2024 HMI consumer analysis - Speech or touch: how consumers prefer to interact with in-vehicle technology

To understand consumer sentiment toward S&P Global Mobility forecast technologies, the Connected Car and Consumer Insights research teams conduct an annual consumer survey in key markets around the world.

By asking vehicle owners of certain model years a series of questions to gauge preferred input/output modalities and willingness to pay for specific in-vehicle technology.

S&P Global Mobility analysts can extract key factors that explain an application’s feature desirability score and how much consumers are willing to pay for it.

The 2024 Human-Machine Interface (HMI) Consumer Survey asked nearly 8,000 participants around the world questions regarding: in-vehicle HMI and overall user experience, to understand feature preferences, as well as their willingness to pay.

Results showed that most respondents believe that touchscreens enhance the driving experience, with nearly 50% of global respondents expressing a preference for a combination of touchscreens with buttons or knobs. When it comes to smartphone integration, respondents prefer using Bluetooth pairing to make phone calls and stream audio with their smartphones. They also prefer utilizing their phone as a navigation aid to get directions or find points of interest while driving.

Additionally, 81% of the respondents claimed to use speech recognition at least some of the time, with Siri (Apple) and Alexa (Amazon Echo) emerging as the most popular virtual personal assistants.