Checking your rearview mirror before you change lanes is a distraction. So is glancing at your touchscreen to change the radio station. But according to new research, these two things are nowhere near equally dangerous — and the gap is bigger than you’d think.
Researchers at Brno University of Technology in the Czech Republic put 45 real drivers behind the wheel of an actual car — not a simulator — and tracked how long their eyes left the road, for 45 minutes of ordinary city driving. The drivers wore eye-tracking glasses. Two researchers rode along, one keeping an eye on the equipment, one with a hand near the emergency brake. Along the way, drivers were asked to do the things we all do behind the wheel: enter a destination into the GPS, change the radio on the touchscreen, adjust the air conditioning, hunt down a water bottle and take a sip.
The question the researchers wanted to answer: how does glancing away from the road to do these things compare to glancing away to check your mirrors before a turn, a lane change, or passing another car?
Touchscreens Are the Worst Offender
Every time drivers touched the touchscreen — punching in a GPS destination or switching radio stations — their eyes left the road for an average of 0.87 seconds. That doesn’t sound like much. But more than 1 in 5 of those touchscreen glances stretched past 1.2 seconds, and some ran as long as 3 full seconds.
At highway speed, 3 seconds covers close to the length of several football fields. Blind.
Physical controls (air conditioning, seat heat, that kind of thing) weren’t far behind, averaging 0.79 seconds per glance. GPS in visual-only mode (no voice guidance) also ran long, averaging 0.70 seconds. Eating and drinking, by comparison, was one of the milder offenders on the list, averaging half a second.
Mirror Checks Barely Register By Comparison
Here’s the part that should reshape how we think about distraction: checking your mirrors — even during a genuinely complex maneuver like changing lanes or overtaking another car — rarely took drivers’ eyes off the road for more than a second. The longest average came during a right-lane change, at 0.55 seconds. Most maneuvers landed well under half a second.
In other words, drivers instinctively pulled their eyes back to the road fast when the task was actually about driving. It was the non-driving tasks — the touchscreen, the GPS, the climate controls — that pulled attention away for meaningfully longer.
Why This Matters More Than the “2-Second Rule”
For years, road safety guidance has leaned on a simple rule of thumb: keep your eyes off the road for less than 2 seconds, and you’re relatively safe. This study pushes back on that idea. The researchers found that even glances under 2 seconds — in the 1 to 1.3 second range — can meaningfully raise crash risk, especially in more complex driving situations. And touchscreen and GPS interactions blew past that shorter threshold regularly, while mirror checks almost never did.
The takeaway isn’t that mirror checks are risk-free — any glance away from the road ahead carries some risk. It’s that not all distractions are created equal, and the ones we’ve quietly normalized (dialing in a destination, switching a station) may deserve a lot more caution than the ones baked into the act of driving safely.
What This Means for You
- Program your GPS before you drive, not while merging onto the highway.
- Set the temperature and the station before you put the car in drive. If you must adjust mid-drive, physical dials you can feel for are safer than a touchscreen you have to look at.
- Use voice controls where you can. The study found audio-visual GPS mode kept glances noticeably shorter than visual-only mode.
- Don’t assume “quick” is actually quick. A glance at a touchscreen that feels like a second can easily run to two or three.
One more note: this study’s driving sample was all male, because the eye-tracking equipment couldn’t get a reliable read through mascara and certain eyelash shapes. That’s a real limitation the researchers flagged themselves, not a claim that these findings only apply to men — distraction doesn’t check gender before it causes a crash.
The takeaway: touchscreen interactions demand far more time with your eyes off the road than the study’s other measured tasks — including the necessary glances drivers make to check behind the vehicle before a maneuver. That gap is worth knowing next time you’re tempted to punch a destination into the GPS mid-drive.
