‘They’ve added all these other opportunities to interact with technology in the car’: Tesla pioneered touchscreens. Then crashes went up

You can hear the smile in Demetrius Branca’s voice when he talks about his favorite picture of Anthony. 

In it, Anthony, his son, wears a funny hat and Adidas jacket as he gazes up at the camera with an infectious smile and sparkling eyes. It was taken on Christmas morning.

“When I see that picture, just like, man, that is as close as you can get to capturing a personality with a photo,” Branca told me recently.

Neither knew that happy holiday would be one of Anthony’s last. On Nov. 7, 2014, exactly one month shy of his 20th birthday, Anthony was run over by a van as he slowed to make a left turn on his motorcycle. The force ripped Anthony off the bike and under the vehicle’s wheels. After running him over, the van coasted to a stop, Branca said, as Anthony lay in the road slowly dying from his injuries. Twenty to 30 minutes later, that sparkle in his eyes went dark.

Eyewitnesses and the evidence suggest the driver wasn’t paying attention.

“All signs pointed to this dude being distracted, but there were no consequences for that, because our state legislature has failed time and time again to pass common sense legislation,” Branca said, his bitterness fresh a decade later.

The driver who killed Anthony was fined $1,100 and had his license suspended for six months.

Even as vehicle deaths have dropped due to a combination of safety features and legislation, those caused by distracted driving have risen. 

In 2022, distracted drivers killed 3,308 and injured nearly 290,000 people in the United States, per the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA). That’s nine lives lost and nearly 800 injuries every day. Nearly 20% of those deaths were people outside the vehicle, pedestrians, cyclists, or other drivers like Anthony.

And those are just the crashes involving distraction that we know about.

Earlier this year, NHTSA Deputy Director Sophie Shulman said that the number of crashes and fatalities caused by distracted driving are likely underreported because drivers are reluctant to admit it and law enforcement has limited abilities to detect it during an investigation.

Most of us think of cell phones when we think of distracted driving; using a cell phone while driving is undoubtedly dangerous. But experts and data are increasingly pointing to another culprit that’s distracting drivers: touchscreen consoles.

The 1986 Buick Riviera was the first car to come equipped with a touchscreen. It took decades for the technology to catch on, however. Most point to Tesla’s 2012 Model S as the catalyst for the explosion of touchscreens in vehicles.

Other car companies have proven all too happy to follow Tesla’s lead. Today 97% of new cars sold in America have at least one. Over the years, they’ve increased in size and responsibility. They increasingly control more functions in vehicles, including basic things like windshield wipers, gearshifts, and climate controls. There are even turn signals activated by touch.

Consumers are on board with the change. S&P Global Mobility found that 86% want their vehicles to have a touchscreen. A third want it to control everything in the vehicle, Forbes reports.

Automakers are more than happy to oblige. Buyers want them and it’s cheaper to put in a touchscreen than it is to install the traditional buttons, knobs, and stalks.

But how much tech is too much in a vehicle? A vocal minority of consumers are starting to push back against touchscreens, particularly those that control essential functions, arguing that they’re inconvenient, annoying, and, above all, unsafe. Yet automakers, safety regulators, and legislators have shown little appetite for slowing the screenification of cars.

To Branca, who lost a son to distracted driving, it’s a recipe for disaster. He pointed out that using a touchscreen requires the eyes, hands, and mind, deviating all the attention required to drive.

“It's basically like you're creating a bunch of suicide bombers who are just driving with no view of what's in front of them,” Branca said.

‘Intexticated’ by ‘screenification’

Plenty of studies have established that it’s dangerous to use a cell phone behind the wheel. An oft-cited statistic from NHTSA states that sending a text takes your eyes off the road for nearly five seconds; if you’re going 55 miles per hour, that’s the equivalent of driving the length of a football field blindfolded. Studies have shown people are equally or even more likely to crash if they’re using a cell phone than if they’re drunk, a finding that gave rise to the portmanteau “intexticated.”

If you’ve ever seen someone texting while driving—or perhaps been that person—you don’t need statistics to know it’s unsafe. How many times have you observed a car swerve, drift, or blatantly ignore a traffic signal then notice the phone in the driver’s hand?

Plaintiffs’ attorney Catherine E. Elbakidze works in the Greensboro, North Carolina branch of the Law Offices of James Scott Farrin. Elbakidze told me she represents a lot of clients who were in accidents involving distracted driving, most using their cell phones. In her opinion, distracted drivers can cause even more serious accidents than others. People do it so often that they become complacent about the danger of picking up the phone to take a call or read a text, she said, so they do so while driving at a normal rate of speed or even above the speed limit.

“When you're dealing with DUI or DWIs and things of that nature, at least at some point, the driver may know that they're about to get into a collision, but I think when you're so distracted, it just happens very quickly, and I think that's incredibly dangerous,” she said.

Data also shows that impaired drivers often drive slower.

Washington was the first state to ban texting while driving in 2007. According to the Governors Highway Safety Association (GHSA), today 49 states prohibit it and in all but six it is a primary offense, meaning you can be pulled over if an officer sees you texting behind the wheel.

However, as Branca noted, some states have loopholes that make such laws harder to enforce, or, as he colorfully put it, “absolute trash” and like “window dressing on a [expletive] show.” For example, in Florida, where he lives and has been lobbying since shortly after Anthony’s death to ban holding a cell phone behind the wheel, it remains legal to use one for other purposes, which makes it difficult for law enforcement to differentiate whether a driver is illegally texting or legally doing something else with their phone. Not even school bus drivers are prohibited from using phones behind the wheel in Florida, GHSA reports.

“Legislation like this in other states has caused an immediate reduction in traffic fatalities of around 25%,” Branca said. “I think it ranges from like 15% to 25% immediately.”

Why are touchscreens replacing knobs, buttons, and stalks?

The average consumer may see a giant touchscreen embedded in a dashboard as a status symbol. In reality, however, it’s less expensive to simply run a vehicle’s controls through one than to install manual controls, so automakers arguably have less incentive to go back to the knobs, buttons, and stalks of yore.

Attorney Elbakidze believes that it’s unlikely automakers will stop relying on touchscreens unless they’re forced to by regulators, public pressure, or the law.

Elbakidze pointed to the defectively-designed gas tanks in Ford Pintos and Mercury Bobcats in the 1970s that caused many to explode in moderate rear-end collisions. Only after public and media scrutiny and what was then the largest punitive damages award in a California personal injury case did Ford agree to recall the vehicles and fix the defect. Just before the jury awarded the young man who’d been severely burned in that case $125 million, Mother Jones published an article revealing that Ford knew about the defect, had a patent for a gas tank with a safer design, but had opted not to use it after doing a cost-benefit analysis in which it concluded that it would be “cheaper” to simply pay for burn and death cases.

“Historically, car companies are always going to put money first, and if there's a way to put something out on the market, especially if it's not currently regulated, they're going to try to push the boundaries to seem the most cutting edge,” she said.

Earlier this year, an independent European automotive safety body made moves to start discouraging the industry from running so many controls through touchscreens. The influential European New Car Assessment Program (Euro NCAP) announced new rules requiring cars to have physical controls for essential functions such as horns, hazard lights, turn signals, and emergency calls if they are to receive the five-star safety rating that many use to market vehicles.

Matthew Avery, director of strategic development at Euro NCAP, reportedly said that overreliance on touchscreens is an “industrywide problem.”

“New Euro NCAP tests due in 2026 will encourage manufacturers to use separate, physical controls for basic functions in an intuitive manner, limiting eyes-off-road time and therefore promoting safer driving,” Avery said.

Thus far, the United States has not made any indication that it is going to crack down on the touchscreens that have become ubiquitous in new vehicles. Not even the high-profile death of Sen. Mitch McConnell’s (R-Ky.) sister-in-law earlier this year led to an outcry about the screens. It is believed that Angela Chao, who was intoxicated at the time, accidentally put her Tesla in reverse and backed into the lake where she ultimately drowned. She’d reportedly accidentally done so many times before, as have other drivers. Her vehicle, a 2020 Tesla Model X SUV, has a touchscreen gearshift that’s generated dozens of complaints from drivers.

Tesla did not respond to an emailed inquiry. It has reportedly declined to comment on Chao’s death.

There is precious little research into the topic. But the data that does exist has shown that touchscreen controls are dangerous. The AAA Foundation for Traffic Safety evaluated infotainment systems in 40 different vehicles manufactured in 2017 and 2018 by testing people performing various everyday tasks, including making phone calls, sending texts, and programming navigation and entertainment. They found that such systems “create dangerous distractions for drivers.” The foundation reported that, compared to tech created by automakers, Apple CarPlay and Android Auto deviated less focus from the road. Still, they reported, these were unsafe.

“Even with Apple CarPlay and Android Auto requiring less overall demand and time to complete a task, drivers still took up to 33 seconds to complete a navigation task compared to 48 seconds for native systems,” the report synopsis stated. “At 25 MPH, drivers can travel the length of three football fields during this time.”

Since then, automakers have put more controls, not less, in touchscreens.

Jake Nelson is the director of traffic safety advocacy and research at AAA. He emphasized that their research primarily focused on using voice commands to accomplish these tasks and that the goal was to inform automakers on how to make better choices, not to demonize the industry. While he says some did make design choices based on their findings that potentially improve safety, they’ve made others that have had the opposite effect.

“The net impact was like one step forward in the right direction, but three steps back because they've added all these other capabilities and opportunities to interact with technology in the car that actually make you less safe,” Nelson said.

He believes it’s important to keep the pressure on carmakers.

The auto industry, he said, has argued that other safety features, such as automatic steering, decrease the risk of distracted driving and essentially justify features that pull the driver’s attention off the road. But AAA found that they will not prevent most traffic fatalities.

“Even once fully implemented and penetrated through the U.S. motor vehicle fleet, all the ADAs [advanced driver assistance systems] technologies available today and working the way that they were intended, still reduce or prevent a minority, not a majority, of traffic fatalities,” Nelson said. “They save many, many lives for sure, but they don't even prevent a majority of traffic fatalities.”

While the internet is full of anecdotal complaints that car companies “love [to] invent new and innovative ways of taking drivers' eyes off the road,” Nelson agrees that currently there’s little actual data about how safe or unsafe these devices are. He said he hasn’t seen or heard of any ongoing research into the safety of the overuse of touchscreens for essential functions that traditionally you could control with the flip of a switch or press of a button, like turning down the radio.

To many drivers, it’s simply intuitive that navigating an electronic menu to turn on the headlights is less safe than having this control on the steering wheel column. Thus they wonder why automakers are putting more and more controls in touchscreens.

Branca, who lost his son to a distracted driver and today sells used cars, is among those who question whether the seemingly—at present—unstoppable momentum to run cars through touchscreens isn’t simply financial.

“Our government is wholly owned by corporate interests,” he opined. “These politicians who need to take in hundreds of thousands of dollars in campaign contributions to do whatever they think they need to do are all too willing to listen to that, but not willing to listen to me or the families who come to them every year and say, ‘We gotta do something about this. This is terrible. My kid's dead. I don't want your kids to die.’”

Automotive manufacturers spend big money lobbying the federal government every year. According to consumer advocacy nonprofit Public Citizen, from 2019-2023, 10 major car companies and trade groups collectively spent more than $183 million lobbying in the nation’s capital. Meanwhile, they found that the top five automakers by U.S. sales (General Motors, Toyota, Stellantis, Honda, and Ford) earned a collective $293 billion since 2018.

Nelson from AAA said he’s not aware of any serious conversations among federal regulators to reduce the overreliance on touchscreens in vehicles.

The human cost of distracted driving

Nov. 7 will be 10 years since Anthony Branca was killed while he slowed to make a turn on his way from his job at a bagel shop to classes at a community college.

For his father Demetrius, these have been some of the hardest years of his life. He and Anthony’s mother learned they were expecting him mere days before his elder brother, then seven months old, fell asleep in his crib and never woke up. Branca said they gave Anthony the middle name Phoenix to symbolize the hope and renewal he inspired during an extremely dark time. He brought light to his and so many other lives.

“This kid, at 19 years old, was my best friend in the world, best friend I've ever had,” Branca said, adding. “He was intelligent, he was clever, he was funny, he was kind, he was wise beyond his years. He was talented. He could play the saxophone, he could play the guitar, he could play drums, he could draw, he could write. He could sing. He was just… he was a force of nature.”

Like any parent would, he imagines what life would be like if Anthony was alive. Would he be a grandfather now? Who would Anthony have become if he was turning 30 on Dec. 7 like he was supposed to?

This year thousands of others just like Anthony will lose their lives to distracted driving. What would their futures have held if someone hadn’t been sending a text or trying to navigate through five screens just to turn on the headlights?

Branca uses Anthony’s memory as fuel to keep going and pushes for tighter restrictions on distracted driving because he knows, and the data shows, that it will save lives. On what would’ve been Anthony’s 30th birthday, he’s embarking on a trip around Florida to lobby lawmakers to pass the Anthony Branca and Anita Neal Act, named for his son and a legislator’s sister, both of whom were killed by distracted drivers. Anthony remains the light of his life and his purpose for living.

“I have faith that someday, when I'm on my deathbed and I'm taking my last breath, that Anthony's going to lean down into me and he's going to whisper in my ears and you say, ‘Dad, that's how you live life. That's a life well lived. I love you.’”

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