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. Touchscreens are simpler, cooler, and sometimes safer 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). Touchscreens were simpler. The stereo in this study “was criticized for its small buttons and poor layout,” whereas the touchscreen’s flexibility allowed the authors to offer a “rather simple interface.” Touchscreens are popular and cool. While gesture controls were clearly the focus of this paper, those were polarizing.

Touchscreens, however, were reliably accepted and enjoyed, and the stereo’s buttons were reliably unpopular. Similar studies like Large et al 2019 also find touchscreens more “pleasurable” and “exciting” to use than alternatives.

Perhaps this is an unfair comparison. After all, that is a particularly awful stereo (button 1 is pause, by the way). But, as both The Turn Signal and a friend of mine in the auto industry put it: cars today are complicated, and adding a button for every feature would be difficult. Touchscreens can dynamically adapt, buttons cannot. This is inherent to touchscreens and it proves that touchscreens must be better for at least some UX. This study illustrates just how much worse buttons can be. The touchscreen, in contrast, looked like this: Find the pause button Touchscreens are cheap Touchscreens can be better, but I don’t think that’s the primary reason car companies are choosing touchscreens. I think touchscreens are taking over the auto industry because they are cheaper than buttons. This isn’t a new idea. As a 2023 article from Hagerty puts it (emphasis added):

I spoke with leading experts in the field, from user-experience (UX) designers to manufacturer reps and analysts. Almost all of them singled out one factor in touchscreen proliferation: cost.

But in my experience, the cost argument gets lost amongst other justifications, and it’s easy to forget its importance. So let’s examine the claim a bit. Sandy Munro, an automotive engineer who deconstructs & audits cars (and detests buttons), estimates that the “redundancy” in some buttons in the 2022 Chevy Bolt EV costs $15 per car. Even the Hyundai Ioniq’s A/C controls, which are mostly capacitive, may cost around $50-60 per car. A Road & Track article estimates that button removal altogether saves “maybe $100 per car.” When carmakers might only make ~$6,000 profit per car, that’s a lot of money. In contrast, touchscreens are, quite literally, free.

All US cars have screens, since rear-view cameras have been mandatory here since 2018, and most of those will be touchscreens, since that’s how CarPlay and Android are typically controlled (and 98% of new US cars have CarPlay). Using that touchscreen to control your A/C costs nothing. CapitalOne AutoNavigator and that Road & Track article raise the same argument. Plus, touchscreens make it easy to sell subscriptions to features — or even remove existing ones—without any manufacturing changes. They can generate revenue.

If you’re not quite convinced, here’s the CEO of Ferrari on this exact point:

[…] Touch is something that is made by — to say, for — the supplier advantage. Making a touch button is cheaper than making — 50% cheaper[—]because if you have to make all these nice, beautiful, crafted buttons, you [need tooling].

Part reduction is cheap In short, touchscreens yield part reduction, which automakers will do anything for. Tesla is “very good” at reducing part count to reduce costs. Ford made the news for removing “about 2,400 parts” from their 2024 F-150, and their new EV platform reduces part count “by 20%”; this still may not be competitive with Chinese manufacturers. GM reduced part count on the Cadillac Lyriq by 24% in 2025. Toyota’s Area 35 program aims to reduce part counts and floor space usage by 35%. There are many reasons to cut parts: it lowers weight, improves EV battery life, streamlines aesthetics, shortens production time, and decreases logistical risk. But it also reduces cost. Sandy Munro on the cost of each additional part on the line:

At Ford, if we could get rid of — in the olden days — if we could get rid of a part number, we were looking at $75,000 just to have that part number there.

Touchscreens let manufacturers cut costs in the name of modernity. I’m sure automakers add touchscreens because they’re cool and because users like the simplicity. But I also suspect every internal meeting ends with, “and it’s cheaper!” I expect they’d do things differently if touchscreens were more expensive.

Touchscreens reduce parts. Each part costs money. Elon Musk:

The best part is no part. The best process is no process. It weighs nothing, costs nothing, can’t go wrong.

Capacitive buttons are cheap Consider capactive buttons. You know, the unpleasant buttons on your microwave, or alongside the shifter on your $100,000 2019 Porsche Cayenne: Just like my microwave! (via Autoweek) These are a great proxy for touchscreens: they are just as impossible to find and use blindly. In fact, they’re kinda worse — they can’t dynamically adapt like a touchscreen can.

But automakers still flock to them because they use fewer parts. Capacitive buttons can be made with basically any microcontroller (that your car already has) and a wire. Real buttons require… a button. And all of the bin space, trained assemblers, and testing that requires. All of that costs money. Cost is the first reason Franz von Holzhausen, Senior Design Executive at Tesla, gives for swapping some physical buttons for capacitive ones:

Yeah, capacitive’s a lot less parts — cheaper, smaller, we have less gaps to deal with.

Harder to find, unsatisfying to use, cheaper to make. I lean hard into von Holzhausen’s first point. When cars switch to capacitive buttons, I think one thing: cost. VW: part-reduction in action Let’s follow the evolution of touchscreens & capacitive buttons in the VW Golf. Their infotainment console had plenty of physical buttons in 2016 and 2017, surrounding a 6.5" touchscreen: 2017: physical buttons (via Autoweek) Then in 2018 (and earlier in Europe), VW enlarged the touchscreen to 8" and replaced the physical buttons with capacitive ones — with no other obvious changes:

2018: capactive buttons (via Erin Mill’s Auto Centre) It’s hard to believe VW made this capacitive swap for any reason but cost. Yes, it’s arguable that capacitive buttons were necessary to fit the larger touchscreen… except the 2016 Golf had an EU-only option that was also 8" and had physical buttons (see pg.

8). And, yes, perhaps there was a cool factor, but again, it was likely, "it looks cooler, and it’s cheaper!" I doubt VW would have done this if the change made the car more expensive. Contrast this with 2020’s (Euro-only?) refresh, which brought a completely-redesigned dashboard & infotainment panel. Zooming out: 2020: new dashboard, no more volume knobs (via Car & Driver) 2020’s refresh is arguably a “rule of cool” change: it seems like a substantial R&D investment, not something that was instantly cheaper. But again, they include (what strike me as) strong concessions to cost — almost no A/C controls, capacitive temperature sliders, and not even a volume knob. By the time it reached the US in 2022, they also replaced the physical buttons on the steering wheel with capacitive ones. Even more cost-cutting: 2022: capacitive buttons on the steering wheel (via Car & Driver via VW) I’m not trying to pick on VW here. Every car company is making these changes. And it’s a bit hard to follow these changes precisely, since trims vary by country. But these changes illustrate the pattern: every design change is made within a culture of cost-cutting. When VW replaced physical buttons with capacitive ones — on the steering wheel and touchscreen — they were almost certainly cost-cutting. Both changes were basically part-swaps. They didn’t change large swathes of the car, and they probably didn’t take much R&D spending. They even used the same labels & icons! Neither change offers tangible driving benefits: instead, they impede haptic feedback, making the car measurably harder to use, slower, and more error-prone (see this 2019 paper on haptics). The only other benefit I can see is that they might look cool. But, if I may? They don’t. And in that context, it seems like VW’s 2020 redesign afforded them an excuse to delete several controls (physical A/C controls and volume knobs), shielded by the allure of a new UI. I wasn’t in the room where it happened; I can’t say what really motivated these swaps.