Somewhere in the past ten years, you got into a car, reached for the fan speed dial, and grabbed air.
It was gone. In its place: a touchscreen. A flat, glowing slab with no texture, no feedback, no physical memory for your fingers to find without looking. You touched what you thought was the right icon, adjusted what turned out to be the wrong thing, glanced down to find the right one, and spent a fraction of a second not watching the road ahead.
That fraction of a second is the whole story. But we'll get to that.
The buttons started disappearing quietly. Then all at once. And now, if you walk into most new car showrooms, the dashboard that greets you looks less like a cockpit and more like an iPad bolted to a piece of expensive trim. Some of the world's largest automakers have spent the last decade stripping out every physical switch, dial, and knob they could find — sometimes to the point where the steering wheel itself became a smooth, unmarked surface of fake buttons that don't click when you press them.
The question most people never asked while this was happening was the one that mattered most: why?
The Honest Answer Nobody Wanted to Say Out Loud
The car industry would like you to believe that the great button purge was about modernity. About minimalism. About following the consumer deeper into the touchscreen era they'd already embraced on their phones. Audi's electronics team said their decision was driven by the fact that people are increasingly comfortable with touch interfaces. Rivian's chief software officer said that, ideally, you'd interact with the car entirely through voice, and that using buttons at all is "an anomaly." Tesla, which probably did more to start this trend than anyone, positioned its cars as tablets on wheels and built an entire brand identity around the absence of a single physical switch.
All of that is true, in the way that a carefully selected true thing can obscure a more complete truth.
<cite index="28-1">The real reason is simpler and less flattering. Touchscreens are cheaper to produce and update than complex button arrays.</cite> Every physical button in a car costs money — to engineer, to tool, to assemble, to test. It needs its own wiring harness, its own connector, its own quality control. A touchscreen replaces three hundred individual components with one piece of glass and a software update. <cite index="26-1">Hyundai's Chief Creative Officer Luc Donkerwolke admitted in 2024 that the reason for removing buttons often comes down to cost-saving. "It's easy to reduce all costs when you only have digital keys. It's low tooling investment, you can do whatever you want, it's only software."</cite>
He then added, to his credit, the line that should have been said years earlier: "The problem is it's not compatible with the use of a car."
What Tesla Started and Everyone Copied
To understand how the dashboard became a screen, you have to understand what Tesla did — and why it worked for Tesla specifically, in ways it didn't necessarily work for everyone else.
When the first Tesla Model S launched in 2012, that enormous 17-inch touchscreen in the centre console was genuinely revolutionary. Nobody had seen anything like it in a production car. It looked like the future. It felt like the future. And it allowed Tesla, a company with no legacy manufacturing infrastructure, to push software updates over the air that added features and fixed problems remotely — something no other car company could do at the time.
That screen was a genuine innovation tied to a genuine engineering advantage. What happened next was a classic case of the industry copying the aesthetics of an idea without copying the substance of it. Legacy manufacturers saw a touchscreen and thought: that looks modern, customers seem to like it, and it saves us money. They ripped out their button panels, replaced them with flat glass, and called it progress.
<cite index="24-1">A survey of U.S. car owners by JD Power found a consecutive two-year decline in overall consumer satisfaction with their vehicles for the first time in 28 years.</cite> Infotainment systems — official industry language for the screen in the centre of your dashboard — generated more complaints in the first 90 days of ownership than any other vehicle system. And the complaints were the same everywhere: simple things had become complicated, basic things required looking away from the road, and a task that used to take one hand and zero thought now required a driver to navigate sub-menus at 70 miles per hour.
The Half-Mile You Don't See Coming
Here is a number worth sitting with: <cite index="24-1">a 2017 study by the AAA Foundation found that drivers navigating through in-car screens to program navigation apps and other features were visually and mentally distracted for an average of 40 seconds.</cite>
Forty seconds. <cite index="24-1">A car travelling at 50 miles per hour could cover half a mile during that time.</cite>
Physical buttons do not eliminate distraction entirely. But they change the nature of it fundamentally. A dial you have touched a thousand times before is something your hand can find without your eyes leaving the road. There's a reason pilots can still operate critical switches in low visibility, and musicians can play an instrument in the dark — muscle memory, built on tactile feedback, allows the hand to navigate without requiring the eyes to confirm each step. <cite index="27-1">Touchscreens, by contrast, demand visual attention to operate — something drivers simply cannot spare.</cite>
The Volkswagen Golf Mk8 became the case study nobody at VW wanted to discuss. When it launched with capacitive touch sliders for the climate control — strips of glass that required you to hold your finger in the right place and slide it with precision — reviewers were unanimous. The system was dangerous, frustrating, and counterintuitive. A car that had been loved for generations for its usability had become a car that required a driver to stare at a panel of flat plastic to adjust the temperature.
<cite index="23-1">The problem with putting everything inside a touchscreen is that simple one-click commands become needlessly complicated. On older cars, something as simple as controlling the fan speed involved an intuitive flick of a very tactile, physical rotary dial. These simple solutions were discarded in favour of fancy-looking on-screen slider controls.</cite>
The "Wow Factor" That Wore Off
Hyundai is one of the few car companies to actually say what happened clearly, without dressing it in corporate language.
<cite index="24-1">Hyundai's Design North America Vice President Ha Hak-soo admitted the company was lured in by the "wow" factor of massive, all-in-one screen-based infotainment systems. Customers apparently didn't share that enthusiasm. "When we tested with our focus group, we realized that people get stressed, annoyed, and steamed when they want to control something in a pinch but are unable to do so," Ha said.</cite>
That phrase — get stressed, annoyed, and steamed — is doing a lot of work in a press statement from a major automaker. It's essentially an acknowledgement that the company put a product into its cars that it knew caused frustration, because it looked impressive in a showroom. And then it took years of customer complaints, declining satisfaction scores, and the mounting evidence of safety research to change course.
<cite index="26-1">Donkerwolke made the point plainly: "We have a clear philosophy — eyes on the road, hands on the steering wheel — and if you do something else like that, you are basically putting in danger the life of your customers."</cite>
The philosophy existed before the touchscreen era. It just wasn't applied to dashboards.
The Regulator Finally Enters the Room
Car companies are large, slow-moving organisations with enormous financial incentives to keep doing what they're doing until something external forces them to change. The external thing, in this case, is Euro NCAP — the independent body that assigns the five-star safety ratings that appear in car advertisements.
<cite index="23-1">Starting in 2026, carmakers that hide basic controls such as wipers, indicators, or hazard lights inside a touchscreen menu will lose crucial safety points under NCAP's updated Human Machine Interface assessment criteria. To earn a top rating, these features must be operated by physical buttons or stalks, not touch panels. A car with touchscreen-only controls risks losing its all-important five-star rating.</cite>
A five-star safety rating is not an optional marketing detail for a mass-market car. Losing one affects insurance premiums, fleet purchasing decisions, and consumer confidence in ways that have a measurable impact on sales. So when Euro NCAP says that touchscreen-only wiper controls will cost you stars, the industry listens in a way that customer complaints alone couldn't quite achieve.
The Great Re-Buttoning
<cite index="23-1">Several legacy automakers, including Volkswagen, Mercedes-Benz, and Hyundai, are reversing course. They're rediscovering the value of buttons, knobs, and tactile feedback — the very elements that once made driving simpler, safer, and far more human.</cite>
Porsche brought physical toggles back to the Cayenne for climate and fan speed. Mercedes-Benz confirmed its next generation of models — including the GLC and upcoming CLA — will feature steering wheels with physical rollers, rockers, and buttons. Volkswagen has acknowledged that its touch-sensitive steering wheel controls in the Golf were a mistake and has committed to more tactile controls in future EVs.
<cite index="27-1">Rachel Plotnick, an Associate Professor at Indiana University and author of a book on the history of buttons, describes this moment as a "re-buttoning phase" following the "touchscreen mania" of most automakers. She argues that people's hunger for physical buttons is driven by their tactility and feedback — and suggests that screen fatigue from spending all day on devices makes buttons feel like a way to "de-technologize" daily life.</cite>
The Car That Never Lost Its Buttons
While everyone else was racing toward glass, a few brands simply refused. Mazda kept its rotary commander knob when every competitor was removing it. Porsche preserved critical physical controls through each generation. And Bugatti — which is worth noting here — never adopted touchscreen controls for primary functions at all. When you can charge a million dollars for a car, apparently, you don't need to save money on buttons.
<cite index="29-1">As Porsche has begun rejecting screens, industry observers have noted that it could "over time be seen as luxurious to have buttons instead." Physical controls, once associated with outdated design, are becoming a marker of quality and considered engineering.</cite>
That is the sharpest reversal in the whole story. Ten years ago, a dashboard full of buttons looked old. Now, a dashboard with a real volume knob, a real temperature dial, and a real set of switches you can operate without looking down looks like a manufacturer that actually respects your attention.
Where This Ends Up
The future is not going to be a dashboard full of buttons any more than it's going to be a car with no screen at all. <cite index="27-1">The sensible answer — which most serious engineers have been saying for a while, even while their companies did the opposite — is a hybrid approach: essential functions handled by physical controls, and non-urgent things like navigation and entertainment on the screen where they make sense.</cite>
Adjusting the temperature: button. Choosing a playlist: screen. Turning on the wipers while it starts raining in the middle of a motorway junction: absolutely, without question, a physical stalk that your hand can find without a single glance away from the road.
The car industry spent roughly a decade solving a problem nobody had — how do we get rid of buttons — and creating several new ones in the process. The correction is underway. It's just slow, because it has to move at the speed of production cycles and regulatory pressure and executive embarrassment.
In the meantime: if you're choosing a new car and the climate control is buried in a menu, consider that a design decision, not a feature. Someone chose to make that harder for you. And now you know why.
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