[ryanbrunner]

To be fair, while I agree that touchscreens are far worse for distraction than physical controls, they're far, far better than a smartphone. Phones are designed to hold your attention, have small text sizes and interface elements, require actually holding the phone vs just using the touchscreen, and a lot of distracted driving comes from wildly inappropriate activities like texting vs advancing to the next song on Spotify or something.

[ghaff]

And the reality is that fiddling with the radio, fiddling with climate controls, looking at physical maps and written directions, etc. were all things long before touchscreens. (To say nothing of mobile phones, including before they got "smart.) Let's not pretend that distractions weren't a thing before touchscreens in cars came along.