Ben Barrett bought a brand-new 2024 Chevrolet Silverado. Not a base model. A properly specified, properly expensive pickup truck with all the technology a person could reasonably want in a daily driver. He was happy with it. He drove it for a few weeks without incident.
Then the screen went black while he was on the road.
Not a flicker. Not a brief freeze. The entire display — his speedometer readout, his navigation, his rearview camera feed, everything housed inside that central screen — went dark while he was driving. "The dash goes out when I'm driving," he told journalists later. "So I don't know what speed I'm driving. The mapping system — that goes completely out."
His car was still physically moving. The engine was still running. The transmission was still engaged. But the layer of technology that the manufacturer had used to replace almost every dedicated gauge, dial, and analogue indicator had simply switched itself off, leaving him in a vehicle he couldn't fully read, navigating a road he couldn't fully see.
This was a brand-new truck. This was the feature everyone wanted.
The 97 Percent Problem
Here is a number worth holding onto: <cite index="29-1">research shows 97 percent of new cars since 2023 have at least one touchscreen, handling a growing number of functions.</cite>
Ninety-seven percent. The screen is no longer a premium addition or a technology upgrade. It is the car. It is the instrument cluster, the climate control, the navigation system, the backup camera, the driver assistance settings, the audio system, the connectivity hub, and in many vehicles the entire gateway to adjusting anything about how the car behaves. The physical knobs and dedicated switches that used to handle those functions individually — each one a standalone, fail-independently component — have been consolidated into a single electronic system.
Which means that when that single system fails, it doesn't take one thing with it. It takes everything.
<cite index="25-1">The most common software complaints involve the infotainment system — screens freezing or restarting randomly, Bluetooth refusing to pair, navigation crashing mid-route, Apple CarPlay or Android Auto not connecting, audio cutting out, or the touchscreen becoming completely unresponsive. Driver assistance technology can also fail. Adaptive cruise control may throw errors and disable itself, lane keeping assistance might stop working, parking sensors can malfunction, reversing cameras may show distorted or blank images, and blind spot monitoring can give false alerts or fail entirely. More seriously, software problems can affect the car's core systems. Dashboard displays may glitch or show incorrect information, warning lights can illuminate due to software bugs rather than actual mechanical issues, climate control may stop responding, the start/stop system might behave erratically, and engine management problems can leave the car in limp mode.</cite>
Read that list again. That is not a list of minor inconveniences. That is a list of things that used to require multiple separate systems to fail simultaneously before a driver would experience them all at once. Now they're all one system. One point of failure. One black screen.
The Volkswagen Black Screen Saga
Volkswagen's recent experience with its MIB3 infotainment system — fitted across multiple models including the Tiguan, Atlas, Taos, Arteon, and Jetta from roughly 2019 to 2026 — is perhaps the most documented case of what a single software failure does to an entire lineup.
<cite index="24-1">When the system malfunctions, it can disable not only entertainment features but also critical functions like the backup camera display. The infotainment system split into two parts — a touchscreen display and a separate control module often hidden in the glovebox acts as the brain of the system, and is usually responsible for freezing, rebooting, and black screen issues.</cite>
<cite index="24-2">Due to the high volume of complaints about MIB3 system failures like black screens and glitches, a class action lawsuit investigation has been initiated for models including the 2022–2024 Tiguan and 2023–2025 Atlas.</cite>
A class action investigation. Not for an engine problem. Not for a transmission failure. For a screen that goes black and takes the backup camera with it. This is what software dependency looks like when it reaches the legal system.
The standard advice for VW owners who experience this failure is a soft reset — press and hold the power button for ten to fifteen seconds. Which is, when you think about it, the same advice you'd give someone whose phone is misbehaving. Except your phone is not reversing toward a bollard in a car park with no camera feed to tell you it's there.
One Million Seven Hundred Thousand Trucks
In early 2024, Ford announced a recall affecting approximately 1.74 million vehicles across multiple Ford and Lincoln models. The reason: rearview camera systems that could compromise driver visibility while reversing.
<cite index="30-1">The recall puts the spotlight on software reliability in modern vehicles. Rearview cameras are now a standard safety feature across the U.S. auto market.</cite>
The backup camera is not a luxury. It has been federally mandated on all new passenger vehicles in the United States since 2018. It exists specifically to prevent reversing accidents — incidents that kill hundreds of people annually and injure thousands more, disproportionately children and elderly pedestrians directly behind the vehicle. It is safety infrastructure.
And Ford needed to recall 1.74 million of them because the software that displayed the feed was unreliable.
Stellantis, separately, recalled well over a million Dodge Ram trucks across model years 2019 and 2021 through 2024. <cite index="28-1">A statement issued by Stellantis in September 2024 explained that the affected trucks have software which could inadvertently shut down electronic stability control. Federal safety standards require electronic stability control to be active and functional essentially the entire time a car is driving.</cite>
Electronic stability control is the system that prevents your car from spinning out in emergency manoeuvres. It is, in certain situations, the difference between maintaining control and losing it entirely. A software bug — not a failed sensor, not a broken actuator, not a worn mechanical component, but a software bug — could switch it off while you were driving.
The fix was an OTA update. The cause was a software error. The affected quantity was over a million vehicles. This is the scale at which software fragility operates when it's embedded in mass-market transport.
The Night Someone Left Their Phone In The Car
There is a particular kind of modern automotive misery that didn't exist five years ago, and it involves standing outside your own car in the dark, unable to get in, because your phone is sitting on the passenger seat.
<cite index="33-1">A BMW owner reported parking in their garage and leaving their phone on the seat. As they walked away, the car locked. They found themselves unable to open the car because they use their phone as their key. Another owner on the same forum reported that their wife had been locked inside a car by the digital key system malfunctioning — the NFC card in the wallet became mandatory after that incident.</cite>
Digital keys are, in the right circumstances, genuinely excellent. Tapping your phone to unlock a car instead of fumbling for a fob is a meaningful convenience improvement. Sharing access remotely without cutting a physical key is useful. Not having to worry about losing a dedicated key fob is real peace of mind.
Until your phone dies. Until the NFC stops responding. Until the software has a moment and the car decides, for reasons it cannot explain, that it doesn't recognise the device that was working perfectly this morning.
<cite index="34-1">BMW's owner's manual says one should carry a key fob at all times. The reason, presumably, is that the digital key and backup key card will not work if you have a software or hardware failure that affects the NFC system, or you lose all power from the 12-volt battery. The fob has a physical backup key inside which will be needed to enter the car, allowing you to pop the hood for a 12-volt jump start or resolve the issue from inside the vehicle.</cite>
Read that. BMW, whose vehicles include the digital key as a premium feature and a genuine selling point, recommends in its own manual that you carry a physical key at all times because the digital key cannot be relied upon in all circumstances. The manufacturer of the feature is telling you not to rely entirely on the feature.
That is not confidence. That is a hedge.
What Repair Looks Like
When these systems fail and the fix is not a soft reset or an OTA update, the cost is significant.
<cite index="27-1">Most repairs range from approximately $500 to $3,500, depending on whether the issue involves software, a touchscreen, wiring, or a control module. The complexity of modern systems means diagnosis often requires specialised factory scan tools and software.</cite>
Five hundred to three thousand five hundred pounds to fix a screen. In a vehicle the owner may have already spent thirty, forty, or fifty thousand on. With a failure rate that is, demonstrably, high enough to generate class action investigations and million-vehicle recalls. And requiring specialised tools that mean the repair can often only be done by a main dealer, eliminating the independent repair shops that most drivers have used for everything else.
The old radio in a 2005 car was, in the worst case, a two-hundred-pound replacement that any audio installer could fit in an afternoon. The infotainment system in a 2024 car that has absorbed the climate controls, the drive mode settings, the instrument cluster, the backup camera display, and the connectivity hub is a four-figure repair that requires a factory diagnostic interface.
The Question Nobody Is Asking Loudly Enough
<cite index="31-1">In a lot of newer trucks and SUVs, the screen runs the backup camera, HVAC, defrost, drive modes, and settings that used to live on real knobs and switches. When the screen freezes or goes black, it can feel like the vehicle just lost a key layer of roadworthiness. This isn't rare, either.</cite>
That phrase — key layer of roadworthiness — is the one that should be in every conversation about how much a car's software should control. A car that cannot be fully operated because its screen is having a moment is not a minor inconvenience. It is, depending on what that screen controls and where the car is when it fails, a safety situation.
The honest question — the one that the industry has been quietly stepping around while it integrated more and more into the touchscreen — is how much single-point dependency is acceptable in a safety-critical machine. A mechanical failure in a 1995 car was usually localised. The headlights didn't work because of a problem with the headlights. The windows didn't work because of a problem with the window motor. One failure, one system.
A software failure in a 2024 car can be the braking display and the rearview camera and the climate control and the navigation and the drive mode settings all at once, because they all live in the same place. One failure. Everything.
The Feature You Didn't Know You'd Miss
Here is what nobody tells you in the showroom. The features that feel the most impressive when you're configuring your new car — the large touchscreen, the digital key, the 360-degree camera suite, the adaptive cruise control with its software-managed engagement — are also the features most dependent on a software layer that can fail, that has failed, and that in many documented cases is failing right now in vehicles that drove off forecourts this year.
None of that makes them bad features. The backup camera is still a genuine safety improvement when it works. The digital key is still more convenient than a fob when the conditions are right. Adaptive cruise makes long motorway journeys meaningfully less tiring when the sensors and the software agree to cooperate.
But somewhere between "this technology is impressive" and "this technology controls my ability to see what's behind me, know how fast I'm going, and get into my vehicle," there is a conversation about redundancy and resilience that the industry is having too quietly and drivers are not having loudly enough.
Ask your next car what happens when the screen goes black.
Ask what it can still do.
And then decide whether that's an acceptable answer.
(Image suggestions: Car touchscreen showing black/dead screen in dark cabin / Ford recall notification vehicle lineup / Digital key phone NFC tap car door / Backup camera distorted or blank screen / Chevy Silverado dashboard showing glitch)
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