They Killed the Button to Sell You the Screen
Sometime around 2017, every car in the world caught the same disease. Tesla had put everything — climate, wipers, the glovebox — behind one glass slab, called it the future, and the rest of the industry, terrified of looking like your dad's saloon, copied it wholesale. Within a few years the physical button was an endangered species.
It was never better. It was cheaper. “Making a touch button is cheaper, 50% cheaper,” Ferrari's CEO admitted this year — and Ferrari is one of the brands now backing away from screens. One sheet of glass replaces tooling, wiring and thirty discrete switches. “Minimalism” was a line item dressed up as a philosophy.
It was also measurably worse. A Swedish magazine timed drivers at 110 km/h doing four routine tasks. A 2005 Volvo with buttons: ten seconds. A touchscreen-heavy MG: forty-five — the difference between glancing past 300 metres of road and 1,400.
Now it's reversing in public. From 2026, Euro NCAP's new protocol pushes carmakers to put indicators, hazards, wipers, horn and the emergency call back on physical controls to earn top safety marks. It's an incentive, not a ban — but in this industry a lost star is a lost contract. Volkswagen's design chief was blunter than any safety body: “It's not a phone, it's a car… we will never, ever make this mistake any more.” Hyundai calls it, simply, a safety issue.
This is the whole argument of this magazine in one component. A trend spreads because it is cheap and it signals status — not because it works. It gets copied past the point of sense. Then reality, or a regulator, makes it walk back. Design isn't a march toward better. It's a series of memes, and some of them get selected against.
A button you can find without looking is not nostalgia. It is more advanced than a screen you have to stare at. The slab was never elegant. It was abdication — and the steering wheel is quietly filling up with buttons again.