Car touchscreens are cheap, not good

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.

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.

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.

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!

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.

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.

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 nob on the older Mazda cars is also a terrible user experience. Turning and pressing physical nobs to change the climate control, volume, or radio stations is very satisfying and user-friendly. But the commander nob 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 nob 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.

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 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.

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.

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.

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 a single (sometimes dual) fixed purpose, they don't change purpose depending on whatever mode something is.

It is, in my mind, 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 features, meaning those buttons had no fixed purpose.

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.

> 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

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

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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!

Just ask the car, unfortunately, asking rarely works unless you're in a Tesla.

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)

Car touchscreens are a safety hazzard. Everyone hates them (except tesla owners), they need to largely banned

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.

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.

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

I hate the way climate controls take over the whole screen, causing me to lose my map screen.