Carmakers like VW are bringing back buttons because drivers loathe all the touch screens.

You don’t see a lot of good news about road safety in the United States. “But really, it’s the cheapest way possible of building an interior.” Although they look fancy, Farah said that carmakers can purchase screens for less than $50, making them significantly less expensive than tactile controls. In a 2022 New York Times opinion piece titled “Touch Screens in Cars Solve a Problem We Didn’t Have,” Jay Caspian Kang wrote, “I can think of no better way of describing the frustration of the modern consumer than buying a car with a feature that makes you less safe, doesn’t improve your driving experience in any meaningful way, saves the manufacturer money and gets sold to you as some necessary advance in connectivity.” Other stories railing against car touch screens ran in newspapers like the Los Angeles Times and tech sites like Tom’s Guide, which declared, “I’m sorry, but touchscreens in cars are stupid.” Carmakers have noticed—and they’ve begun to change their tune. “As they reject the screens, it could over time be seen as luxurious to have buttons instead.” Volkswagen, which owns Porsche, has acknowledged that customer feedback led it to drop its much-loathed steering wheel touch controls that were nearly impossible to use without looking down from the windshield, and executives have suggested adding more buttons to its future EVs. “I think people are going to get tired of these big black screens,” Alfonso Albaisa, Nissan’s senior VP for global design, told Green Car Reports.