Car touchscreens are cheap, not good
ben.stolovitz.com
ben.stolovitz.com
But when Mazda unveiled their button-lite 2026 CX-5 about a year ago, I started investigating.
I'm pretty convinced that touchscreens today are primarily a cost-saving measure, and every other justification is secondary. I hope I can convince you, too!
The article explained why. Since 2018 in the US, due to the proliferation of giant trucks being used as passenger vehicles (SUV's) backup cameras have been mandatory safety equipment. A backup camera requires a screen. So the automakers have to install a screen in the dashboard.
It is only a few dollars more to install a "touch screen" vs. a "basic display screen", and with the addition of those few dollars to the screen, that touch screen can now replace hundreds of dollars of physical buttons and their necessary wiring.
Net result, the BOM cost of the car drops by several hundred dollars, and the cost to assemble drops by some measurable amount as well.
So they why is: "because they save the automakers BOM and assembly costs".
All that said, I think initially it was a mix of a few things coming together.
Yes, auto mfgs always want to reduce parts for cost and supply chain control. But there was also this moment of New Wow where the impractical nature of touchscreens was overshadowed by the holy crap I've got a tablet in my car. It implied a break with the last generation of cars, where you might have gotten a 4-inch screen (touch or not), and it became desirable at a surface level to users.
Although I greatly dislike touchscreens for the obvious usability issues in a motor vehicle, I still kind of widen my eyes when I'm in a car with some new, ridiculous multi-screen dashboard setup.
Mazda was mentioned in this thread, and I think they do a great job of separating the concerns here; you've got a big buttons of various sizes that do different things that can be memorized without sight.
Perfect example of reasonably good intention backfiring.
So now you have a backup camera, which is useful, but you also have drivers fiddling around with a touchscreen while driving, taking eyes and concentration off the road.
I don't have research numbers, but it feels like the latter causes way more accidents than the backup camera prevents.
My partner has one of these newer cars where everything is a multi-menu operation through the touchscreen and it is very scary. Anything you need to change takes many many seconds of visual attention focusing on the touchscreen, which means not focusing at the road. I'm quite sure this will lead to an accident at some point.
Personally none of my cars have a screen and none ever will. I can adjust everything that can be adjusted purely by feel without ever taking my eyes off the road. Clearly that is safer.
You can also have the best of both worlds. I'm not pretending it's an ideal car, but my Audi has plenty of knobs and buttons and switches for about anything I usually need. You only are forced to use the screen for switching between radio and bluetooth music (maybe there's a button for that too and I don't know it), for setting up the navigation and of course the zillion of car settings. So do I have a screen? Yes. Do I depend on it? Really no. So folks, there IS a way, we just have to push for it.
I thought this is a pretty well-known thing already? For almost decade.
Also, I rather like the idea that blogging can simply be stating the obvious: https://blog.jim-nielsen.com/2026/blogging-stating-the-obvio.... Hopefully my argument is helpful to someone!
I thought about this before posting my reply, that should I. But if you really spent time for researching this blog, you would know that your conclusion is not rare nor the first one. It is widely discussed and appears in HN regularly. But regardless, the tone in the post or here in comments felt to me that you try to somehow own this idea. Thought, you even cited the Ferrari CEO who said exactly the same.
I think they've got that. Short of budget stuff or the Slate truck, most new cars have some big dumb screen in them at all times.
But advertising poses a new problem for both advertisers and mfgs not unlike the mid-90s ad sale issue. There was no consolidated ad server, so everyone was trying to build their own agency and advertisers had to navigate that.
Which probably means some sort of Google or Google-like player in the space.
(b) infotainment systems have always-on cellular internet connections
(c) billboard impression counts can be tied to the vehicle
IIRC infotainment systems are already showing ads in some form. And location + driving performance is being captured + monetized and shared with insurance companies.
Unless this results in an EV car that I can rent for less than $100/mo, this really needs to be stopped.
It amuses me that back in the 90's LCD color screens were magical fairy dust that cost about the same as what magical fairy dust would cost. Laptops with color LCD screens were like $6000 in the 90's, I think $3k over a greyscale. That's like $13k today.
Whereas the little plastic buttons and knobs were cheaper to pump out of an injection molding machine and assembled. Now screens are cheaper to make than little plastic baubles.
From what I've read, the little plastic baubles part of buttons are cheap, it's the electrical wiring harnesses and assembly that are expensive part of physical controls.
It used to be that it would focus buttons in notifications, making it easy to interact with. Now the focus doesn't seem to change at all (or only sometimes) making it a nightmare to do simple things. I dare not use the new Gemini assistant since the last time I was completely unable to navigate to the buttons in its panel at all.
I really hope they don't phase out the wheel just because Google sucks at supporting it. I know they have both touch and the wheel in newer models now.
It's one 1 screen, regardless of whether your car has heated seats, ventilated seats, sync, arm-rest warmers, separate blowers or a single blower.
Within 1 production line, say for the BMW 3 series, some people don't select heated seats, some do.
Now they only need to make 1 version of the plastic, and it's just a checkbox in the software to enable the heated seats.
Oddly enough, it seems like, although the value of "blind operation" is well-understood, it's not super well researched. As one of the papers I cite puts it:
> Little research deals with the optimal design of haptic features and how haptic feedback can support the user in searching for control elements.
My car is a 2018 with car play and physical scroll knobs and buttons, while awkward, I can operate it with my eyes on the road (realistically I can do everything I need from the steering wheel). This weird middle ground carplay was somehow the worst combo of buttons and touchscreen.
Things like sliders and knobs can also have limits and detents that provide two way feedback that a screen cannot.
If you have to set the fan level on a touch screen, I have to use my eyes to coordinate my hand movements. On my old 2000 econobox, I just had to find the fan control slider (normally without even looking, and certainly faster than finding it on a screen, and getting my hand to the right spot), and I knew if I was already at max, or how much I had adjusted it based on the number of clicks. Same thing with the old red/blue temperature adjuster slider/knob.
With physical parts, the development process is highly sequential. Pick the look, design how it fits, engineer what parts are used, manufacture tooling etc etc in a waterfall. If a revision needs to be made, the whole process needs to be re-started adding a huge amount of delays.
With a touchscreen, the physical touchscreen and the software that runs on it are parallel threads. You can make most UI changes without impacting the manufacturing/design pipeline at all. You don't even need to have planned what the interface looks like before you finalize the parts needed.
You still have the issue of having to build the panels that the switches get installed into, so if you can replace a bunch of switches with a touchscreen interface, you can get on with designing the interior before you even know how may switches need to be installed.
For deep car settings, those have been screen controls for over a decade now and that makes sense.
Tesla is the exception that proves the rule; its fashion was its unique minimalist touch screen style compared to other vehicles. Car companies copying that design are making it passé.
Touchscreens are modal. If I want to control the climate, I first have to press the Climate capacitive button or scroll through the screen to find climate. That takes my hands off the wheel and my eyes off the road for longer than just tapping the fan-up button.
As for the cost, I will _happily_ pay the $100 more to have a more premium and tuned interior. Heck, I chose to step up an entire trim model to the top of the line trim just for the fancy LCD screen mirror. I'd happily pay extra for better buttons.
IMO touch screens are great for rarely used features, but anything that gets clicked on most drives should be a dedicated touch point (capacitive button, physical button, steering wheel control, whatever).
Give me multifunction displays from aviation. Touch screen in the middle, rows of modal buttons along the bottom and left side. You can use muscle memory to find the button.
I'm guessing the cost difference is greater than this. Which means the end-user price difference would be north of $1k.
Would be interesting to see if customers would pay $2 to 5k extra for a mostly-tactile interior. (I think back-up camera requirements make some screen unavoidable.)
While I was not presented with the option on a given model to go with buttons or touchscreens, when I was shopping for cars, I did eliminate models based on their interface options. The models I was willing to consider were probably cut in half because I wouldn't get anything that was entirely touch screen or capacitive for both AC and media.
No, that's not a thing because there is no physical sensation to it.
That being said, the touchscreen software is abysmal and laggy. CarPlay works great, but any time I have to navigate the car's built-in software is a headache.
At that point though they might as well be physical buttons! It's all the disadvantages of a touch screen and none of the advantages.
It also irritates me that there are 3 of those blank button placeholders on the dash and I wish they were actual buttons that were just mapped to A/C and recirc...
That’s why I think it must be a legal requirement for any car with touchscreen controls to operate car functions must have driver assistance features enabled, no exceptions.
They're dangerous for controls the driver would reasonably need to operate while driving the car. They're fine for more-complex at-rest configuration, or stuff a passener would care about.
The only metric that matters is how fast you can get attention back on the road.
You can hit buttons without taking your eyes off the road.
You cannot do this with a touchscreen.
There's no way to design or engineer around it, it's simply the wrong tool for the job.
You most certainly can. That doesn't mean people do it 100% of the time.
You can't possibly make this argument in good faith. Obviously it is trivial to interact with physical buttons while blind, so it can always be done without taking eyes off the road.
BMW iDrive buttons are an excellent example for that.
The article directly links to a study that shows this is also true of physical buttons. Regardless of the fact that buttons are tactile, people don't go feeling up their radio without looking, even if they can. Furthermore, the vast majority of infotainment input today is into phone mirroring systems like carplay.
This whole thing is compounded by the fact that Mazda's knob solution was actually worse while being marketed as better. While a touchscreen needs to be looked at to find a button, a cursor controlled by a knob needs to be watched in whole to navigate to the button. Your fine motor skills as a human allows you to directly press a button, physical or not, without looking at your arm to get near it.
With the knob, you have a few issues:
1. iOS made the focus border on UI elements very faint. So it’s hard to tell where the knob is at rotating through all the UI elements.
2. Because zoom is kind of a sub feature, you have to rotate through like 10 buttons to get to the right thing, click, then get into a submenu.
3. Because not many apps design around the knob… the active “cursor” can get trapped in a submenu where the knob just rotates between a few buttons and can’t escape back to the root of the app.
Basically, it takes active attention to zoom in/out. Touch screen, I could probably do it without looking.
I find the knob considerably more distracting. First you have translate the motion of the knob to the cursor moving on the screen. Secondly, you have to cycle through all the options so you have to spend even more time looking at the screen. It's significantly faster and less distracting to just reach out and tap the button you want.
Other physical buttons are great but the knob is a terrible UI.
But that advantage goes away for any element that isn't currently on the screen. So navigating between pages or submenus or slide up drawers is much more fiddly than the dial and much more susceptible to the "car shake" issue.
Absolutely! Twiddling with a phone while driving is illegal, for a good reason.
For the same good reason, having to interact with a touch screen while driving should be illegal (from that, it follows that it should be illegal to sell a car which requires using a touch screen).
A concrete step I take to push this along: I mention physical buttons as a dealbreaker to car dealerships when I shop. Of course, I'm only speaking to dealer reps and not the decision makers at $CAR_CO, but if enough people do this, it does get back to the them and will make a difference.
It has already started asking for physical buttons for key functions to give manufacturers the top safety rating, and it's working. Buttons are coming back.
Setting temperature manually by dial doesn't make sense anymore either- most cars have too many things to change and an expanding menu is great. There's hot cold, faster fan lower fan, feet vs head-height (we're already looking at more than three separate controls). Now there's seat heating and cooling (with varying power), steering wheel, defrost, controls of vent direction, etc.
I'll admit the touchscreen might be daunting if it's a rental but it takes like one week to get everything mapped out mentally (and going back to physical controls on rentals sucks).
Apple and Google have spent untold amounts of money developing iOS and Android. CarPlay and Android Auto are really nice.
Tesla has spent gobs of money on its touchscreen software too. It's the only native car touchscreen UI I've tried that feels smooth, snappy, responsive, simple.
I've tried the native touchscreen UI of quite a few US and European carmakers. All of them fall short. They feel janky, clunky, obtuse.
Physical buttons are much, MUCH cheaper than high-quality touchscreen software.
It was an incredibly frustrating drive -- I could barely successfully navigate the radio using the screen or the wheel buttons. I'm sure I would have gotten more used to it but it just wasn't what I was looking for. I'm a software developer, I deal with this technology every day, and I just didn't want that to be front and center on my drive as well.
Now that being said, the commander knob on the older Mazda cars is also a terrible user experience. Turning and pressing physical knobs to change the climate control, volume, or radio stations is very satisfying and user-friendly. But the commander knob is a joy-stick for controlling an on screen cursor -- so you both have to be constantly looking at the screen and you have to translate knob motions to the movement of that cursor. It should be unsurprising that simply reaching up and pressing an icon on the screen is significantly easier and less distracting.
Luckily I'm almost always in Carplay / Android Auto so it's best of both worlds -- you can press physical buttons to do most of the major tasks (open music, open maps, select favorites, volume, climate control, etc) but then press the screen when that makes sense.
Now, I know it's not a very representative car. But nobody said the buttons need to be as flashy or as numerous.
My point being, I think we havent found the sweet spot yet.
AC is not an issue IMO. It’s always in the same place on the screen, on auto, and I never touch it really.
It has Carplay/Android Auto, naturally, but it also has physical buttons for play/pause/previous/next and volume, and physical buttons for A/C control. All buttons have fixed purpose, they don't change depending on whatever mode something is.
It is an ideal amount of buttons compared to, say, the Honda CRV or Toyota RAV4 at the time that had extra buttons around the screen for flexible purposes.
I hear the Escape was actually designed for the European market (as the Kuga), which may explain its design sensibility.
Unfortunately, the Escape has not been a roaring success, and Ford will discontinue it in the US market in favor of the Bronco Sport which has, you guessed it, a huge touchscreen and few physical buttons.
The "cloud features included" line amuses me greatly given the low-tech theme.
The fact you can rip open the dashboard and fix something is great and what I call a feature, not a bug.
Chances are if the whole thing is unresponsive due to heat or a bug the volume knob isn't going to actually change the volume as well. Its not like the knob is the actual pot directly changing the circuitry in the amp these days, its a digital input.
Even outside of OEM head units, I've owned a few after market head unit stereos where the volume knob was technically a digital input and if the system was lagging hard the volume input could be delayed a good bit.
A number of these systems will have a different volume level for things like phone calls than for the music, but both volume levels are controlled by the knob. It'll also do things like automatically lower the volume level for notifications or have dynamic volume levels based on acceleration. The knob is rarely directly controlling the actual output of the system.
Here's a good question: if you press the volume buttons on the steering wheel controls, does the volume knob on the radio move?
A lot of people have their self-worth tied up in being the guy that can fix things, so it hurts when you just no longer have to.
I sure hope so. I can avoid this whole touchscreen madness by only buying older cars, but there's a chance that I'll outlive the availability of cars that are old enough.
Those rear hatch motors are amazing and most have indexing.
1. Usually they are high on the dash, higher than where conventional controls would be
2. You cannot rest your hand on the surrounding panel to press them, because this will cause unintentional presses on other buttons
Resulting in two problems:
1. Because of the above, you must activate more muscles to steady your hand and arm in a moving car to accurately press them. This is less comfortable and leads to frustrating misclicks
2. This increases the amount of time required to use the controls, which is annoying for infotainment, but dangerous for anything safety related
It seems to me that many of the problems that people report related to touch controls are more to do with how they are laid out than the fact that they are touch controls.
Floating screens make this harder, especially as they get larger and further from the driver
Tesla has also been guilty of some particularly awful designs on later models, like requiring the driver to navigate to a submenu to turn on the wipers (which I know they changed in an update, but still should have never done to begin with)
Absolutely! They loaned me a Model 3 while my 2015 Model S 70D was having the battery replaced (just before the warranty ran out). I really disliked it despite it being considerably newer and having longer range. The big portrait screen on the old Model S being firmly embedded in the dashboard makes it much easier to use. Also part of the landscape screen on the Model 3 was obscured by my left hand on the steering wheel (UK spec right hand drive car).
I was very glad to get back into my ancient Model S.
Not quite true because automakers can satisfy the rear-view camera requirement with very cheap screens, e.g. integrated into the rear view mirror.
With capacitive, I'm holding my whole-ass arm in the air in a bouncing car trying to watch my finger tip float around a button, with the intensity of shooting proton torpedoes down an exhaust shaft. Alllmmoosstt tthhheerree!
It is not an alternative for touch screen, it replaces it.
With voice control I never have to take my eyes off the road at all.
same way people just talk to claude code via whisper
Also: I don't want a microphone in my car at all times. Thank you.