I Understand Why the Buttons Left. I Still Want Them Back.

The first thing I noticed in the rental wasn't the screen. It was my right hand.

It went where it always goes, down and slightly right, expecting a dial that would click into place somewhere around 22 degrees. Instead it found glass. Flat, smooth, completely indifferent glass. I had to look down at a menu to turn the air conditioning up, and in that half second of looking away I understood the whole argument I'm about to make.

The screen won, and it won for good reasons

Tesla is the obvious example here, because Tesla is the one that committed hardest. One enormous screen in the middle, almost nothing else, and from that screen you can control effectively every system in the car. Recent Model 3s went further and moved the turn signals onto the steering wheel itself. No stalks. It is a genuinely bold interior, and plenty of people love it.

I want to be fair about why this happened, because it isn't laziness.

It's cheaper. A physical control is a mechanism. Someone has to design the detent in a volume knob, the swivel on an air vent, the tactile click of a seat heater button, and then someone has to manufacture it, test it, and stock the replacement part for a decade. A touchscreen replaces forty of those mechanisms with one part. That is an enormous saving across millions of units.

It's also more reliable, in a narrow sense. A digital button has no moving parts and no wear surface, so it doesn't develop the sticky, half-dead feel that a real button gets after 80,000 presses. Fewer warranty claims. Fewer trips to the service center for something as small as a broken vent tab.

And it's fixable after the fact. If customer feedback says a control is buried too deep in a menu, the manufacturer can push an over-the-air update and it simply moves. That's remarkable. Cars used to ship with their mistakes welded in place for the length of the model cycle. Now a bad interface decision can be a temporary one.

So I get it. The economics are sound, the flexibility is real, and the design language is clean. I still think it's gone too far.

The problem isn't the screen, it's what got dragged onto it

I don't need a knob for the ambient lighting theme. I don't need a switch for the phone pairing menu. Put all of that on the screen, bury it three levels deep, I'll never notice.

What I object to is the stuff that has no business being in software.

The glove box is the one that gets me. On several modern cars, opening the glove box means tapping through the touchscreen. That is a latch. It has been a solved problem since roughly 1935. Turning it into a menu item doesn't make it better, it makes it a thing I now have to look at a screen to do.

Air vents are the same story. Adjusting where the air is pointed used to be a two-second act you performed with your fingertips while watching the road. On a few cars now it's a submenu with directional arrows, and you are steering with one hand while nudging a virtual air stream with the other. Nobody asked for this.

The distinction I keep coming back to is muscle memory. A physical control can be operated blind. That's not nostalgia, that's the entire functional advantage. Glass gives you nothing back. You have to look, because there is nothing to feel.

It turns out I'm not the only one who noticed

This is the part I didn't expect. The regulators agree.

From January 2026, Euro NCAP's updated protocols make physical controls a scoring factor. To earn top safety marks, a car needs real buttons, levers, or stalks for a set of essential functions: turn signals, hazard lights, the horn, the windscreen wipers, and the emergency call system. Physical climate controls earn credit too. Bury those in a touchscreen and you lose points, no matter how well the car crashes.

The reasoning is blunt and hard to argue with. Two seconds of eyes off the road is roughly where crash risk starts climbing sharply, and a touchscreen task, by design, requires you to look. There's no version of tapping a featureless piece of glass that you can do by feel.

Some manufacturers were already walking it back before the rules landed. Volkswagen restored physical buttons for climate and volume after a long stretch of customer complaints about its touch sliders. Mercedes has been reintroducing hardware controls in places. Mazda more or less never left, and its rotary commander dial, which was mocked for years as behind the times, now looks like patience rather than stubbornness.

Everyone in the driver's seat is getting older

A founder at a company I was volunteering with made a point to me once that I haven't been able to shake. He said that within about a decade there will be more people over 60 than under it. I couldn't validate the number as he said it, and the real figures are a little different, but the direction is exactly right. The WHO projects that by 2030 one in six people worldwide will be 60 or older, and that people over 60 will outnumber children under 10. In the United States, adults over 65 are projected to outnumber under-18s for the first time around the same point.

Now consider who buys the cars that have these systems. It isn't usually someone three years into their career. It's someone with two decades of earning behind them, and often four decades of driving habits, and possibly reading glasses that are currently in the glove box they can't open.

An interface that assumes you grew up with an iPad is an interface that fails a growing share of its own customers. Voice control is the standard answer here, and I know people who genuinely rely on it and are happy. But voice is a workaround for a design problem, not a solution to it, and it fails exactly when you need it most: bad accent day, road noise, passenger talking, poor signal.

Intuitive doesn't mean minimal. Sometimes intuitive means a switch that's shaped like the thing it does.

The other computer, the one you can't see

There's a second version of this trend that gets less attention, and it's underneath the car rather than in front of you.

I'm not talking about autonomous driving. That's a different problem with different tradeoffs. I mean the layer of electronics in modern performance cars: stability programs, torque vectoring, adaptive dampers that can adjust suspension settings more than ten times per second, all of it quietly smoothing out what the car is doing before you're aware anything happened.

Technically it's astonishing. The lap times are not up for debate. But if someone buys a sports car, some part of what they're buying is the conversation between the car and the road, including the parts of that conversation where the car is a bit rude. Sanding off every imperfection also sands off the feedback. As an enthusiast, I want to feel the inconsistency and work around it. That's the activity. Removing it is removing the point.

And then something breaks

Every one of these systems is another thing that can fail, and a much more expensive thing to fix.

A stuck window switch is a twenty dollar part and an afternoon. A failed control module, a dead touchscreen, or an adaptive damper that has stopped talking to the rest of the car is a different category of repair entirely, often dealer-only, often four figures. The complexity that makes the car impressive at year one is the same complexity that makes it a liability at year eight.

This matters more than it sounds like it does, because it changes who can afford to own the car second-hand, and it changes whether the car survives long enough to be owned second-hand at all.

I'm not against any of it. I want manufacturers to build all of it. What I want alongside it is an option to decline: a trim without the active suspension, a layout with real climate controls, a version of the car that costs less and breaks less and asks less of my attention while I'm doing 70.

What I'm actually asking for

I'm not asking for the screen to go away. The screen is good. Maps belong on it, media belongs on it, the settings menu belongs on it, and over-the-air updates are a genuine improvement over the way cars used to age.

I'm asking for the ten or fifteen things I do without looking to stay where my hands already know to find them.

Give me back the volume knob. Give me a temperature dial with a detent. And give me a glove box that opens because I pulled a latch, not because I found the right icon.

If you drive something that gets this balance right, or something that gets it badly wrong, I'd like to hear about it. I'm still building my list.