It’s no secret that any iPhone comes packed with loads of features that you probably don’t know about, but there’s one in particular that can help with a problem not many can ever shake — motion sickness.

About one in every three people experience motion sickness on a regular basis, and just about everyone in the world can experience it if they’re exposed to the right (or wrong) amount and type of motion. One of the most common places that I get motion sickness is in the back seat of a car. It’s why I insist on driving no matter where we go, because if I don’t, it’s a bad day for all involved. However, since I discovered this nifty iPhone trick for devices with iOS 18 or later, I no longer stress about back-seat rides.

Meet vehicle motion cues, Apple’s fix for car sickness

Another thing that makes our phones smarter than us

See those little dots around the screen? That’s a feature that Apple has dubbed Vehicle Motion Cues, and I find it mighty fitting that I found this feature just as iOS 18 is making its grand exit in favor of iOS 26. My shortcomings and latency aside, this feature works thanks to the accelerometer inside your iPhone, which can sense that you’re inside a moving vehicle. When it does, these dots will appear on your screen.

They move about the screen in the opposite direction to whichever way your car turns. This is meant to give your eyes a focus point that counters the direction in which you’re traveling and prevents motion sickness. It might seem simple, but I took a drive around my city the other day in the back seat scrolling TikTok and felt completely fine. It’s a simple trick that just works, and it’s just as simple to turn on.

How to turn on vehicle motion cues through settings

The same way we find everything else

To first access vehicle motion cues, you need to open the settings app on your iPhone. Then, navigate to the accessibility tab, which should be located directly underneath the “General” tab. Once you’re there, select “Motion,” after which you will find the “Show Vehicle Motion Cues” tab as the second option. From there, you’ll be able to set your Vehicle Motion Cues to always be on, off, or, in my preferred method, automatic, so that whenever your accelerometer realizes that you’re in a moving vehicle, it can handle the legwork of turning the system on for you.

When this feature was first released in 2024, Apple devoted a short segment of a press release to its introduction, and not much else, but there was some good information buried in there.

“Research shows that motion sickness is commonly caused by a sensory conflict between what a person sees and what they feel, which can prevent some users from comfortably using iPhone or iPad while riding in a moving vehicle,” said the press release. “With Vehicle Motion Cues, animated dots on the edges of the screen represent changes in vehicle motion to help reduce sensory conflict without interfering with the main content.”

How to add to Control Center for easier usage

If you need to access the feature in a hurry, the Control Center is here to help

As easy as it was to turn on through the settings app itself, Vehicle Motion Controls can just as easily be added to your iPhone’s Control Center, too, along with plenty of other useful extensions.

1. First, slide down from the top right corner of your screen. This can be done from any place within the iPhone, but if it helps to have yours on the home tab, then by all means. It’s your life.
2. Next, hold down for a moment and press “Add a Control” before navigating down to the Vision Accessibility tab.
3. There, you’ll find Vehicle Motion Cues just waiting to be added to your Control Center. Again, it will ask if you want them on all the time, turned off, or set to automatically trigger. Automatic is the easiest way I’ve found to live with this feature, as any newer iPhone is quite solid at being able to tell when it’s in any moving vehicle.

The Control Center is one of the more underutilized features on most iPhones, and it got a lot of changes in iOS 18, with more expected to come in iOS 26. However, this feature is likely to make its way over in the next wave of updates, as there’s simply no reason for Apple not to do so.

Does it actually work, or is it a sham

This feature is backed by actual science

As an avid reader of the news and books on my phone, I’ve found that Vehicle Motion Cues works flawlessly for me. Now, I can read up on some of my PhD studies on flights or car rides without getting out of the car looking and feeling like I have just left the local dive bar.

On a personal level, I have no qualms with the software, and if my instructions and colorful graphics were a bit much for you, Apple has you covered with its own how-to guide when it comes to booting this function up. The science, though, says that this is a feature that can work for quite literally everyone. Most books will tell you to simply sit up front, keep your head still, and buckle up, but what that’s meant to do is keep your eyes still first and foremost.

By giving your eyes these small dots to counteract the movement of your head, they keep the motion receptors within your eyes still, just as sitting up front and focusing on the horizon would do. Now, though, with this feature, you’re able to keep reading, doom-scrolling, or whatever else you please before looking up from the back seat and screaming, “Are we there yet!?” with the confidence of someone who’s never dealt with motion sickness in their life, just like I did.

My fiancée didn’t enjoy it when I asked her that question on our short trip to get groceries, but I told her that this was for scientific real-world applications. I still spent the night on the couch, but hey, at least I wasn’t car sick. Good work, Apple.