.
For example, if a car’s passive safety is worse, its score will not be raised, even if it has many active safety systems.
Euro NCAP has been conducting separate tests of active safety systems for the past few years and assigning separate points for them.
According to the British weekly “Auto Express”, the organization plans to start reducing points for moving the most important functions to touch screens from 2026.
Tesla was one of the first manufacturers to move everything, even the function of turning on the wipers, to touch-sensitive screens, and after that, the fashion for screens that is out of control began, and as they increased, the price of screens decreased.
And now it is even cheaper to move everything to the screen than to produce ordinary buttons, even the manufacturers themselves are beginning to understand that the main functions are activated only through touch screens is simply unsafe and are increasingly returning the buttons to switch the main, most frequently used functions.
