Car touchscreens are cheap, not good

Touchscreens are simple, flexible, and seem ill-suited to controlling 4,000lb machines.

But the auto industry fawns after them: every manufacturer seems to want in, at every price point. They replace knobs & dials with colossal touchscreens and bedeck every remaining surface in plastic capacitive buttons.

I never felt qualified to comment. Maybe I was missing something. Touchscreens seemed dangerous, but crash deaths are down by over 40% since 1975 (although they have increased since 2010). Reddit discusses this multiple times a week without ever reaching consensus. Plus, people still buy these buttonless cars. Perhaps I was a luddite; other people could buy their touchscreens and I would stick to my Mazdas, with their rotary knobs.

And then Mazda unveiled their new touchscreen-forward 2026 CX-5.

So I looked into it, and I’m convinced: even though touchscreens are better in some ways, car manufacturers flock to them because touchscreens are cheap to assemble & install. There are many reasons to use touchscreens, but they are all dwarfed by a culture of cost-cutting. Car touchscreens are cheap, not good.

There are many good reasons to replace car buttons with touchscreens. It would be disingenuous to argue otherwise. You can sum this up in one image:

Find the pause button

Even to the most stalwart button enthusiast (👋), it should be unsurprising that touchscreens outperformed this stereo in a 2008 paper:

Touchscreens were safer in some ways , although less safe in others. Participants made significantly fewer driving errors while using touchscreens and took significantly less time to accomplish tasks, although they had insignificantly more long glances and fewer interactions done with no glances at all (see Appendix: are touchscreens unsafe? for further analysis).

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