Car Touchscreens Are Getting More Distracting, New Test Reveals

Swedish car magazine Vi Bilägare just dropped a sobering update for anyone who thought automakers were finally getting infotainment right. In a new test comparing 11 vehicles, the magazine found that drivers are actually spending more time staring at screens than they did four years ago.

The average distance traveled while fiddling with a touchscreen, meaning eyes off the road, jumped from 756 meters in 2022 to 813 meters in the latest round. That extra two seconds might not sound like much, but at 60 mph, your car covers 88 feet every second.

The test had drivers perform routine tasks, adjusting climate, changing radio stations, tweaking screen brightness, while cruising at highway speeds on a closed airfield. Researchers then measured how far each car traveled during those interactions. The biggest offender? The Mercedes-Benz CLA-Class, which required an average of 35 seconds of screen time per task.

That’s 15 seconds longer than a 2022 GLB-Class. The CLA also had a 19-second delay after unlocking before it would respond to inputs, and it racked up 1,116 meters of distracted driving, second only to the Mazda CX-60’s 1,137 meters.

On the bright side, some vehicles actually improved. A Tesla Model Y beat the Model 3 from 2022, and the Volvo XC60 took top honors in the new test with an average of 485 meters per task. But even that was 68 meters worse than a 2022 Volvo C40 Recharge. The takeaway? Automakers have made screens bigger, sharper, and better positioned, but those upgrades haven’t translated into safer, quicker interactions.

As Vi Bilägare notes, a 2005 Volvo V70 with old-school knobs and buttons still outperformed most modern touchscreen-heavy models.