Busty
Highway Hunter
That is not quite right. Guideline testing shows that touchscreen mostly do not fully meet lots of formal criteria, also in rather basic navigation use cases. That is already pretty bad. What makes it even worse is that most users do not realize how distracted they are. They like touch screens in general, they want to have them in their cars as well. It is when they are shown their driving pattern (speed changes, diffuse steering) that they start to hesitate.
The thing is that in a car the optimal positions for touch controls are more or less all on a circle/oval with the radius of the driver's arm. Displays, however, should be positioned higher (more or less on eye level) and on a larger radius.
Everybody in the business knows that based on facts alone in-car touch screen solutions can only be an add-on/part of a redundant operation. This, however, does not mean that future cars will not use touch screens extensively. Early in the development of the upcoming A8, Audi, for instance, tested a very Tesla-like layout against a two-screen solution that their designers favored and which is now becoming reality. What had never been disputed (at least from that stage on) was the fact that this car will have to come practically without any hard-key.
