DESIGNERS LIKE
TO SAY THAT
SCREENIFICATION
FREES UP
INTERIOR SPACE.
36 March 2019 _ PopularMechanics.comDistracted Much?
New cars’ “infotainment systems” are a mess of
dangerous touch screens and inscrutable icons.
More knobs, please.DRIVING
/ BY EZRA DYER /↓ OWNER’S MANUAL
W
HEN I’M IN CHARGE of a car company, we’re going to have
one strict rule about interior design: Make it so it doesn’t
cause you to crash the car. You’d think this would already
be in effect everywhere, but no. Ever since the arrival of
the iPhone, car designers have aspired to replicate that
sleek, glassy aesthetic within
the cabin. And it never works,
because you tend to look at a phone while you use
it. In a car, you have this other thing you should
be looking at, out there, beyond the high-resolu-
tion panoramic screen that separates your face
from the splattering june bugs. If a designer
came to me with a bunch of screens, touch
pads, or voice-activated haptic-palm-pad ges-
ture controls, I’d trigger a trapdoor that caused
the offender to plummet down into the driver’s
seat of a Cadillac fitted with the first version of
the CUE system—which incorporated a motion
sensor that would actually change the screen
as your finger approached it. And I’d trigger
my trapdoor by turning a knob. I wouldn’t even
have to look at it.
Knobs are great that way. So are buttons and
shift levers. I know: booorrr-ing! Yo u r mom’s
Grand Caravan had a shift lever, right? She
didn’t have to look at it or think about it, and if someone borrowed her sweet
Iacocca-mobile, they’d know how to use it, too. What fun is that when you
can turn shifting gears into a convoluted game
of Bop It? Designers like to say that novel elec-
tronic shifters—rows of buttons, pull switches,
or self-centering nubs—are all about freeing up
interior space. But reinventing the shifter is really
about impressing your friends with how novel and
futuristic your car is. Well, sure. They don’t have
to live with it.
The same goes for the screenification of
everything. Screens can work if the display is suf-
ficiently huge that you don’t need a jeweler’s loupe to set your HVAC mode.
But even a Tesla Model S and its interior JumboTron is lacking compared
to a system with built-in hard points. Give me a screen, sure, but also give
me some buttons and knobs, stuff I don’t have to look at while I’m driving
70 mph. Trucks tend to get this right. I’ve driven the new Ram 1500, ChevySilverado, and GMC Sierra, and all of them have vol-
ume and tuner knobs flanking a touch screen. So does
the new Genesis G70, the Toyota Corolla Hatchback,
and, while I’m at it, my 2010 Lincoln MKT EcoBoost,
which was built the year before Ford wandered into
its touch-pad adventures. The MKT lost its knobs
and hard buttons in 2013, replaced by touch pads
that survive to this day. I fail to see the improvement.
I entertain the notion that I’m just an old fuddy who
likes to bounce between Pop2K (channel 10) and Pit-
bull (13) on Sirius XM without taking my eyes off the
road. Maybe I’m calcified in my thinking and unable
to appreciate the brilliance of these innovative inter-
faces. Why, I remember the early 2000s, when BMW
first introduced iDrive, which controlled a dash screen
via a central knob and a
few menu buttons. Every
adult seemed to hate it,
but I suspected that more
agile minds would have no
problem. So I took a 645Ci
to a Boston grade school
and challenged a class of
sixth-graders to complete
a series of tasks without
having anything explained
to them. On average, the
kids took about 30 seconds
to bounce from the home
menu to the media screen,
change the station, and
navigate back. I’d say that’s
the sign of an intuitive sys-
tem, given that they started
with zero knowledge of how
anything worked. And yet, grown-ups despised iDrive.
I couldn’t convince anyone otherwise.
To get a younger-than-me perspective on all this,
I talked to 25-year-old Nascar driver Bubba Wallace
Jr., who is working on a campaign against distracted
driving. Do pointlessly complicated interfaces annoy
him, too? “I have a Tahoe,” he said. “I think I’ve lis-
tened to broadcast radio once. Every other time, I set
up a playlist on my phone before I start driving. I’m
not changing stations.”
That’s interesting. Maybe everyone doesn’t prize
a tuner knob the way I do. But even if you’re patched
into CarPlay at all times, you’ll still want to adjust
the volume now and then. For that, Wallace Jr.’s
Tahoe has a knob. He didn’t mention that, because
he probably doesn’t even think about it—it just works.
I rest my case.LEXUS
RE M OTE TOUCH
Like standing on
a bowling ball.VW GOLF
CarPlay plus
hard buttons.TESLA MODEL 3
One tablet,
only vital info.RAM 1500
No-look knobs,
big screen.ACURA RLX
Are two displays
really better?CADILLAC CT6
18 buttons on the
wheel, touch-pad-
everything dash.NOT REALLY DISTRACTING REALLY DISTRACTINGHEIGHT^ OF^
INSANITY