By Daniel Stern, DVN Chief Editor
Every auto show, every new-model press release – indeed, every weekly edition of your DVN-Interior newsletter – is packed with adoring descriptions of the latest disruptive innovations in auto interior design. Minimalist interiors with no (terrible, horrible, no-good, very-bad, yucky, icky) buttons, knobs, switches, or dials. Touch-sensitive surfaces and shy-tech to erase even the visual remnants of discrete controls. Everything is controlled via the touchscreen(s), or by voice interface. Instrument clusters replaced by HUDs and AR-HUDs. The car not as transport machine, but as third living space, wellness cocoon, lifestyle accessory, entertainment pod. That’s the road we’re on, with our foot mashing the accelerator to the floor.
But is it the right road, headed in a good direction? Not necessarily, no, at least not for some significant percentage of drivers (er, ‘end users’). In a new article on TechRadar, two-decade-veteran EV correspondent Leon Poultney described being fed up with being force-fed unrequested innovations which, despite the hype, make life worse rather than better. The whole article is well worth a read, but certain bits of it really stand out on Poultney’s please-just-stop-it list:
• Virtual assistants (“more effort than simply pressing an easy-to-locate button. Shouting ‘Hey Renault, make it cooler in here’ takes longer than turning a dial, while asking XPeng’s little robot Xiao P to do anything is largely pointless; it mostly refuses”)
• Camera-and-display replacements for mirrors (“almost always in the most awkward, unnatural position inside the cabin, it’s impossible to judge distances properly and in low light or poor weather conditions, the image quality drops. A wing mirror, which can be easily heated, adjusted and cleaned, is a solution that has stood the test of time because it works”)
• Relaxation programs
• Capacitive and haptic buttons (“Accidentally brushing the steering wheel is sometimes enough to change a radio station and, in many cases, the functions on the touch-sensitive surface change, leaving the driver to take their eyes off the road and rummage around the dash for what used to be a simple one-button solution”)
Like Poultney; I am constantly annoyed by these kinds of features. Using them feels like being forced to take the long way around to get from A (knowing what I want) to B (getting what I want). Worse, I can’t actually get to B; I’m forced to settle for an approximation of something the car ‘thinks’ is B, because it has been programmed to act as though it knows better than I do what I really want. No amount of variable-color interior lighting, no amount of custom-crafted fragrance-wafting, no amount of friendly smiling from a virtual face soothes the infuriation resulting from a battle of wits with a machine programmed to win, no matter how wrong it is.
Poultney’s right: life was better when I could quickly and easily adjust how much air, of what temperature, was directed where, by using buttons, levers, and dials operable by feel and muscle memory, without having to think or talk or interact about it. That’s more than just an opinion, it’s a documented fact, so much so that in-car electronics constantly rank worst and most troublesome in JD Power studies, and Euro NCAP has adjusted their protocol to discourage a few of the worst control misconfigurations.
But voice controls will solve that, no? No. Just think about the last time you had to deal with an AI voice-driven call router: even your clearest pronunciation gets misinterpreted, and if you should happen to talk to someone in the room with you – or even cough or sneeze – where your call will get misrouted is up to the brainless AI. It’s customer scorn, not customer service. Such is the magnitude of this annoyance in the automotive arena that Alfa Romeo even based a commercial on it.
HUDs and AR-HUDs and full-width displays are great, though, right? They’ll keep the driver’s (er, user’s) eyes up on the road rather than down on the no-longer-existent instrument cluster, and that can only be good, right? Well…the devil is in the details. The other day, a car-enthusiast/early-adopter friend who’s been in the tech sector for years, knowing I work in this field, gave me his well-informed review of the 2025-model version of his somewhat older, same-model premium European-brand car, which he’d taken to the dealer for service; the current-model car was the loaner car, and he had it for several weeks’ worth of daily driving:
“This thing is a spaceship. There’s a separate, curved screen for the passenger, because I guess we must all be entertained like a 3-year-old now. Who asked for this? It is extremely reflective, and sculpted in such a way that the ambient always-animated reflections (because driving) are bonkers-level distracting, and constantly in my peripheral vision.
“Few buttons, many multifunction capacitive plates that depress. The dash feels less capable than five years prior. I really can’t get over that; the dashboard has become *less good*. When they introduced the fully-digital dashboard it was so much more useful, and configurable. You could get a full map, small map with ‘traditional’ tachometer and speedometer, change the ‘focus’ by making items bigger or smaller. Now none of that is really a thing. You have two exclusive pods that don’t overlap functions (example: you can’t see phone stuff and radio station info), and no map I can find. There is a speedometer HUD virtually projected over the hood…but I wear polarized sunglasses, and if I keep my head level, the speedo is invisible. As I bob my head to the left or right, it slightly phases in and out of existence enough to distract me.
“The parking warning is worse by far; the old version would beep progressively faster until it reached a continuous tone 6 inches away from an obstacle, in quadraphonic sound: if your obstacle was front left, you’d hear the beeps out of the front left speaker. Front center would be both front speakers, etc. Now it’s just some beeps, at a singular speed, until a continuous tone is reached, and no directional sound.
“The seats have better bolsters, and perforated leather, but overall not the quality of the older car.”
That’s a multifaceted, damning indictment of extreme user-hostility in what is supposed to be a pinnacle of automotive technology, technique, and design. He suspects the only part of his impression that matters to the decision-makers is the very first thing he said: “This thing is a spaceship”. That kind of reaction sells cars. After the buyer buys, who cares whether their day-to-day experience lives up to the initial wow-factor? It’s not like they have a choice of something else. Maybe they should…!
