I have a touch screen in my car, but pretty much all the functions can be accessed by buttons in the center console or steering wheel.
this post was submitted on 17 Jul 2026
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Touchscreens in cars are a really stupid idea.
Touchscreen only is a terrible idea. I think it's fine if you have play, pause, volume and mute buttons and have to use the touchscreen to enter your Spotify login details.
What if we got around login details or just used some sort of audio input?
Let's not give them ideas....
I hate mine.
In case you don't yet know, touchscreens are mostly cost saving measures. They're incredibly cheaper than physical controls, and so every company wants them.
There's also quite a bit of reliable data on touchscreens negatively impacting drivers' performance, as well as substantially increasing the likelihood of crashes. Which only the EU and China seem to care about.
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S2590198226000382
Welcome to 2026, where China actually looks at academic research, and introduces safety laws, while the US disregards anything but billionaires' profits.
In my opinion, touchscreens in cars are very cool, but only for navigation and minor features such as radio or ambient lighting controls. I know a lot of people might crucify me for calling radio a minor feature, but it's not critical for the driver's ability to drive safely.
Yep. You can memorize where knobs and physical buttons are, because its a field of tactile feedback that you can navigate by pure touch, and once you are familiar with it, without even having to think about it.
but a touch screen? Theres no tactile feedback, no nothing. Every time you have to do anything, you have to take your eyes off the road to read screens and navigate menus.
Honestly, I wish they'd make touchscreen interfaces illegal for everything but privately owned tablets/phones. It has no business being the way a driver interacts with a car, or a customer interacts with a store, or anything else.
Just to add to what others are saying, I live in canada, where we have to drive with gloves. All meaningful controls need to be chunky physical features.
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I wish I didn't have to look at or touch my phone for navigation. No clue why, with modern tech, I can't communicate with my phone verbally star trek style to ask questions about upcoming turns, alternate routes, adding stops, etc.
My previous employer upgraded everyone's work phones early this year. Some sort of MOTO phone. Im dispatched, this phone is given to me for navigation. This thing was so overloaded with ads that I couldn't use Google maps for a single trip without giant full screen ads popping up for some MOTO shit. It's the actual phone manufacturer shoving ads up while a navigation app has the screen forced on.
I'm no phone dev, but there's no way the phone manufacturer who modifies the boot image and packs 20 uninstallable apps DOESNT know when the phone is being used for navigation. I would say the opposite, I bet android makes it very clear why the screen is stuck on. And the phone manufacturer says hey let's advertise right now, it's the perfect time.
How many deaths can be directly tied to this advertising campaign. Like so wildly directly, I'm not sure how advertising can more directly and immediately cause death like this. There's a MOTO dev somewhere that should be looking at hard time
Good solutions are actually possible (and available!), but for some reason almost no car companies adopt them. Or they do for a single model, never to touch it again.
I know at least one model of Skoda Fabia has a feature, where you can connect your phone (via cable or bluetooth), and it'll take the phone's Google maps and display them on the car's bigger screen.
Not a perfect solution, but infinitely better than just using a phone or the car's most likely outdated navigation. Entirely possible, but very rare.
Wait, how come touchscreens are cheaper than buttons?
It's generally much cheaper to produce a tablet than it is to produce 30 physical buttons and knobs. Fewer wires are required too, and the same setup may be easily reused across many models.
https://www.bimmer-mag.com/touchscreen-vs-buttons/#Cost-Saving_Measures
Don’t forget, in a Tesla, you even need to use the iPad to adjust where the AC vents are pointing!
That's hilarious but I don't know if you're joking
Not a joke.
Also needed to open the glove compartment. Not joking.
Yeah but it's not untrue.
And to put the car in drive or reverse
There is always the option to not buy a Tesla
But you don't have choice what other people are driving around you.
Bwahahahaha
It's even funnier when you need to reboot the car while driving, because the browser crashed and the interface became unresponsive
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These to a fucking tea. And cause it's a flat touch screen you can't even feel your way around to the correct settings while looking at the road.
I'll happily have no screen and old analog controls, and yes, I realise I sound like an old man yelling at clouds.
Its understandably more expensive for the car companies - they have to make the machine that makes the parts for a retro dash, then install them - but fuck the car companies, this is about safety and ease of use.
Having repaired some of the knobs on my dash, I assure you, they are less expensive than a TV. The AC knob is like 2 pieces of plastic and some bike brake style tension cables that hook to a leuvre somewhere inside. A touch screen is going to be a tabled screen and a motor on that leuvre etc.
Granted, I have a cheap little car.
I remember years ago seeing a video about a company that was supposably developing tactile touchscreens. There was a layer underneath the LCD layer that could be puffed out with some kind of fluid to form bumps where the buttons were shown. Nothing has come of this, unsurprisingly.
It really only makes sense for the map. I have a 2020 and it has the touchscreen but besides the map which you touch once before you start driving, everything else, AC, speaker volume is a simple knob.
On some Teslas, even the gear selection is done through the touchscreen. Fucking awful design.
No. Way.
How is that legal?
Oh wait, it's not a manual of course...
Yeah, you aren't changing gears while driving, you're switching between forward and backward, so you're already stationary.
Unrelated, but my elderly uncle drove a minivan with an automatic transmission that he drove like it was a manual. He would start from every stop by putting the shifter into "1" and then "2" and then "D" and then back to "N" when he stopped. He was a former Navy pilot (A-1 Skyraiders) and I guess he just couldn't accept the loss of control that goes with an automatic. It doesn't seem like this could possibly have been good for the transmission, but I dunno.
Just like on my own EV car with a knob for backwards and forwards (and neutral) 😆 I was tired when posting that comment lol
Oh wait, it's not a manual of course...
It's a modern EV... It doesn't even have a transmission.
All you're picking is Park, Drive, Neutral, or Reverse.
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there was a wife of a billionaire who drowned by accidentally driving a tesla into a pond on her estate, because of the touchscreen gearshifting problem. I'll try and look up a source of anyone wants it
My favorite thing is the cop cars that have an actual fucking laptop set up next to the driver. Nothing distracting about that, no sir.
Hence why I bought a car with, according to all the reviewers, a "dated interior". Just what I wanted: lots of buttons and knobs! There is an 'infotainment' touch screen, but I can ignore that.
If Elon decreed that the Tesla iPad would now also give the driver, say, a prediction market gambling feature or X-rated AI chatbot or something, there’s nothing any government would do to stop him*, because after all he is a visionary genius and was a trillionaire and you can’t argue with the invisible hand of the free market.
* the US and UK would wave it through, because you can’t hold up the inevitability of the future. The EU would grumble, though might fold under the threat of tariffs.
so true bestie
Depending on your country, it might also make you liable. Not every judiciary system is like that.
In the UK that would be a distracted driving charge.
Which is a hefty 6 penalty points, half way to getting disqualified from driving.
One of the things which attracted me to the Chevy Equinox I bought: it has the basic climate controls as buttons:
Heat, fan, temp, Ac, everything but heated seats
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