Enlarge / A car's hazard warning lights will need a physical control to get a five-star EuroNCAP score in 2026.

Some progress in the automotive industry is laudable. Cars are safer than ever and more efficient, too. But there are other changes we'd happily leave by the side of the road. That glossy "piano black" trim that's been overused the last few years, for starters. And the industry's overreliance on touchscreens for functions that used to be discrete controls. Well, the automotive safety organization European New Car Assessment Programme (Euro NCAP) feels the same way about that last one, and it says the controls ought to change in 2026.

"The overuse of touchscreens is an industry-wide problem, with almost every vehicle-maker moving key controls onto central touchscreens, obliging drivers to take their eyes off the road and raising the risk of distraction crashes," said Matthew Avery, Euro NCAP's director of strategic development.

"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," he said.

Enlarge / The Tesla Model Y has earned an IIHS Top Safety Pick+ for 2024. (credit: IIHS)

The Insurance Institute for Highway Safety has toughened up the tests required to earn one of its coveted Top Safety Pick or Top Safety Pick+ awards. The institute has spent the past 65 years investigating automobile safety and putting pressure on manufacturers to concentrate more on implementing safety measures, and with this year's revision, it wants to see better protection for backseat passengers and better pedestrian detection, among other requirements.

IIHS started crash-testing new vehicles at its facility in Virginia in 1995 after noticing that the National Highway Transportation Safety Administration's own tests did not best reflect the kinds of crashes happening on American roads. It continues to add new tests or adjust existing ones , in recent years adding a rollover protection test and increasing the speed of the side crash test.

For 2024, a vehicle has to earn either an acceptable or good rating in the moderate front overlap test to earn the Top Safety Pick+ award, and the test now includes a dummy behind the driver.

Enlarge (credit: Getty Images)

American pedestrians were at slightly less risk of being killed by a car last year. The Governors Highway Safety Association has just published a preliminary analysis of road safety data for the first half of 2023, and it has found a "modest" reduction in pedestrian fatalities, which have been all too high in recent years.

As with last year's study, the GHSA found some states were much safer than others. In fact, 29 states and the District of Columbia recorded declines in the number of pedestrian traffic deaths for the first half of 2023, with Vermont recording no pedestrian deaths at all.

In total, the GHSA estimates that 3,373 pedestrians died on US roads between January and June 2023, which it says is a 4 percent decrease compared to the first six months of 2022. However, the report points out that even though this year saw a small decline, the number of pedestrian deaths for the first half of 2023 is 14 percent higher than the same time period in 2019.

Enlarge / It actually feels intimidating standing next to a vehicle like this GMC Yukon Denali when the hood is level with your shoulder. (credit: Jonathan Gitlin)

It's hard to escape the fact that American trucks and SUVs have been on a steroid-infused diet for the last few years. The trend was all too apparent at the last auto show we went to—at Chicago in 2020, I felt physically threatened just standing next to some of the products on display by GMC and its competitors. Intuitively, the supersized hood heights on these pickups seem more dangerous to vulnerable road users, but now there's hard data to support that.

It hasn't been a great few years to be a pedestrian in the United States. These most vulnerable road users started being killed by drivers more frequently in 2020 , and while some states were able to reverse that trend, others went the other way , making 2022—the last year for which there is full data—the most deadly year on record for US pedestrians.

The problem has multiple causes. For decades, urban planners have prioritized car traffic above everything else, and our built environment favors speeding vehicles at the cost of people trying to cross roads or cycle. But it's not all just the fault of those planners, as the vehicles we drive play a large role, too.

Enlarge (credit: Mercedes-Benz)

Most car crashes begin and end in a few seconds. That's plenty of time to get in a tiny micro-nap while driving. The famous asleep-at-the-wheel film scene in National Lampoon's Vacation , where Clark Griswold goes off to slumberland for 72 seconds while piloting the Wagon Queen Family Truckster (a paragon of automotive virtue but lacking any advanced driver safety systems), might be a comical look at this prospect. But if Clark were in the real world, he and his family would likely have been injured or killed—or they could have caused similar un-funny consequences for other motorists or pedestrians.

There's plenty of real-world news on the topic right now. Early in 2023, the Automobile Association of America's Foundation for Traffic Safety published a study estimating that 16–21 percent of all fatal vehicle crashes reported to police involve drowsy driving.

With the road fatality numbers in the US hovering close to 38,000 over the past few years, that means between 6,080 and 7,980 road deaths are linked to drowsy drivers. Further research by the AAA's Foundation finds that drivers likely under-report drowsiness in all car crashes. Nodding off while driving is as dangerous as—and potentially more dangerous than—driving drunk. And while drunk-driving figures have decreased between 1991 and 2021, the opposite is true for drowsy driving.

Enlarge / The Waze crash history alerts look like this. (credit: Waze)

Traffic navigation app Waze is adding a new feature to its toolbox today. It's called crash history alerts, and it's meant to warn drivers about dangerous hotspots, based on a combination of historical data plus road and traffic data.

Originally an independent startup, in 2013 Google purchased the Israeli company for $1.15 billion, perhaps beating Apple to the punch . Even before the purchase, Waze was becoming an Ars reader favorite thanks to more advanced traffic rerouting than either Google Maps or Apple Maps.

It has not been entirely smooth sailing driving; for a while the app was infamous for asking drivers to make difficult left turns across busy multi-lane roads and routing cars through once-quiet neighborhoods as shortcuts , aggravating the people who live in those neighborhoods.