How to turn on iOS vehicle motion cues — beat car sickness while traveling
Travel sickness, meet your match
iOS 18 keeps expanding its accessibility features — with iOS 18.1 you can take a hearing test and even activate a feature that turns your AirPods Pro 2 into hearing aids. But there's one addition that's particularly helpful for travelers: Vehicle Motion Cues, a clever feature that helps reduce motion sickness.
For those of us who've spent every car journey staring straight ahead to avoid nausea, this is a game-changer. This tool uses your iPhone's sensors to detect vehicle movement, displaying animated dots that match your direction of travel. It's a simple but effective way to help your brain align what it feels with what it sees — often the key disconnect that causes travel sickness.
By providing these visual cues, your iPhone can help reduce that queasy feeling that comes from reading or looking at your screen while in motion. Here's how to enable it.
1. Open Settings
Navigate to your iPhone's Settings app.
2. Find Accessibility
Scroll down and select the Accessibility menu.
3. Locate Motion Settings
Tap Motion to access movement-related features.
4. Access Vehicle Cues
Select Show Vehicle Motion Cues from the available options.
5. Enable the Feature
Toggle the Motion Cues switch to On. Your days of staring straight ahead during car journeys are over — time to enjoy that backseat entertainment.
Now that you've learned how to enable vehicle motion cues, why not explore some other iOS 18 features? If you have Apple Intelligence, check out iOS 18.2 lets you create custom emojis with Genmoji — here's how and iOS 18.2 brings Image Playground to iPhone — here's how it works. And edit your photos the smart way, explore How to use Clean Up in iOS 18 with Apple Intelligence.
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Kaycee is an Editor at Tom’s Guide and has been writing for as long as she can remember. Her journey into the tech world began as Cazoo's Knowledge Content Specialist, igniting her enthusiasm for technology. When she’s not exploring the latest gadgets and innovations, Kaycee can be found immersed in her favorite video games, or penning her second poetry collection.