How to turn on iOS vehicle motion cues — beat car sickness while traveling

How To
By published

Travel sickness, meet your match

iOS 18 Vehicle Motion Cues
(Image credit: Future)

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.

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.

Kaycee Hill
Kaycee Hill
How-to Editor

Kaycee is Tom's Guide's How-To Editor, known for tutorials that get straight to what works. She writes across phones, homes, TVs and everything in between — because life doesn't stick to categories and neither should good advice. She's spent years in content creation doing one thing really well: making complicated things click. Kaycee is also an award-winning poet and co-editor at Fox and Star Books.