Mazda 3 ditches touch screen

While rivals offer increasingly complex dashboards, the new Mazda3 has abandoned touch screens and won’t show anything than driving information in its instrument panel.

That’s the opposite of brands like Volkswagen, which now offers a configurable digital dashboard display for its Golf small car.

The current third generation Mazda3 has a screen which allows touch activation when stationary, but Mazda has abandoned even that, arguing its new design is safer.

“We moved the screen further away to minimise eye refocus time,” explained Mazda R&D engineer Matthew Valbuena at the Mazda3 global launch in Los Angeles last week.

You can read our first drive here. The new fourth-generation Mazda3 goes on-sale in Australia mid-year.

“So, the amount of time it takes for you look at the car ahead and look at the screen is reduced when the screen is farther away because you don’t have that dramatic difference in distance that requires your eyes to adjust.

“So, because the screen is further away there is no longer any touch screen functionality,” Valbuena stated.

Removing the touch function came about as part of Mazda’s new human-centric vehicle development process which debuts with the Mazda3. We’ve covered the thinking behind that here.

“We did lots of research and testing with cameras and sensor data looking at steering input,” confirmed Valbuena.

Valbuena agreed there might be some negative customer feedback about losing the touch screen, but argued the safety positives outweighed them.

“It does seem a little counter-intuitive but when you look at it from the viewpoint of driver safety, a supported driving position is best,” he argued.

“What people don’t realise is, yeah, it’s really easy to reach out and touch the touch screen and execute what they want to do, but in a driving scenario you can’t operate a touch screen without taking your eyes off the road.

“When you have your hands on the steering wheel and you reach… you inadvertently add torsion to the wheel… You are actually turning the wheel so the lane centring position is varying.

“So, to avoid that concern and really optimise the driving function -- because when the driver is behind the wheel that’s the most important function they should be doing -- we removed the touch screen interface.”

In the new Mazda 3 virtually all media screen functions are now controlled by a push or rotate of an evolution of what Mazda calls the ‘commander’ dial in the centre console. Clicking on a function will also now bring up an explanation on the right-side of the media screen explaining what the function does.

“Sometimes the customer may not understand the Mazda unique name or what BOSE audio pilot is when it comes to audio settings,” explained Valbuena.

Mazda’s new instrument panel also shies away from driver distraction, showing no entertainment information within the new three-dial display. It’s the complete opposite of one of the new Mazda 3’s arch-rivals, the Volkswagen Golf, which can be optioned with a configurable ‘Active Info Display’.

“Mazda has a very strong philosophy; information related to the art of driving is in front of the driver on the cluster or the active driving [head-up] display.

“You won’t see the song that is playing or who is calling because those things aren’t relevant to the art of driving.”

In the new Mazda 3 turn-by-turn navigation information is shown in the head-up display but only a compass can be activated in the IP.

In other instrumentation changes, the new Mazda3 shifts to a windscreen-based active driving display rather than a flip-up combiner lens.