Where the Needle Ought to Live

Eleven modern cars were driven along an airfield in Sweden at 110 km/h in the summer of 2022 while their drivers attempted four ordinary things: switch on the seat heater and raise the temperature two degrees, change radio station, reset the trip meter, then dim the instrument lighting and switch off the centre screen. The Swedish magazine Vi Bilägare timed them all. A 2005 Volvo V70, brought as a reference, finished the lot in 10.0 seconds and 306 metres.

The worst of the eleven, an MG Marvel R, needed 44.9 seconds and 1,372 metres: four-fifths of a mile consumed while its driver worked through menus. Vi Bilägare repeated the exercise in July 2026 at Lunda airfield near Uppsala with ten newer cars. The average distance covered had risen, from 756 metres in 2022 to 813 metres. The best of the 2026 field, a Volvo XC60, took 485 metres. The V70’s 306 metres remains unbeaten.

Volvo V70 (2005) 10.0 sec

Dacia Sandero 13.5 sec

Volvo C40 13.7 sec

Tesla Model 3 23.5 sec

Volkswagen ID.3 25.7 sec

BMW iX 30.4 sec

MG Marvel R 44.9 sec

Tasks: seat heater and temperature, radio station change, trip meter reset, instrument dimming and screen off.

Source: Vi Bilägare, 2022

What Euro NCAP Has Written Down

Euro NCAP is a European consumer testing programme, not a British regulator. Its stars carry no legal force here and never have. What they carry is commercial weight, in fleet policy and in advertising small print. On 26 November 2025 the programme announced the largest revision to its rating system since the overall star rating arrived in 2009: four assessment stages, each scored out of 100, with minimum thresholds in every stage governing the star count. Inside the first, Safe Driving, sits a new assessment of the human-machine interface, judging the placement, clarity and ease of use of essential controls, including whether commonly used functions have physical buttons.

That is the institutional wording. Euro NCAP was blunter two years earlier: the European Transport Safety Council reported in March 2024 that the programme would require dedicated physical controls for five things from January 2026, namely the indicators, hazard lights, horn, windscreen wipers and emergency eCall function. Bury any of them in a touchscreen and five stars go out of reach.

The overuse of touchscreens is an industry-wide problem, with almost every vehicle-maker moving key controls onto central touchscreens.

The reasoning is mechanical, not aesthetic. A switch has a fixed position, a shape and an end-stop, all findable by hand. Glass has none of the three, so the eye must do the finding.

The British Evidence

The most useful measurement of that cost was made in Berkshire. IAM RoadSmart, with the FIA Foundation and the Rees Jeffreys Road Fund, commissioned the Transport Research Laboratory to establish what happens when drivers operate Android Auto and Apple CarPlay. TRL’s report, PPR948, is dated 31 January 2020. Forty drivers, all holding full UK licences, each completed three runs of one route in TRL’s DigiCar simulator: no interaction, voice control only, touch only. Twenty used Android Auto, twenty CarPlay.

Choosing music through Spotify by touch raised mean reaction time to a visual stimulus by 57 per cent on CarPlay and 53 per cent on Android Auto. TRL set those numbers against its own earlier work on the same simulated route. A hand-held telephone call had produced a 45.9 per cent increase, in 2002. Sending a text message, 34.7 per cent, in 2008. Cannabis, 21 per cent, in 2000. The legal alcohol limit, 12.4 per cent, in 2002.

At motorway speeds that amounted to between 18.7 and 24.9 additional metres of stopping distance, or four to five car lengths. Eye tracking showed touch control pushing the summed time spent looking away from the road past 12 seconds on almost every task, outside the guidance issued by NHTSA, the American federal agency, the only published benchmark available. Voice control stayed inside it. Drivers also underestimated how long they had looked away.

The Retreat

Volkswagen went furthest into the glass and has been most explicit about coming back out. Its design chief, Andreas Mindt, told Autocar in March 2025 that five functions would return to physical switchgear below the display, on every car the company builds.

From the ID.2all onwards, we will have physical buttons for the five most important functions – the volume, the heating on each side of the car, the fans and the hazard light – below the screen. They will be in every car that we make from now on. We understood this.

Mindt added that Volkswagen would “never, ever make this mistake anymore”, that the steering wheel would get physical buttons again, and that “it’s a car. It’s not a phone: it’s a car.” The first models with the revised cabin arrive in 2026. The concession is narrow and worth stating precisely: not that screens are bad, but that a screen should never be the only route to a function a driver needs in a hurry.

The Owners Got There First

British owners had been marking the industry down before Euro NCAP put anything on paper. Auto Express reported in June 2026 that its Driver Power scores for in-car technology had fallen year on year: overall infotainment satisfaction from 88.9 per cent in 2024 to 84.6 in 2025 and 83.5 in 2026. These are ratings from a self-selecting owner survey, not measurements, and remain high in absolute terms. The gradient is the point.

Measure	2024	2026
Infotainment, overall	88.9%	83.5%
Balance of touch-sensitive and physical controls	89.1%	84.0%
User-friendliness	87.8%	81.4%

Source: Auto Express Driver Power, 2026

Why The Rev Counter Is A Fair Casualty

None of the above applies to the tachometer. The rev counter earned its central place because the driver of a geared petrol engine needed two things the speedometer could not supply: whether the engine was in its useful band, and how close the next change of gear had come. Remove the gearbox and the question evaporates. An electric motor driving through a single-speed reduction gear turns at a fixed multiple of road speed, which makes a needle tracking motor revolutions a decorative second speedometer. State of charge, energy flowing out and back, and predicted range answer the questions an electric driver has. That deletion has a reason behind it. The heater dial has no comparable defence, and never did.

Controls of the old kind are still on sale in Britain, though the list is short. Mazda’s UK price and specification guide dated 16 February 2026 opens the MX-5 range at £28,585 on the road and closes it at £38,015 for the 184PS Homura RF. The range includes climate control air conditioning, a separate volume dial and a rotary Multimedia Commander between the seats for the 8.8-inch display. Mazda’s own copy makes the safety case in almost the terms Euro NCAP now uses: the controller’s “tactile feel plays to the senses allowing for ease of use whilst on the move, and more importantly, allows you to keep your eyes on the road.” That is marketing, and it is also the argument.

The Law Is Vaguer Than The Rating

British law here is far less settled than either the rating or the research. The hand-held rules were tightened on 25 March 2022, since when a driver may not use a hand-held device for any purpose at the wheel. The fixed penalty is £200 and six points, and a driver who passed within two years loses their licence.

The offence turns on holding. A screen bolted into the dashboard is not held, so prodding it breaks no dedicated law, however long the prodding takes. What remains is the general duty, and the Highway Code is instructive about its own limits. Rule 149 carries a MUST NOT for hand-held devices, citing sections 2 and 3 of the Road Traffic Act 1988. Rule 150, on in-vehicle technology, is phrased differently: drivers MUST exercise proper control at all times, and should not be distracted by maps or screen-based information such as navigation or vehicle management systems. The binding imperative attaches to the control, not the screen.

The enforceable hook for a driver who runs into the car ahead while three menus deep in the climate settings is therefore careless or dangerous driving, which must be observed and proved. The RAC’s reading is that a prosecution for driving without due care and attention remains available whenever an officer believes a driver was dangerously distracted by something inside the car. Which leaves Britain in an odd place. The interface that costs a driver 44.9 seconds is legal; the telephone in his pocket is not. Euro NCAP cannot alter that. It can only withhold a star, and it has decided to. The rev counter left for a reason. The heater dial did not, and it is coming back with five stars attached.