Let me tell you about the worst moment I've ever had inside a brand-new car.
It was raining. Not drizzle — proper, out-of-nowhere, highway rain that appears from nowhere and turns the windshield into a waterfall in about four seconds. I reached for the wiper control without thinking about it. My hand landed on a flat, perfectly smooth panel of glass. I looked down, found the wiper icon buried under a weather sub-menu, tapped it, accidentally activated the heated rear window, went back, tapped again, finally got the wipers going — and looked up to realize I'd spent a genuinely alarming amount of time staring at a dashboard instead of the motorway in front of me.
The car was eighteen months old. Brand new when purchased. More expensive than anything I'd owned before. And it nearly caused an accident because turning on the wipers required the kind of focused visual attention that should probably be saved for, say, driving.
That experience lives rent-free in my head now whenever someone tells me that touchscreen dashboards are the future. Maybe. But the present is a mess.
The Slow Disappearance Nobody Voted For
It didn't happen all at once. That's the thing. If every button had vanished overnight, people would have noticed and revolted immediately. Instead it was gradual — a dial removed here, a row of shortcuts consolidated into a menu there, a volume knob that got quietly eliminated in a refresh year when nobody was looking.
And each individual change was easy to justify. Cleaner interior. More modern look. Easier to update over the air. Fewer parts to fail. The automotive press, which is eternally susceptible to the word "minimalist," mostly applauded.
What got lost in the applause was forty years of refinement. Because those buttons and dials weren't there by accident. They were there because an enormous amount of engineering had gone into making them intuitive, quick, and operable without looking. The volume knob on a 2005 car didn't require your eyes to work. The fan speed dial on a 2010 hatchback could be adjusted with one hand, one motion, while your other hand stayed on the wheel and your eyes stayed on the road. These weren't primitive features waiting to be upgraded. They were solutions to real human problems, arrived at through decades of testing actual human behaviour.
They got replaced by something that looks better in a showroom photograph and works worse on a Tuesday morning in traffic.
The Part They Never Advertised
Here's what makes this genuinely interesting rather than just frustrating: car companies knew.
Not theoretically. Not "maybe." The research was available and in some cases was being done internally. Hyundai ran focus groups to test their all-screen dashboards on real drivers, and the feedback they got used words that almost never appear in corporate research reports. People described the experience as making them feel stressed, annoyed, and steamed — their words — when trying to control something in a hurry and finding that the touchscreen interface stood between them and the thing they needed.
Hyundai's own Design VP admitted this publicly in an interview, saying that the company had been "lured in by the wow factor" of full-screen systems, and that it took hearing directly from customers to understand that the wow factor evaporated approximately five minutes into daily ownership.
And Hyundai was being more honest than most. Other companies — when pressed — eventually offered a different explanation for why buttons disappeared that had nothing to do with design philosophy or the evolution of human interface preferences.
It had to do with cost.
A single physical button in a car carries with it an entire chain of expense: tooling investment, dedicated wiring, quality testing, supply chain management, replacement inventory. A touchscreen replaces all of that with software. One piece of glass handles a hundred functions that used to require a hundred individual components. Multiply the savings per car by the production volume of a major automaker, and you are talking about very significant numbers indeed.
Hyundai's own Chief Creative Officer put it bluntly, in a quote that should probably be printed on a wall somewhere: "It's easy to reduce all costs when you only have digital keys. It's low tooling investment — you can do whatever you want. The problem is it's not compatible with the use of a car."
That last sentence. Read it twice.
What Tesla Started and Everyone Got Wrong
It's impossible to tell this story without talking about Tesla, because Tesla is where the industry's cargo-cult thinking began.
When the Model S launched in 2012 with a 17-inch touchscreen dominating the centre console, it was genuinely revolutionary. Not primarily because of the screen itself, but because of what the screen represented: Tesla had built cars that could receive software updates over the air, adding features and fixing problems remotely long after the vehicle left the factory. The screen was the interface for a fundamentally different kind of car-ownership relationship.
That context is everything. Tesla's screen made sense because it was backed by a software ecosystem that no other manufacturer had. Legacy carmakers looked at Tesla's sales numbers and the jaw-dropping showroom reactions to that blank, beautiful dashboard and drew exactly the wrong conclusion. They assumed the screen was the product. They removed their buttons, installed their screens, and discovered that without the underlying software infrastructure Tesla had spent years building, all they'd actually done was make their climate controls harder to reach.
The result was a decade of automotive dashboards that looked futuristic and worked like a frustrating app update from an IT department.
When the Numbers Got Uncomfortable
Eventually, the safety data became too consistent to ignore.
A 2017 study by the AAA Foundation found that common touchscreen tasks — adjusting navigation, changing audio settings — kept drivers visually and mentally off the road for an average of 40 seconds per task. At 50 miles per hour, a car covers roughly half a mile in 40 seconds. Half a mile of road, covered without anyone really watching it.
A separate study specifically examining the Volkswagen Golf — one of the cars that attracted the most criticism for its haptic touch-slider climate controls — found that touchscreen interfaces caused measurably higher visual, manual, and cognitive distraction than physical buttons across every metric the researchers tested.
Physical buttons and dials work differently because they exploit something the human body is actually very good at: muscle memory. A dial you've turned five hundred times doesn't need your eyes to confirm it. Your hand knows where it is, how far to turn it, and what it will feel like at the right setting. A touchscreen cannot be memorised this way because there is nothing physical to memorise. The surface is identically flat everywhere, every time.
The VW Golf case became the car industry's most public cautionary tale. The haptic sliders that replaced the climate dials required precise visual attention every single time they were used. Reviews were almost uniformly critical. Owner complaints piled up. Eventually, Volkswagen quietly restored physical controls — and said, in the way large corporations say things without quite saying them, that customer feedback had driven the decision.
The Regulator That Changed Everything
Here is the thing that actually moved the needle, because consumer complaints alone — however loud and consistent — were not quite enough to override the financial incentive of cheaper dashboards.
In 2026, Euro NCAP — the independent body whose five-star safety ratings appear in every car advertisement and affect everything from insurance premiums to fleet purchasing decisions — updated its criteria. Under the new rules, vehicles that hide essential controls like windshield wipers, turn signals, and hazard lights inside touchscreen menus will lose points in their safety assessment. To earn a top rating, those features must be operable through physical controls.
Losing a five-star safety rating costs a car manufacturer far more than the savings from removing buttons ever generated. Suddenly, the financial calculation reversed.
And then, rapidly, so did the dashboards.
The Brands Coming Back to Earth
Porsche brought physical toggles back to the 2024 Cayenne for climate and fan functions. Mercedes-Benz confirmed that upcoming models — the GLC, the next CLA — would return to physical rollers and buttons on the steering wheel, with plans to retrofit existing models through service updates. Volkswagen committed to more tactile controls across its future EV range. Hyundai introduced physical dials for temperature control across multiple updated models.
Researchers have started calling this the "re-buttoning phase" of the industry. The word sounds almost comical, but the phenomenon it describes is real: the whole sector walking back, quietly and without much fanfare, a decision it sold to consumers as progress.
Mazda deserves a specific mention here, because it largely refused to follow the trend in the first place. While competitors were celebrating their minimalist glass interiors, Mazda kept its rotary Commander knob and was rewarded with some of the strongest usability scores in independent reviews. Sometimes the most sophisticated thing a design team can do is look at a trend and decide, deliberately, not to follow it.
The Part That Should Stick With You
The frustrating thing about this entire episode is not that car companies tried something new and it didn't work out. Trying things and learning from them is how progress happens.
The frustrating thing is that the research was there before they started. The studies on touchscreen distraction and reaction times existed. The engineering case for muscle memory and tactile feedback had been understood for decades. The decision to remove buttons was not made because the evidence pointed that way. It was made because the budget meetings pointed that way, and the evidence was inconvenient.
Drivers paid for that decision — in frustration, in wasted attention, in near-misses on wet highways while searching for wiper controls in a sub-menu.
The buttons are coming back now. But it took ten years, a regulatory intervention, declining satisfaction scores, and an uncomfortable number of focus group participants using the word "steamed" before anyone in a position to change things moved seriously to change them.
Next time a car manufacturer tells you that removing a feature is actually an upgrade — reach for the manual override. And check whether it's behind a touchscreen.
(Image suggestions: VW Golf Mk8 haptic touch sliders close-up / 2024 Porsche Cayenne dashboard with physical buttons / Driver hand reaching for absent dial on blank panel / Before-after: 2005 car dashboard full of tactile controls vs 2022 all-glass interior / Tesla Model S centre screen interior)
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