The rain came down relentlessly as I piled into the Polestar 2. I was soaked through like a stray dog tossed into a frozen pond and every bit as mad; the parking ticket shoved under the wiper blade didn’t do much to assuage my mood. The streets of New York City are never kind to anyone, especially not in February.
I reached for the familiar touch of hard plastic switches to crank the heater and warm my seats. I found none, only a big touchscreen with menus to fish through instead. That didn’t help my disposition, either.
I knew this had been happening for years, the death of buttons in cars. I saw it get worse and worse the longer I spent in this business. Used to be, this was what you got on the futuristic electric vehicles, like this Polestar. But now it was everywhere. That new Chevy Colorado makes you go through a screen menu to turn on the headlights. The 2023 BMW X1 got rid of a ton of buttons too, making you use the screen if you need to cool off a bit. Hell, even that little iDrive controller knob is going away soon. The Mercedes EQS’ optional dashboard is basically just one huge screen. I knew they would all be like that eventually.
When, I wondered, did it all get so bad?
Sitting there wet and freezing in the Polestar, I decided I’d had enough. I had to find out who was responsible. I had a new case to solve and this time it was a murder mystery. Who killed all the buttons in cars?
After all, nobody’s happy about this. Study after study tells us touch screens aren’t as easy or safe to use as actual, physical buttons. Distracted driving is literally a deadly problem and it’s worse than ever to be a pedestrian these days. Users constantly count screens and infotainment systems among their top complaints about new cars. But the upcoming electric vehicle era is all about software, not control, and probably not human driving, either. If everyone hates this stuff, I wanted to know who to blame.
I called up Sam Abuelsamid looking for answers. These days, he’s an auto industry research analyst at Guidehouse Insights, but he used to be a gumshoe like me. And he didn’t blanch when I asked him that question.
“I’d say that the initial wound was cast by BMW,” Sam said. “But the coup de grace was administered by Tesla.”
Elon Musk. Of course, it was him. I was about as surprised to hear that as Fernando Alonso is when his F1 car turns into a rolling hand grenade yet again. If there’s moving and shaking in the world of cars, you can often trace it back to Musk. For better or worse, where he goes, the rest of this business follows and he’s not afraid to step on anyone who gets in his way. Wants to go to Mars someday, I heard. Some days it feels like his computer-simulated reality and we’re all just living in it.
But I had to go further back to understand the whole picture. “Tell me more about the Germans, Sam,” I asked.
Suspect 1: BMW
Sam said it started at the turn of this century with the E65 7 Series. I was barely out of my learner’s permit back then, but I knew that car well. It came with a fancy knob and a screen to control all the fancy things it could do—navigation, heated seats, communications, the works. Nobody was happy about it then, either.
“iDrive reduces the number of switches and buttons on the dash because various electronic menus appear only as needed on the dash's color monitor,” this rag wrote at the time. “Problem is, even after studying the 745i's thick owner's manual, it can be downright difficult—and frustrating—to accomplish some intended iDrive tasks.”
Be that as it may, Sam said, iDrive was a solution to the problem of expensive cars trying to do more and more. “By that time, especially with premium vehicles, you were getting so many features in there—where are you going to put all the controls for these features?” he said. “How's the driver to interface with all this functionality?”
He had a point. Except that 20 years later, the problem is everywhere. Now, a Honda Civic’s more advanced than that BMW ever was. People want more and more out of all of their cars now that connected technology pervades every aspect of our lives. So cars got more and more complicated—but there’s only so much real estate for buttons. It would be tough to imagine switches for everything a new 7 Series does today, where the thing can park itself while you’re watching Netflix inside.
Sam also brought up how expensive buttons are for car companies, too.
“It costs a lot of money to engineer all those buttons and switches and knobs, and make sure everything works with the wiring connections,” he said. “There’s a ton of complexity with assembling the dashboard and the interior. Engineering all of these small parts, these hundreds of little physical parts you see and touch, plus the electrical switches behind those that you don’t see.”
All those little costs add up. I asked Sam how much car companies were saving by relegating everything to a 17-inch touchscreen. Maybe $100 per car, he said, which is a lot when you consider how many cars BMW or Toyota or whoever sells; “In terms of engineering costs, it’s probably in the order of tens of millions that they're saving,” Sam said.
If you’re a bean counter at a car company, you’d see this as a justifiable homicide.
Suspect 2: Tesla
I had spent enough time over the years mourning the BMW of my youth, so I put it out of my mind. We moved on to Tesla.
“They really tried to position themselves as a tech company, the Apple of the auto business,” Sam said. “When they created the Model S, they wanted it to be seen as the iPhone of cars. And so, like Apple, they pushed to get rid of as many buttons and switches and controls for image reasons.”
Things got even more sparse and streamlined as the years went on for Tesla, and at least some drivers probably wondered how many buttons they ever actually needed.
But Musk is as ruthless a businessman as anyone who’s ever drawn breath, on our planet or some other one. You don’t get to be a giant killer like Tesla by wasting money on stuff you don’t need. That meant cutting costs deemed unnecessary, like buttons, Sam said. Now, Tesla has a market cap and profit margins every other car company dreams of. No wonder they all started going that route. While us drivers were seeing red over this stuff, Musk and the rest were seeing green.
Finally, you have over-the-air updates. If new features are coming to Tesla’s cars all of the time, how do you plan for buttons to make them work? It’s easier to put all of that into the screen instead.
However, “It’s potentially a negative from the user’s perspective,” Sam said. “The problem is you develop muscle memory when you own a vehicle for a while. When you start messing with that interface, that memory is lost… Tesla's particularly guilty of this change.”
I wanted to reach out to Tesla’s PR people to ask what happened, but a couple of years back Musk sent them all on vacation. A permanent vacation.
Suspect 3: Backup Cameras
I wanted to hear some theories from someone who really understands how people behave in cars. So I called up Kelly Funkhouser, the Manager of Vehicle Technology at Consumer Reports.
Her answer surprised me. She said that one big factor in the screen takeover was the requirement that all new cars have backup cameras, a law that’s been on the books since 2018.
“I would identify that as being a good thing for safety,” Kelly said. “The reason I’m sharing the blame with that is it led to revolutionizing the screen… and that’s escalated into the removal of buttons.”
She was right. Backup cameras are a good thing; nobody wants to run somebody over by accident when they’re getting out of a parking space. But once screens legally had to be in cars, Kelly said, all bets were off. Screens were the future, like them or not.
Of course, she called out Tesla here for the same reasons Sam did. But it was fascinating to me that a device meant to make cars safer could’ve led to more distractions in other ways.
Kelly also didn't mince words about the way things were going. “Using touchscreen-type interfaces is definitely not preferable in a vehicle setting,” Kelly said.
The car companies also want to mimic the experience you get with your smartphone, she said. It makes sense; if people are going to use Zoom or Netflix or TikTok in the car, what else are you going to model that after? But Kelly said that’s a dark path to go down.
“Phones and screens are intentionally designed to draw and keep your attention for as long as possible because then they can monetize that,” she said. Again, she was right on target; all these apps are specifically designed to be as addictive as any street drug.
“In cars, it should be exactly the opposite of that,” she said. “It should be not drawing your attention or causing a distraction. And tasks should be done as quickly as possible to get the driver's eyes back onto the road and away from the street.”
Some car companies still get this stuff right. Kelly said Honda does a good job with controls, and it even added the volume knob back in after everyone threw a fit. Mazda has said to hell with the touch screen entirely and makes drivers use a rotary knob for controls. Sam said he likes the buttons for vital controls on the Lucid Air, and that machine’s hardly old-school. I liked the Genesis GV60 I drove after the Polestar 2 for the same reason; it has buttons.
I knew that if you asked BMW, they’d say voice controls are the key to solving this riddle someday. Instead of fishing through screen menus, you tell the car what you want. And sure, these have gotten better over the years, now that they can connect to the cloud and don’t depend on a little processor somewhere in the car. But those can be plenty frustrating on their own, and as Kelly pointed out, nobody wants to talk to a machine just to ask it to turn the heater up. “They shouldn't be used as an excuse to have bad controls,” she said.
It all became clear to me then. It was a conspiracy and I saw where it was going. A world where you don’t drive your car or even own it, really. You simply ride in it, engaging with all these apps and features you have to pay monthly subscription fees for. A future where everything is permanent, recurring revenue, even if it wasn’t actually safe or even viable with current technology. All this stuff only really works when you’re just a passenger, not a driver.
I felt like I finally had my motive. But there was no clean, easy ending to my case. There was no scenario where I perp-walked Musk into a courtroom to stand trial for his crimes against controls, or where I got into a Mexican standoff with two software engineers who worked at BMW in the early 2000s. There was no resolution to be had here. This was just the way things are going.
But maybe there’s still a chance for people to push back, I thought. We got Honda to change their minds about the volume knob. Now, word on the street is the next iPhone could dump mechanical volume buttons entirely for little capacitative touch panels. The same thing Volkswagen and Cadillac had to walk back.
Let’s see millions of iPhone users try that. Maybe, just maybe, they’ll start asking for their buttons back, and our cars will follow. I’m nothing if not a sunny optimist.
Patrick George is a writer and editor in New York. The former Editor-in-Chief of Jalopnik and Editorial Director of The Drive, he covers the future of transportation.
