In-car touchscreens can be much more distracting to use compared to systems with physical buttons, potentially putting drivers at higher risks of accidents.

BMW’s iDrive was named as the easiest to use in What Car?’s test of the UK’s most and least distracting infotainment and air-con systems

A test carried out by UK automotive publication What Car? of 20 infotainment and air-con systems found that it took twice as long to adjust heating controls on some cars with touchscreen controls rather than physical dials. And it took up to four times longer to zoom out of the sat-nav map to view a pre-programmed route using a touchscreen than it did using a rotary dial controller.

With figures indicating that distracted driving is a contributing factor in 15% of all road accidents, the tests – covering six tasks frequently carried out by drivers on the move – also found a sophisticated voice control system is the least distracting way of doing many tasks.

But levels of sophistication vary; systems in the Audi, BMW and Mercedes-Benz all recognise natural speech, so you can activate them by talking and then ask them to carry out your desired task and hardly take your eyes off the road at all.

However, not all voice control systems are as intuitive or fast to respond; What Car?’s testers were looking away from the road for more than twice as long in cars with the worst systems.

The research also highlighted the benefits of having a range of different ways of doing a task, so the driver can choose the most convenient for each situation. The best systems let you use physical buttons, the touchscreen or voice control to do a wide range of commands.

The most and least distracting in-car control systems: