I realize the article is pro buttons. I think a huge thing missing from the button discussion (well, maybe lightly touched on in the article) is that physical buttons and controls help guide without looking. Other buttons give feedback that your hand is in the right place. Sure, at first contact that (very bad) reference radio is worse than the touch screen but within a few days of using that I would not need to look to make sure I was hitting the button I wanted because I could feel the face of it with my hand and know I was hitting the right button. So basically, even though the paper picked essentially the worst radio on the planet, it would likely be better than a well designed touch screen after just a few days of use. First day though? That thing is a nightmare.
A while ago I was driving a loaner car - a brand new top tier Accura rdx and the infotainment system was truly the worst and most dangerously designed I had ever witnessed. It was essentially a lenovo thinkpad type touchpad by the cup holder, and the screen was far away. The first time I tried to use it, it was so distracting that I would of crashed the car if it weren't for the safety features.
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.
I test rode an electric pedal assist bicycle yesterday that has a little operating system by the throttle, basically just a speedometer + toggle the level of power assist from eco to turbo. Even it has a "avoid distracted driving" popup that I had to fiddle with to dismiss while riding this bike for the first time.
I think that most people have the usability of buttons without sight as a main argument for.
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.
Totally agree; I had to cut a few sentences about that :). (I also tried to steel-man the paper as much as possible).
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.
OP here: I always disliked touchscreens in cars, so I didn't understand why automakers kept shoving them in. I always assumed I was weird in some way, and that most consumers preferred touchscreens or something (Reddit seems to argue this in circles all the time). I planned to keep buying Mazdas, with their lovely buttons and stuff.
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!
> 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!
I thought this is a pretty well-known thing already? For almost decade.
OP: Perhaps it is, but this article honestly took me 12 months to research & write. I really struggled to find trustworthy sources. Do you know of any others I should look at?
> Also, I rather like the idea that blogging can simply be stating the obvious
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'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!
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.
> so I didn't understand why automakers kept shoving them in.
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".
Obviously they read it, but it's 2026 and entirely possible to publish an article without having read a word of it :)
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.
I love the click-wheel on my Mazda3 and I love that it allows the screen to sit out of arms length up on the dashboard. Its a very nice interior. What I don't love is how Android Auto is slowly breaking since it assumes more and more that you have a touchscreen.
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.
I cried when Mercedes go rid of the click wheel. Research in this article be damned, I’d argue that rotary knobs with directional shifting like Mercedes paired with great software are the best car infotainment interface in recent history for screens in cars.
(a) cars have forward-facing cameras/computer vision for lane tracking
(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.
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.
I think that nowadays people value "technological features", and how better to show "technological advancement" like a giant ass touchscreen and not some "old" XX century knobs.
I hope that changes and people start valuing simplicity and robustness over electric gimmicks (I know many people already do, but we need critical mass).
How much is that needed? There was very little text on those buttons to begin with. Are there significant cultural differences in the iconography associated with them?
I have heard (but have no insider knowledge) that it's not just the cost of parts, but what parts do to the development lifecycle.
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.
It's a good argument except the basic controls needed for a car haven't changed in decades: We all need the same climate controls, media controls, etc.
For deep car settings, those have been screen controls for over a decade now and that makes sense.
Automakers are constantly doing functionality-neutral tweaks. There's fashion in how cars looks, and they want every year's model to feel new. Climate control is constant, but one generation has a knob, the next has a slider, the next adds an extra zone, the next changes fan speed from two buttons to a single "up-down" button and so on.
Of course, cars are always evolving, that's why a new model comes out every single year. Ironically, the screen elements of cars always become the most dated part. I don't feel there is nearly as much fashion in the touch screen as the physical elements.
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.
I suspect that another thing that's expensive, besides analog controls, is creating and testing a new, better interface for driving ICE cars using digital controls. So the only thing old our old-tech car companies do is add ad-hoc extensions of the usual car controls. And it is economical to package all these in a touch screen along with all the standard controls they can get away with.
I feel like you could solve that with some constraints defined early in the process—the controls must fit in dimensions XxYxZ, and have K-input wires, and draw at most 5V of power, or whatever. Then the control designer can go off and design whatever they want within those constraints, and the car designer can go off and design the interior of the car knowing what the head unit will require.
That's what the term "parts bin parts" refers to in the industry. If you get familiar with any car brand you can normally tell what brand of car a particular switch came from because they all use the same parts. Corvettes will share a LOT of parts with Suburbans, eg.
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.
I refuse to believe this is the only way to make it cheaper. Standardization and modular components could help. Might not be cheap enough. But surely we can be more imaginative!
They're getting better though. The first gen touchscreens were tiny and unreliable. The one in my 2024 Ioniq 5 is pretty decent. I am really glad I still have physical AC controls though, even if they're capacitive.
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 will _happily_ pay the $100 more to have a more premium and tuned interior
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.)
I'm somewhat skeptical that the cost difference would really be that high, but honestly...yeah I probably would. If what I was getting was fully physical (not capacitive) media and AC controls, including pause/play, skip/tune, volume control, temp control, fan speed control, zone selection, etc? I interact with those systems multiple times every single time I get into a vehicle, which is essentially multiple times every day, for years. Improving the quality of those interactions even a little bit (and in my opinion the difference between good physical buttons and even a very good touchscreen, let alone a shitty one, is massive), is worth thousands of dollars.
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.
Touch screens don't have to be modal, that's a UI choice. The 2020 Bolt we just got leaves the climate controls on screen at all times, even when CarPlay is open. I was also pleasantly surprised by the number of buttons it has, including both a volume knob and a temperature knob.
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.
Actually it's an odd split. The temperature and fan adjustment are physical buttons, but the A/C, recirculation, and heated seat controls are on the screen. I'm thinking this is for two reasons: If a lower trim level lacks heated seats then they just exclude them from the firmware, and the AC and recirc controls require lighted indicators, which is probably a lot more expensive than just a button, so those were much cheaper to integrate into the display. That being said, I've heard digitizer failures can be an issue on this model so I dread that happening.
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...
Do you not have muscle memory for screens too? I find my brain has an easier time visualizing all the touchscreen controls I use semi-often over buttons. Perhaps it's a generational thing.
More importantly, car touchscreens are dangerous. It’s impossible to operate a touchscreen without moving your attention from the road to the touchscreen itself.
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.
Just like the article mentioned, you can't just say that touchscreens are dangerous without bringing up how many buttons do not make it better UX. There are plenty of touchscreen designs that are way better than buttons.
The only metric that matters is how fast you can get attention back on the road.
You cannot push physical buttons on a dashboard without taking your eyes off the road, it's a myth. Fiddling with radio controls is the most cited reason for accidents before cell phones.
Simple. I can operate any button without taking my attention from the road at all as long as the said button has a distinct feeling and/or location. That’s immediately an infinitely better experience.
BMW iDrive buttons are an excellent example for that.
> car touchscreens are dangerous. It’s impossible to operate a touchscreen without moving your attention from the road to the touchscreen itself
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.
> It’s impossible to operate a touchscreen without moving your attention from the road to the touchscreen itself.
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.
You're right in that with a physical control you still probably glance at it as you're reaching for it, but you don't have to keep your eyes on it the whole time unlike a touch screen. With a touch-screen there's no feedback that your finger is on the button and that you have actually pressed it. With a physical control, button, knob, or slider once you have your hand on it you can manipulate it without looking. They demand momentary glances, not seconds of constant focus.
Well, it depends on button and function. Rarely used functions will require looking, common ones (assuming button placement is sensible) will not, but even ones that require looking are still better because you skip going thru the menu to find it.
Mazda’s rotary knob also has safety issues. Let’s say I want to zoom the Google Maps in or out in CarPlay) at some point in my navigation.
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.
With a knob, you always could stop what you are doing and look back at the road and then continue. With a touch screen, you need to find a button and touch it without looking at the road, or you need to do it from the start again.
I have this knob and I don't understand your point. With the knob or the touch screen, you need to look at the screen to see what you're doing. The knob merely controls a cursor.
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.
Yes, you still need to look at the screen but could pause this in any position of the selected item and continue after looking back at the road.
I was driving an F150 with just a touch screen and it was much worse when I needed to find an item on the screen and try to touch it on a far-located screen in a shaking car.
In my experience, there is no advantage to pausing on some random icon I don't want. I always have to re-orient anyway. Just selecting the icon want from the screen is instantaneous.
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.
There has been more pushback on car screens over the past couple of years, and the optimist in me hopes this leads to change. With enough pushback, manufacturers will have to listen to the market, cost savings be damned.
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.
I could not imagine having to go back to buttons for anything I actually want to control. Once you get used to a well-designed touchscreen, buttons are just so clunky and unintuitive for most functions. Dials are probably my most favorite physical control, but other than volume there's not much it's useful for in a well-designed, modern car anymore. It was great for radio stations, but is terrible for Spotify.
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).
Not exactly, I got my first iPad in college. It's not so much that it's a challenge as it's totally unnecessary effort. I'm sure when the controls came out they were great, then they turned into some weird sprawl that was just designed to look complicated so the car looked like it had lots of features. Now, minimalism reigns king in tech and the one screen is the newest, (imo best) form factor, along with the steering wheel controls, etc.
That works as long as you actually stick to your guns and keep them as deal-breakers. If you accept them with some grumbling, that's still a sale and that provides no backpressure to the manufacturer.
I agree. It also works if you mention it as a dealbreaker, leave without buying, and then buy at another shop. Yes, I realize this can be more work and may not be feasible for everyone.
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.
Their source is "a Swedish motoring magazine in 2022". Europe sure does love regulation- no desire or call for finding the best way to implement vehicular controls, just a desire to lock in old functionality with a flimsy excuse.
This is a timely article for me because I test drove a 2026 Mazda CX-5 and then ultimately purchased a 2025 instead. Disliking the giant touchscreen wasn't the only reason but it certainly was one of the reasons. The screen actually makes the entire experience feel cheaper compared to the extremely nice feeling buttons on the older model. They even cheapened-out on the steering wheel buttons on a car where those are now the only buttons!
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.
The $6,000 profit per car referenced in the article is gross profit, not net profit. Net profit is considerably lower, around 5% for the mass manufacturers. So a $100 cost savings is very significant against a ~$3,000 net profit on a Bolt.
The $6,000 number is a lot harder to calculate. The lower number is just vehicle profit from their investor reports divided by number of cars sold. The lower number is a lot more variable -- some years car companies lose money from their vehicle production side...
Sure, touchscreens are cheap, but high-quality touchscreen software is most def NOT CHEAP!
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.
For touchscreens, I think there is an opportunity to make larger touch targets. For example, when you want to adjust HVAC controls, the UI should take over the ENTIRE screen with ridiculously huge targets. Something in the range of 1-4 square inches in size for a core button should allow your for reduced cognitive overhead. This is critical for safe driving.
I gotta say, the one redeeming feature of Ferrari Luce, for me at least, was the interior. I don't dislike screens, I just hate the tesla-esque obsession (where, for them with FSD - for all the hate they get about it up here - it might actually make sense since u are gonna have a FSD+Grok car) with no buttons. I know buttons add cost, but going back to the Luce example again: you have a healthy sized screen (so u don't go to the pre-tesla days), but you also have wonderful buttons across the board.
Now, I know it's not a very representative car. But nobody said the buttons need to be as flashy or as numerous.
Tesla arguably has better, more useful, and more obvious physical buttons than most cars. Most car manufacturers spray confusing physical buttons everywhere with esoteric icons and insane UX. Everything you'd want to do as a driver in a Tesla has a physical button or a set it and forget it "auto" mode.
Uhm, I like Teslas a lot. The design and the philosophy of just minimizing the amount of components. But where I would draw the line is AC via touch screen (again, if Grok can now do it reliably, fine, otherwise, buttons please). Also, depending on the model, I know some models had turn signals in some weird places (above the head? or am I hallucinating?). Also to make your point: if it hadnt been for carplay and its android equivalent, legacy auto would have been cooked long ago. I never use my VW native apps.
My point being, I think we havent found the sweet spot yet.
I want to cheer (again) for my 2020 Ford Escape. Its infotainment design was a significant differentiator that led to my selection after testing a dozen different models across all US manufacturers.
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.
I have a Mazda that uses the knob implementation of Android Auto... It's just okay. The first problem is that the screen cracks under heat, which is cheap to fix diy, expensive otherwise. Second is the firmware is difficult to update. Again, it's free diy, but you'll brick your infotainment if you screw up. The old firmware is bad: frequent disconnects and screen blackouts. Dealers don't seem to care much about patching it though. I know a mechanic that refused to touch the infotainment as well. You kind of need to flex your nerd abilities or go aftermarket if you want to keep a decent android auto experience.
My biggest issue with touchscreen controls is that they are not ergonomic.
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
Neither of those are a problem in my 2015 Tesla Model S for the buttons that control the climate control or media player.
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.
They're at the bottom of a portrait screen (and IIRC there's a bit of a bezel to rest your hand on), which makes it a little better.
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)
I think there is a real market for modding news cars to have physical buttons again. Whenever this discussion pops up on the internet, there's plenty if people who prefer them (they're called "old folks" ;-)) so why not mod your dashboard to feature a - wait for it - volume button for your music!
The volume button (dial) broke on my Ford Maverick in summer. Moving to a touchscreen car felt like a sigh of relief that I no longer had to worry about buttons and dials breaking when I need to use them, and don't have to worry about a trip to a dealer or tearing apart a dash to replace them.
I will say a button "feels" nicer, but the added risk to me wasn't worth it. To each their own
you're just describing another thing that can go wrong. Most likely when you "rip open the dashboard" there's a few different PCBs that can all go bad, then a bunch of fuses, small LEDs, other things that need to be fixed. People act like anyone with a touchscreen hasn't had a car before that had all those things. I replaced sensors, wires, and my oil temp gauge still didn't work. Two LEDs on the display had some kind of bad voltage or something because I had to replace them every few years. It's so cool having spare fuses and being able to identify the blown one and replace it until you get a touchscreen and you never have to.
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.
> wait until the whole thing is unresponsive due to heat or 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.
I've personally experienced it on at least six different car infotainment systems by four different manufacturers where the stereo will start playing whatever was left on, you turn the volume knob but the whole thing is still loading so it doesn't react for a few seconds.
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?
I wonder how much can be controlled over some kind of bus. Would be cool to have all sorts of physical buttons and a micro controller to control radio, AC, heated seats etc etc so I can keep looking at the road while changing things.
> In contrast, touchscreens are, quite literally, free. All US cars have screens, since rear-view cameras have been mandatory here since 2018, and most of those will be touchscreens
Not quite true because automakers can satisfy the rear-view camera requirement with very cheap screens, e.g. integrated into the rear view mirror.
As an engineer in R&D, I've always known if I needed a cheap but amazing part, to look at automotive replacements from third parties for parts to build an MVP with.
Those rear hatch motors are amazing and most have indexing.
There was a study from a few years ago that associated almost all increase in traffic deaths in the past decade or so with in car displays. Almost all deaths were pedestrians being struck at or after twilight. The thinking is that infotainment systems are making drivers take their eyes off the road to adjust anything in their vehicles, and also ruining their nightvision. Not sure how they were able to separate this from smartphones.
Adjusting radios was the biggest cause of traffic incidents for a long time. IMO the super bright LED headlights from other vehicles is the worst thing for night vision.
The anti-screen crowd vastly overestimates people's competence with buttons. "You can hit them without taking your eyes off the road!" Please observe the typical driver as they attempt to change their climate control settings and report back.
Wait till have they have to swipe up from the bottom of a touchscreen to do the same thing. In many ways, it's all the same buttons with the same icons but now they're inside of menus!
Not sure why the command knob in Mazda scares new users: it’s an option and you still could use the touch screen, it’s just a nice alternative for it…
Absolutely love the command knob, so much better than using the touch screen
You cannot touch the touch screen on a Mazda with the commander knob unless you're in Carplay/Android Auto and only if you've found the buried setting to enable it.
It is not an alternative for touch screen, it replaces it.
I think its easier to develop muscle memory to certain buttons. For instance I had a similar 1DIN head unit to the one pictured in the article. I never needed to look at it to operate it.
On my last button car, I could control volume and turning on/off the radio without looking, but that was it. With the touchscreen, I do have to glance away but am way faster to get back looking at the road. Most things I just don't need to fiddle with anymore, before I'd need to redirect 3 fans, change a dial to put AC mode on/off, another two sliders to make driver and passenger the same (desired) temp (more or less- would have to change later), etc. Now I just adjust one smart "auto mode" a couple degree depending on what I feel like, then can get more granular in controls if I want in two taps.
With voice control I never have to take my eyes off the road at all.
Lordy I hope not. Cannot imagine having to childproof my car's entertainment system, or make sure I don't sing a trigger word, or try to turn on the defroster to dehumidify the windshield during an intense rain storm where I can barely hear myself think.
Also: I don't want a microphone in my car at all times. Thank you.
It could use array microphone to detect that the sound originates from the driver's seat (in addition to using it for filtering out not-from-driver's-seat sounds).
I mean that's cool, if it actually works reliably. Automation tech enthusiasts are willing to be impressed by 99% reliability. To get buy-in from regular people, it needs to just work better. To be clear, I don't know how reliable this actually is now, but I'd be willing to bet that it's not reliable enough.
Both could be possible. It belongs in an R&D lab unless and until it's good enough. If, after some time and dollar threshold, it's still not good enough there might be a case for spending those resources elsewhere.
No. No, please, no. I won't buy a car that relies on voice for anything, and I really don't want to rent one either. Wildly inefficient, slow, unpredictable.
Voice makes sense as a third input mode, but it seems like a poor replacement for the controls you need while stressed or time-constrained. In a car the real UX test isn't "can the system eventually understand me?", it's "can I do this eyes-free, in noise, with high confidence, in under a second?" That's why defrost, wipers, volume, and temperature feel fundamentally different from "navigate to X". Touch is fine for discoverability, voice is fine for occasional commands, but safety-critical/high-frequency actions still want dedicated hardware.
car touchescreens are in the same category of most laptop webcams/cams: just make it good enough, and make it fit (and they both suck, most of the time)
Maybe people should stop buying cars with crappy touch screens then? The touchscreens in my Model 3 has been amazing. Ever since I took delivery of it in 2019. Manufactures need to do better.
I realize the article is pro buttons. I think a huge thing missing from the button discussion (well, maybe lightly touched on in the article) is that physical buttons and controls help guide without looking. Other buttons give feedback that your hand is in the right place. Sure, at first contact that (very bad) reference radio is worse than the touch screen but within a few days of using that I would not need to look to make sure I was hitting the button I wanted because I could feel the face of it with my hand and know I was hitting the right button. So basically, even though the paper picked essentially the worst radio on the planet, it would likely be better than a well designed touch screen after just a few days of use. First day though? That thing is a nightmare.
A while ago I was driving a loaner car - a brand new top tier Accura rdx and the infotainment system was truly the worst and most dangerously designed I had ever witnessed. It was essentially a lenovo thinkpad type touchpad by the cup holder, and the screen was far away. The first time I tried to use it, it was so distracting that I would of crashed the car if it weren't for the safety features.
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.
I test rode an electric pedal assist bicycle yesterday that has a little operating system by the throttle, basically just a speedometer + toggle the level of power assist from eco to turbo. Even it has a "avoid distracted driving" popup that I had to fiddle with to dismiss while riding this bike for the first time.
I think that most people have the usability of buttons without sight as a main argument for.
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.
Totally agree; I had to cut a few sentences about that :). (I also tried to steel-man the paper as much as possible).
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.
https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC6676796/
OP here: I always disliked touchscreens in cars, so I didn't understand why automakers kept shoving them in. I always assumed I was weird in some way, and that most consumers preferred touchscreens or something (Reddit seems to argue this in circles all the time). I planned to keep buying Mazdas, with their lovely buttons and stuff.
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!
> 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!
I thought this is a pretty well-known thing already? For almost decade.
OP: Perhaps it is, but this article honestly took me 12 months to research & write. I really struggled to find trustworthy sources. Do you know of any others I should look at?
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!
> Also, I rather like the idea that blogging can simply be stating the obvious
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 figured it was the most reasonable conclusion via Occam's Razor. Economical and the illusion of futurism
> 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!
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.
> so I didn't understand why automakers kept shoving them in.
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".
They're aware. You're replying to the OP of the article, lol.
Obviously they read it, but it's 2026 and entirely possible to publish an article without having read a word of it :)
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.
They are. All BMWs have the same screen.
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.
I love the click-wheel on my Mazda3 and I love that it allows the screen to sit out of arms length up on the dashboard. Its a very nice interior. What I don't love is how Android Auto is slowly breaking since it assumes more and more that you have a touchscreen.
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.
I cried when Mercedes go rid of the click wheel. Research in this article be damned, I’d argue that rotary knobs with directional shifting like Mercedes paired with great software are the best car infotainment interface in recent history for screens in cars.
Curiously Teslas currently have two click wheels in the steering wheel.
I love voice control, have you tried/gotten used to that?
The reality is they want to serve us ads in the future. But they first need adoption.
(a) cars have forward-facing cameras/computer vision for lane tracking
(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.
> But they first need adoption.
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.
Stellantis tried it already, had to back-pedal calling it a "glitch". I'm sure someone else will be bold enough to try again though.
I think that nowadays people value "technological features", and how better to show "technological advancement" like a giant ass touchscreen and not some "old" XX century knobs.
I hope that changes and people start valuing simplicity and robustness over electric gimmicks (I know many people already do, but we need critical mass).
It is so much easier to add internationalization to a touchscreen over physical buttons
How much is that needed? There was very little text on those buttons to begin with. Are there significant cultural differences in the iconography associated with them?
I have heard (but have no insider knowledge) that it's not just the cost of parts, but what parts do to the development lifecycle.
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.
It's a good argument except the basic controls needed for a car haven't changed in decades: We all need the same climate controls, media controls, etc.
For deep car settings, those have been screen controls for over a decade now and that makes sense.
Automakers are constantly doing functionality-neutral tweaks. There's fashion in how cars looks, and they want every year's model to feel new. Climate control is constant, but one generation has a knob, the next has a slider, the next adds an extra zone, the next changes fan speed from two buttons to a single "up-down" button and so on.
Of course, cars are always evolving, that's why a new model comes out every single year. Ironically, the screen elements of cars always become the most dated part. I don't feel there is nearly as much fashion in the touch screen as the physical elements.
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.
I suspect that another thing that's expensive, besides analog controls, is creating and testing a new, better interface for driving ICE cars using digital controls. So the only thing old our old-tech car companies do is add ad-hoc extensions of the usual car controls. And it is economical to package all these in a touch screen along with all the standard controls they can get away with.
I feel like you could solve that with some constraints defined early in the process—the controls must fit in dimensions XxYxZ, and have K-input wires, and draw at most 5V of power, or whatever. Then the control designer can go off and design whatever they want within those constraints, and the car designer can go off and design the interior of the car knowing what the head unit will require.
That's what the term "parts bin parts" refers to in the industry. If you get familiar with any car brand you can normally tell what brand of car a particular switch came from because they all use the same parts. Corvettes will share a LOT of parts with Suburbans, eg.
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.
I refuse to believe this is the only way to make it cheaper. Standardization and modular components could help. Might not be cheap enough. But surely we can be more imaginative!
They're getting better though. The first gen touchscreens were tiny and unreliable. The one in my 2024 Ioniq 5 is pretty decent. I am really glad I still have physical AC controls though, even if they're capacitive.
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 will _happily_ pay the $100 more to have a more premium and tuned interior
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.)
I'm somewhat skeptical that the cost difference would really be that high, but honestly...yeah I probably would. If what I was getting was fully physical (not capacitive) media and AC controls, including pause/play, skip/tune, volume control, temp control, fan speed control, zone selection, etc? I interact with those systems multiple times every single time I get into a vehicle, which is essentially multiple times every day, for years. Improving the quality of those interactions even a little bit (and in my opinion the difference between good physical buttons and even a very good touchscreen, let alone a shitty one, is massive), is worth thousands of dollars.
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.
That can get thrown into a tiny 2" screen in the instrument cluster.
Touch screens don't have to be modal, that's a UI choice. The 2020 Bolt we just got leaves the climate controls on screen at all times, even when CarPlay is open. I was also pleasantly surprised by the number of buttons it has, including both a volume knob and a temperature knob.
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.
> The 2020 Bolt we just got leaves the climate controls on screen at all times
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.
Actually it's an odd split. The temperature and fan adjustment are physical buttons, but the A/C, recirculation, and heated seat controls are on the screen. I'm thinking this is for two reasons: If a lower trim level lacks heated seats then they just exclude them from the firmware, and the AC and recirc controls require lighted indicators, which is probably a lot more expensive than just a button, so those were much cheaper to integrate into the display. That being said, I've heard digitizer failures can be an issue on this model so I dread that happening.
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...
Do you not have muscle memory for screens too? I find my brain has an easier time visualizing all the touchscreen controls I use semi-often over buttons. Perhaps it's a generational thing.
More importantly, car touchscreens are dangerous. It’s impossible to operate a touchscreen without moving your attention from the road to the touchscreen itself.
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.
Just like the article mentioned, you can't just say that touchscreens are dangerous without bringing up how many buttons do not make it better UX. There are plenty of touchscreen designs that are way better than buttons.
The only metric that matters is how fast you can get attention back on the road.
There are zero touchscreen designs that are better than (physical, tactile) buttons.
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 cannot push physical buttons on a dashboard without taking your eyes off the road, it's a myth. Fiddling with radio controls is the most cited reason for accidents before cell phones.
?
You most certainly can. That doesn't mean people do it 100% of the time.
Simple. I can operate any button without taking my attention from the road at all as long as the said button has a distinct feeling and/or location. That’s immediately an infinitely better experience.
BMW iDrive buttons are an excellent example for that.
> car touchscreens are dangerous. It’s impossible to operate a touchscreen without moving your attention from the road to the touchscreen itself
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.
> It’s impossible to operate a touchscreen without moving your attention from the road to the touchscreen itself.
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.
You're right in that with a physical control you still probably glance at it as you're reaching for it, but you don't have to keep your eyes on it the whole time unlike a touch screen. With a touch-screen there's no feedback that your finger is on the button and that you have actually pressed it. With a physical control, button, knob, or slider once you have your hand on it you can manipulate it without looking. They demand momentary glances, not seconds of constant focus.
Well, it depends on button and function. Rarely used functions will require looking, common ones (assuming button placement is sensible) will not, but even ones that require looking are still better because you skip going thru the menu to find it.
Mazda’s rotary knob also has safety issues. Let’s say I want to zoom the Google Maps in or out in CarPlay) at some point in my navigation.
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.
With a knob, you always could stop what you are doing and look back at the road and then continue. With a touch screen, you need to find a button and touch it without looking at the road, or you need to do it from the start again.
I have this knob and I don't understand your point. With the knob or the touch screen, you need to look at the screen to see what you're doing. The knob merely controls a cursor.
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.
Yes, you still need to look at the screen but could pause this in any position of the selected item and continue after looking back at the road. I was driving an F150 with just a touch screen and it was much worse when I needed to find an item on the screen and try to touch it on a far-located screen in a shaking car.
In my experience, there is no advantage to pausing on some random icon I don't want. I always have to re-orient anyway. Just selecting the icon want from the screen is instantaneous.
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.
There has been more pushback on car screens over the past couple of years, and the optimist in me hopes this leads to change. With enough pushback, manufacturers will have to listen to the market, cost savings be damned.
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.
I could not imagine having to go back to buttons for anything I actually want to control. Once you get used to a well-designed touchscreen, buttons are just so clunky and unintuitive for most functions. Dials are probably my most favorite physical control, but other than volume there's not much it's useful for in a well-designed, modern car anymore. It was great for radio stations, but is terrible for Spotify.
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).
I cannot relate to this at all. Controlling the AC with three knobs is not a challenge. Did you grow up using an iPad perhaps?
Not exactly, I got my first iPad in college. It's not so much that it's a challenge as it's totally unnecessary effort. I'm sure when the controls came out they were great, then they turned into some weird sprawl that was just designed to look complicated so the car looked like it had lots of features. Now, minimalism reigns king in tech and the one screen is the newest, (imo best) form factor, along with the steering wheel controls, etc.
That works as long as you actually stick to your guns and keep them as deal-breakers. If you accept them with some grumbling, that's still a sale and that provides no backpressure to the manufacturer.
I agree. It also works if you mention it as a dealbreaker, leave without buying, and then buy at another shop. Yes, I realize this can be more work and may not be feasible for everyone.
In Europe it's done through EuroNCAP: https://etsc.eu/cars-will-need-buttons-not-just-touchscreens...
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.
Their source is "a Swedish motoring magazine in 2022". Europe sure does love regulation- no desire or call for finding the best way to implement vehicular controls, just a desire to lock in old functionality with a flimsy excuse.
LOL. Go do more research if you have issues with their approach. HN really likes to assume that everyone except themselves are idiots.
This is a timely article for me because I test drove a 2026 Mazda CX-5 and then ultimately purchased a 2025 instead. Disliking the giant touchscreen wasn't the only reason but it certainly was one of the reasons. The screen actually makes the entire experience feel cheaper compared to the extremely nice feeling buttons on the older model. They even cheapened-out on the steering wheel buttons on a car where those are now the only buttons!
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.
The $6,000 profit per car referenced in the article is gross profit, not net profit. Net profit is considerably lower, around 5% for the mass manufacturers. So a $100 cost savings is very significant against a ~$3,000 net profit on a Bolt.
OP: ooooo, that's neat. Do you have a source? I struggled to find a source for even that $6,000 number.
The $6,000 number is a lot harder to calculate. The lower number is just vehicle profit from their investor reports divided by number of cars sold. The lower number is a lot more variable -- some years car companies lose money from their vehicle production side...
Sure, touchscreens are cheap, but high-quality touchscreen software is most def NOT CHEAP!
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.
I think the reality is that it is harder to sell a subscription to a button than it is to software.
Yeah, that's true. Sigh.
For touchscreens, I think there is an opportunity to make larger touch targets. For example, when you want to adjust HVAC controls, the UI should take over the ENTIRE screen with ridiculously huge targets. Something in the range of 1-4 square inches in size for a core button should allow your for reduced cognitive overhead. This is critical for safe driving.
I gotta say, the one redeeming feature of Ferrari Luce, for me at least, was the interior. I don't dislike screens, I just hate the tesla-esque obsession (where, for them with FSD - for all the hate they get about it up here - it might actually make sense since u are gonna have a FSD+Grok car) with no buttons. I know buttons add cost, but going back to the Luce example again: you have a healthy sized screen (so u don't go to the pre-tesla days), but you also have wonderful buttons across the board.
Now, I know it's not a very representative car. But nobody said the buttons need to be as flashy or as numerous.
Tesla arguably has better, more useful, and more obvious physical buttons than most cars. Most car manufacturers spray confusing physical buttons everywhere with esoteric icons and insane UX. Everything you'd want to do as a driver in a Tesla has a physical button or a set it and forget it "auto" mode.
That's why Lyft/Uber drivers who use Teslas need to cover them in stickers explaining how to do such esoteric behaviors as "open door"
Uhm, I like Teslas a lot. The design and the philosophy of just minimizing the amount of components. But where I would draw the line is AC via touch screen (again, if Grok can now do it reliably, fine, otherwise, buttons please). Also, depending on the model, I know some models had turn signals in some weird places (above the head? or am I hallucinating?). Also to make your point: if it hadnt been for carplay and its android equivalent, legacy auto would have been cooked long ago. I never use my VW native apps.
My point being, I think we havent found the sweet spot yet.
I want to cheer (again) for my 2020 Ford Escape. Its infotainment design was a significant differentiator that led to my selection after testing a dozen different models across all US manufacturers.
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.
I have a Mazda that uses the knob implementation of Android Auto... It's just okay. The first problem is that the screen cracks under heat, which is cheap to fix diy, expensive otherwise. Second is the firmware is difficult to update. Again, it's free diy, but you'll brick your infotainment if you screw up. The old firmware is bad: frequent disconnects and screen blackouts. Dealers don't seem to care much about patching it though. I know a mechanic that refused to touch the infotainment as well. You kind of need to flex your nerd abilities or go aftermarket if you want to keep a decent android auto experience.
My biggest issue with touchscreen controls is that they are not ergonomic.
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
Neither of those are a problem in my 2015 Tesla Model S for the buttons that control the climate control or media player.
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.
They're at the bottom of a portrait screen (and IIRC there's a bit of a bezel to rest your hand on), which makes it a little better.
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)
I think there is a real market for modding news cars to have physical buttons again. Whenever this discussion pops up on the internet, there's plenty if people who prefer them (they're called "old folks" ;-)) so why not mod your dashboard to feature a - wait for it - volume button for your music!
The volume button (dial) broke on my Ford Maverick in summer. Moving to a touchscreen car felt like a sigh of relief that I no longer had to worry about buttons and dials breaking when I need to use them, and don't have to worry about a trip to a dealer or tearing apart a dash to replace them. I will say a button "feels" nicer, but the added risk to me wasn't worth it. To each their own
Yeah, wait until the whole thing is unresponsive due to heat or a bug, you’ll be wishing only your volume button was affected.
The fact you can rip open the dashboard and fix something is great and what I call a feature, not a bug.
you're just describing another thing that can go wrong. Most likely when you "rip open the dashboard" there's a few different PCBs that can all go bad, then a bunch of fuses, small LEDs, other things that need to be fixed. People act like anyone with a touchscreen hasn't had a car before that had all those things. I replaced sensors, wires, and my oil temp gauge still didn't work. Two LEDs on the display had some kind of bad voltage or something because I had to replace them every few years. It's so cool having spare fuses and being able to identify the blown one and replace it until you get a touchscreen and you never have to.
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.
Or you reach for a certain area of the screen out of muscle memory, but the UI changed "just because" and now you're very distracted.
> wait until the whole thing is unresponsive due to heat or 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.
Not convinced that is true.
It'd be easy to check. It was true on my 1998 Mercury Mountaineer, I can't imagine car manufacturers would go back just for funsies.
I've personally experienced it on at least six different car infotainment systems by four different manufacturers where the stereo will start playing whatever was left on, you turn the volume knob but the whole thing is still loading so it doesn't react for a few seconds.
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?
I wonder how much can be controlled over some kind of bus. Would be cool to have all sorts of physical buttons and a micro controller to control radio, AC, heated seats etc etc so I can keep looking at the road while changing things.
This company sells buttons for Teslas: https://www.enhauto.com/pages/buttons
The "cloud features included" line amuses me greatly given the low-tech theme.
Here's another really nice looking one: https://www.ctrl-bar.com/ Mine is scheduled to be delivered tomorrow...
> In contrast, touchscreens are, quite literally, free. All US cars have screens, since rear-view cameras have been mandatory here since 2018, and most of those will be touchscreens
Not quite true because automakers can satisfy the rear-view camera requirement with very cheap screens, e.g. integrated into the rear view mirror.
https://i.ebayimg.com/images/g/83QAAeSwizNpjhlB/s-l400.webp
As an engineer in R&D, I've always known if I needed a cheap but amazing part, to look at automotive replacements from third parties for parts to build an MVP with.
Those rear hatch motors are amazing and most have indexing.
There was a study from a few years ago that associated almost all increase in traffic deaths in the past decade or so with in car displays. Almost all deaths were pedestrians being struck at or after twilight. The thinking is that infotainment systems are making drivers take their eyes off the road to adjust anything in their vehicles, and also ruining their nightvision. Not sure how they were able to separate this from smartphones.
Adjusting radios was the biggest cause of traffic incidents for a long time. IMO the super bright LED headlights from other vehicles is the worst thing for night vision.
The anti-screen crowd vastly overestimates people's competence with buttons. "You can hit them without taking your eyes off the road!" Please observe the typical driver as they attempt to change their climate control settings and report back.
Wait till have they have to swipe up from the bottom of a touchscreen to do the same thing. In many ways, it's all the same buttons with the same icons but now they're inside of menus!
Not sure why the command knob in Mazda scares new users: it’s an option and you still could use the touch screen, it’s just a nice alternative for it… Absolutely love the command knob, so much better than using the touch screen
You cannot touch the touch screen on a Mazda with the commander knob unless you're in Carplay/Android Auto and only if you've found the buried setting to enable it.
It is not an alternative for touch screen, it replaces it.
Oh, my bad, the touch screen isn’t working when the car is moving. But this is just a Mazda restriction, not a technical one.
I think its easier to develop muscle memory to certain buttons. For instance I had a similar 1DIN head unit to the one pictured in the article. I never needed to look at it to operate it.
On my last button car, I could control volume and turning on/off the radio without looking, but that was it. With the touchscreen, I do have to glance away but am way faster to get back looking at the road. Most things I just don't need to fiddle with anymore, before I'd need to redirect 3 fans, change a dial to put AC mode on/off, another two sliders to make driver and passenger the same (desired) temp (more or less- would have to change later), etc. Now I just adjust one smart "auto mode" a couple degree depending on what I feel like, then can get more granular in controls if I want in two taps.
With voice control I never have to take my eyes off the road at all.
Just ask the car, unfortunately, asking rarely works unless you're in a Tesla.
Voice interface is the future, just have voice assistant do everything without relying on knobs nor touch screen
same way people just talk to claude code via whisper
Lordy I hope not. Cannot imagine having to childproof my car's entertainment system, or make sure I don't sing a trigger word, or try to turn on the defroster to dehumidify the windshield during an intense rain storm where I can barely hear myself think.
Also: I don't want a microphone in my car at all times. Thank you.
It could use array microphone to detect that the sound originates from the driver's seat (in addition to using it for filtering out not-from-driver's-seat sounds).
I mean that's cool, if it actually works reliably. Automation tech enthusiasts are willing to be impressed by 99% reliability. To get buy-in from regular people, it needs to just work better. To be clear, I don't know how reliable this actually is now, but I'd be willing to bet that it's not reliable enough.
Then it seems like we should work on making it better instead of just trashing the idea?
Both could be possible. It belongs in an R&D lab unless and until it's good enough. If, after some time and dollar threshold, it's still not good enough there might be a case for spending those resources elsewhere.
Hell no. I'd sooner tear out my own vocal cords than accept this future.
No. No, please, no. I won't buy a car that relies on voice for anything, and I really don't want to rent one either. Wildly inefficient, slow, unpredictable.
Voice makes sense as a third input mode, but it seems like a poor replacement for the controls you need while stressed or time-constrained. In a car the real UX test isn't "can the system eventually understand me?", it's "can I do this eyes-free, in noise, with high confidence, in under a second?" That's why defrost, wipers, volume, and temperature feel fundamentally different from "navigate to X". Touch is fine for discoverability, voice is fine for occasional commands, but safety-critical/high-frequency actions still want dedicated hardware.
car touchescreens are in the same category of most laptop webcams/cams: just make it good enough, and make it fit (and they both suck, most of the time)
If we ever get flying cars, I hope they have real buttons. I imagine it's too late for land cars to ever go all the way back to buttons.
Car touchscreens are a safety hazzard. Everyone hates them (except tesla owners), they need to largely banned
Maybe people should stop buying cars with crappy touch screens then? The touchscreens in my Model 3 has been amazing. Ever since I took delivery of it in 2019. Manufactures need to do better.
I hate the way climate controls take over the whole screen, causing me to lose my map screen.