A while back, someone made the case on this website for cars with no digital screens. We look at screens all day anyway, and they’re distracting and just plain lazy design, the author posited.
The author in question was, er… me. So allow me to set the record straight by disagreeing with myself.
Yes, car makers’ screen addictions have got out of hand and I enjoy the zen of simple cars, but for the vast majority of mainstream cars, touchscreens are essential to harnessing the inherent complexity and something that customers want.
The Ineos Grenadier demonstrates as much: its interior looks like the flight deck of an airliner. You know, the things that require multiple years of study and training to learn how to operate.
I firmly believe that certain essential, often-used functions should ideally be controlled by physical buttons, like the interior temperature, seats and useless mandatory driver assistance features.
But the tyre pressure reset, the setting for deciding whether the speedo should be in miles or kilometres, the equaliser for the audio? It’s stuff you adjust once and then forget about, so a screen is perfect for them.
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The touch-only thing felt (and kinda literally was) as if your employer took away your computer when tablets came out to save money. A dumb move that felt really wrong, especially in luxury cars.Some luxury cars used to introduce a new weird control system every few years (voice, rotating knob, trackpad to write letters with your fingers...) and kept all other legacy systems redundant to keep conservative buyers happy when they bought the same model for decades.Then came Tesla, fooling first-time luxury cars buyers with those futuristic looks, that were actually well hidden cost-saving measure to compensate for the cost of the batteries.
Don't you dare mock 1980's graphic equalisers. The more bands the better! My favourite was one I had that was only 5 band but 2 sliders moulded together to look like a huge 10 band. Needed another DIN slot in the car for no benefit! Awesome.
Porsche have mastered the art of physical controls on that front. They show how it should be done.