Car units are integrated with your car's controls. I almost never need to use the touchscreen because of my in-steering-wheel controls. A smartphone with Blue

Car units are integrated with your car's controls. I almost never need to use the touchscreen because of my in-steering-wheel controls. A smartphone with Bluetooth only covers the basic scenarios where you know where you're going before you leave - and that only if you spend far MORE effort hooking up a charger, a mount, launching the app you need, and you never need to switch apps (such as between maps and music) during your drive. A good mapping solution enables all sorts of things: * Seeing alternative routes you don't know about or expect along with their anticipated time difference * Easily adding stops on the way (gas stations, restaraunts, you name it) * Letting you know what you need to do soon (such as seeing a pattern of four lanes on the freeway and learning that you need to be in the second from the right) * Giving you a solid idea of when you have to be watching for your next turn and when you can simply focus on the road without reading street signs. "Next turn in 3 miles" means look at the road, "next turn in 0.2 miles" means you need to start looking at street signs * Automatic rerouting. If you DO miss a turn or get stuck behind traffic from an accident, you don't need to immediately start thinking about how best to get back on course. You can focus on the driving instead. In the music scenario, it gives both voice controls that let you focus on the road ("Play Modest Mouse in Spotify" rather than having to dig through albums or radio stations), integration with your car's controls (next track involves lifting my thumb rather than reaching for a knob in the middle of the car or my phone). Saying "no one should ever hear a text message while driving" is just abstinence-only education at this point, and the message works about as well as it does for sexual education. That ship has sailed and it's simply not a valid line of argument. "No one should reach for a touch screen" isn't any better - it's not a good model, but it's the reality in a huge percentage of vehicles sold today. This isn't over-optimization - it's simply a quality of life increase. Most people don't want to have to micromanage every detail of their trips - they want to get from point A to point B safely, reliably, and rapidly. Good car systems make that simple. If you want to sit your Rand McNally atlas next to your manual transmission and your 8-track, that's your right, but other people want to focus on the parts that they HAVE to be involved with, not the parts technology can help with.