Allianz survey finds one in three Australian drivers has faced a critical moment using in-car touchscreens

At 60km/h, a driver who looks away from the road for three seconds travels about 50 metres, roughly the length of an Olympic-sized pool. That is the arithmetic behind a new Allianz survey of Australian drivers, which asks what happens when the quick tap to change the music or the few presses to adjust the aircon take place on a touchscreen.

The headline finding is that nearly one in three surveyed drivers reported a critical situation while using an in-car touchscreen. One in five respondents said they had caused or partly caused a crash in the past three years. Of those drivers, more than two in three said distraction definitely or possibly played a role.

Chris Wood, Allianz Australia's Emerging Risks Manager, pointed to how drivers perceive the trend. Some 75 per cent of respondents said they felt in-car distractions had increased over the last couple of years. Wood said that made sense with electric cars, because they are so new and the first thing you see when you get into one is an enormous screen.

Yet the survey also turned up a gap. Despite three-quarters believing distraction from in-car technology had grown, only 41 per cent rated the overall risk of driver distraction as high or very high. Professor Michael Regan, an Emeritus Professor at UNSW Sydney who has spent decades researching driver distraction, finds that gap concerning. He said his PhD proved that people cannot consciously attend to two things at the same time.

Regan said distraction is not only about eyes leaving the road, but also the mind and the hands. When attention shifts to a screen, drivers can miss subtle changes in traffic or take longer to react to a hazard, even if they are looking back at the road moments later.

The design shift sits underneath all of this. Carmakers are increasingly moving functions once handled by physical buttons and dials into touchscreen menus, so routine tasks take multiple steps. Wood described the old way: muscle memory said reach left, there is the demister button, press it, and the driver never had to take their eyes off the road. Now, he said, it can take four or five menu options to reach the same place.

For Peter Frazer, the stakes are personal. His daughter Sarah was killed by a distracted truck driver on the Hume Freeway after her car broke down. Frazer remembered arriving home to find police waiting: two female officers crying and his family screaming, and himself falling to the ground catatonic. He said the truck driver travelled more than 300 metres without looking ahead, with the distraction believed to have lasted about 11 seconds.

Since Sarah's death, Frazer and his family have campaigned for safer roads through the SARAH Group. On screens in vehicles, he says it has gone too far. He also points to a lever Australia already holds. Because the country does not make its own vehicles, he said, the Australian Design Rules let it set what is required of any vehicle sold here, and manufacturers must comply.

The open question is whether Australia will use that power so that the latest in-car technology does not come at the expense of road safety.