Touchscreens on Your Dashboard? Who Needs ‘Em?

Give Automologist MAC good old-fashioned buttons…

Some while ago, I bemoaned the unstoppable march of the touchscreen in modern cars. Well, the car companies now seem to be agreeing with me, what with mounting evidence that touchscreens are a road safety hazard and their customers who hate using the non-tactile controls.

I have just been driving an Audi Q7 and using the in-car touchscreen—well, more like wrestling with it, which me and the wife have found to be a two-person minimum requirement to get it to do what we want when we are in motion. Porsche has announced a redesign of the Cayenne, which will still have a touchscreen, but owners will also be able to complete most of the functions using good old-fashioned buttons.

You may think this to be a small victory. After all, the touchscreen craze we have suffered for the past decade has already blurred the line between automaker and tech company. Of course, no manufacturer typifies this more than Tesla, with their giant tablet-like infotainment dashboard on which you can go gaming or to the cinema and, oh, turn on the windscreen washers.

Touchscreens are just far too distracting to be in a car, as far as I am concerned, and also, as multiple studies have clearly demonstrated, not really very good at controlling things. Buttons have a ‘feel’—they give you feedback so you can almost “braille” your way around a car. A touchscreen gives you no tactile feel of where you are touching, so you have to look down to achieve what you want to do.

In a way, it is a bit of a ‘no-brainer’. We know the use of a phone whilst driving is dangerous yet somewhat ironically, we do not apply the same logic or knowledge to the use of the touchscreen, which is of course essentially a tablet computer.

With a little luck, it seems that the car industry is starting to get the idea as well. Both Hyundai and Nissan are known to be adding buttons back into their vehicles and, of course, Volkswagen, which owns Porsche, dropped the idea of a touchscreen on the steering wheel after customers voiced their concerns.

Despite these small victories, don’t expect the touchscreen to disappear from new cars any time soon. We are, after all, talking about an industry that literally took half a century to reinvent the start button.