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.

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.

> 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.

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"

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 far greater than this. Which means the end-user price difference would be thousands of dollars. Would be interesting to see if customers would pay $5 to 10k extra for a tactile interior.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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).

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.

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?

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.

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.

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.

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)

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.

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 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!

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.

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.

Not convinced that is true.

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...

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.

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

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

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.

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.

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.