As an engineer, Steve Elias loves gadgets. But the dashboard on his 2005 Pontiac GTO is too much for him.

It “lights up like a Christmas tree,” he said, and provides detailed information like average speed and distance traveled, to the last one-hundredth of a mile.

It has become so overwhelming that Elias, of Amherst, New Hampshire, has resorted to sticking electrical tape over parts of the display.

“I kind of miss the old dashboard where the needle just went around,” he said. “This one attracts my eye. When I’m driving, I don’t want to be looking at the dashboard. I want to be looking at the road.”

I used to live on the road — driving 55-80,000 miles/year. A little background music was just fine. I focused better than I could with silence and didn’t wander off into serious daydreaming. It can be a problem, say, driving from Santa Fe to Salt Lake City.

“Manufacturers spend a lot of time designing technology to put into their vehicles, but it seems little time is spent asking if it even needs to go into the vehicle in the first place,” said David Strayer, a psychology professor at the University of Utah and a leading researcher on distractions in cars. “Over the last 20 years, the car dashboard has become a lot more complex.”

Strayer……..sees no end in sight to the popularity of gadgets in the car. Until recently, he said, airplane cockpits were becoming weighed down with controls, but the military urged manufacturers to simplify their designs because of concerns about pilot distraction. “I’m not sure if anyone is going to pressure the auto industry,” Strayer said.

While he agrees with carmakers who say drivers have always been distracted by tuning the radio or eating in the car, Strayer said the new tasks being demanded of drivers were different. “They tend to require more cognitive skills and use more mental resources,” he said.

Even hands-free devices for cellphones or audio prompts on navigation systems, he said, tend not to help. At least nine studies have shown that holding the phone is not the source of the distraction for the driver. And audio prompts alert drivers to turns by giving distance figures; most people give directions by landmarks, which require less brain power.

“When you are paying attention to displays, audio prompts or cellphone conversations,” Strayer said, “you are not processing other information required to see what’s coming at you.”

On the other hand, I don’t see a new BMW or Lincoln Navigator around town without a satellite radio antenna and I wonder what they’re listening to that isn’t available OTA or from CD’s. Are they all listening to Bloomberg stock reports?