Some mistakes happen in a moment. A quick lapse of judgment, an ill-advised decision at 3 a.m., an email sent to Reply All. Others take years, unfolding in slow motion as warning signs are ignored, reasonable objections are silenced, and people in boardrooms nod sagely at their own catastrophic short-sightedness. The mass adoption of touchscreen-only controls in cars falls into the latter category.
Volkswagen has now admitted the error of its ways, vowing that physical buttons are back for good. “We will never, ever make this mistake again,” said their Chief of Design, as if they’d been tricked into it by some mysterious force, rather than actively championing the change.
It raises a bigger question. How did it happen in the first place? How did entire teams of HMI experts, human factors specialists, and UX researchers – people whose literal job is to stop this kind of nonsense – allow it to happen? Were they asleep at the wheel, or were they simply drowned out by design teams infatuated with minimalism and finance teams rubbing their hands at the thought of fewer moving parts?
The answer, of course, is all of the above.
The cult of minimalism, confusing more screens with innovation
At some point in the last decade, car designers decided that buttons were offensive. They cluttered up dashboards. They broke the sainted, uninterrupted lines of modern interior design. Worse, they weren’t futuristic. The ideal was a sleek, unbroken surface, like an iPhone, only larger and more expensive to replace if it b0rked.
This obsession with minimalism went unchecked because it looked fantastic in concept renders. Screens glowing with digital promise, smooth and uninterrupted by the ugliness of function. Never mind that the only reason buttons existed in the first place was that they worked. Never mind that people could reach for a dial without taking their eyes off the road, adjusting the temperature by feel alone, a level of usability that no amount of software updates could replicate.
Rob Tannen, a human-centred design specialist, summed it up recently on LinkedIn: “Fundamentally, the problem with touch-based interfaces is that they aren’t touch-based at all, because they need us to look when using them.” In a moving vehicle, that isn’t just bad design, it’s dangerous.
The significant point here though is that this was not a revelation. UX researchers have known it for years. The car industry had, in fact, already worked this out in the 1980s, which is why it spent decades refining tactile, mechanical controls that allowed drivers to focus on the road and remain at arm’s length. But in their rush to be seen as technologically advanced, OEMs decided to throw that institutional knowledge in the bin.
The accountant’s dream, confusing cost-cutting with innovation
Touchscreens are cheap. They replace dozens of mechanical components with a single panel of glass, a bit of wiring, and some off-the-shelf software. For car manufacturers looking to shave costs wherever possible, it was an irresistible proposition. Instead of painstakingly engineered switches, they could throw everything onto a digital interface and call it an upgrade.
Charles Mauro, a veteran in human factors (HF), called this for what it was: “We only have touch screens in vehicles because such interfaces provide a marketing and sales boost to new cars by lending the impression of ‘high-tech’ and modern feature sets. From HF’s perspective, they remain highly impoverished interfaces.”
In other words, it wasn’t about what was best for the driver. It was about what looked best in a press release.
But removing physical controls isn’t just an inconvenience, it’s actively worse. Simple tasks that once took a split-second, a quick flick of a switch, a half-turn of a dial, became a (painstaking) exercise in menu navigation. Climate control settings buried in submenus. Hazard lights requiring two taps and a prayer. Windscreen wipers accessed through a system designed by someone who apparently lives in the desert (i.e. Tesla).
The real irony? Some of the most expensive, high-end cars, the ones that supposedly define luxury, ended up with the worst interfaces. A £120,000 SUV with a laggy touchscreen that freezes in winter. A luxury saloon where temperature adjustments require you to gesture-swipe on visuals of air vents. The tech-driven future, they said.
The Silicon Valley delusion
Blame Tesla. When the upstart EV brand introduced its monolithic, screen-heavy interior, traditional carmakers panicked. If Tesla was doing it, surely that was the future?
OEMs, desperate not to look outdated, decided they had to copy the software-defined model. Everything should be digital, infinitely updatable, infinitely customisable. Who needs buttons when you can have a dynamically shifting interface?
This was a critical misunderstanding of why Tesla got away with it. Tesla’s approach worked (to an extent) because the entire car was designed around it. But for traditional manufacturers, retrofitting touchscreen interfaces onto vehicles that had been developed with physical controls made for a UX disaster.
The dream was that everything would be intuitive. The reality was that even basic tasks became a chore. Ford, in an attempt to embrace this brave new world, introduced ever larger screens into its cars. The result, as The Verge put it, was predictable: “Surveys have shown growing customer dissatisfaction with in-car tech, especially touchscreen software. People are overwhelmed, and Ford’s response seems to be to add more screens, which is not a guarantee for success.”
The data problem
There’s a particularly dangerous kind of UX research that looks at how often people use controls and decides that if something isn’t used frequently, it should be buried.
This is how Tesla ended up hiding the wiper controls inside a screen menu. Their reasoning? “People don’t use them often.” A brilliant insight in California, somewhat less so if you live somewhere with rain.
This logic led to cars where drivers had to dig through menus for basic functions. The entire point of a car interface is that when you do need something, it should be immediately accessible and context really, really matters. Nobody wants to enter a submenu for demisters when their windscreen is fogging up at 70mph. Auto Express’s report is well worth a read here.
The Return of Sanity
Volkswagen’s public climbdown marks a turning point. Hyundai has followed suit. The backlash has been strong enough that manufacturers are now scrambling to put buttons back in their cars, pretending that they always intended to.
But it wasn’t customer complaints that forced the change. It wasn’t common sense prevailing. It was regulators.
Euro NCAP has mandated that, from 2026, cars will need physical buttons for key functions to qualify for a five-star safety rating. The industry had spent a decade ignoring drivers, but when the threat of lower safety scores loomed, suddenly they rediscovered their enthusiasm for good UX.
Where Do We Go From Here?
The great touchscreen experiment is over. Car interiors are moving back towards hybrid interfaces, a balance of digital and physical that prioritises usability over showroom aesthetics. Manufacturers are rethinking software-defined controls, realising that while over-the-air updates are useful, core functions need permanent, intuitive access.
Most importantly, UX research in automotive needs to be taken seriously again and their voices heard right up the product development and engineering chain. Not just as a box-ticking exercise, but as a genuine guide for what works.
For now, though, it’s a relief to know that the button is making a comeback. It turns out that some of the most futuristic technology in modern cars was there all along.
AI disclosure: Some article research was supported by AI, themes consolidated, article excerpt was AI generated. Article copy entirely author’s own.
John Gibbard 