In the last ten years, car manufacturers have increasingly equipped the interior with touch technology, adding large screens instead of buttons. This gives our cars a futuristic look, sometimes like a space shuttle from a fantasy movie. But many drivers are abandoning this vision of the future and instead buying used cars because of the presence of physical buttons.
According to automotive columnist Dan Neal, all these new technologies are distracting drivers and making them feel less safe. In support of the latter, he cites a recommendation from the European New Car Assessment Program, which advises manufacturers to ditch touchscreens in favor of knobs and buttons if they want to get a better safety rating.
Today there is a whole cohort of “new car skeptics”, as Neal calls them, who do not accept the latest offerings from automakers. Coupled with the fact that new cars are quite expensive these days, the benefits of older models have caused the average age of a car in the US to jump to 12.6 years, according to a recent study by S&P Global Mobility.
In addition to the fact that touchscreens and other new technologies take attention away from the road, many believe that the new digital cars are literally tracking machines on wheels that will report you to insurance companies or even China.
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Others are of the opinion that new cars are not as reliable as old ones. Some motorists believe that all this luxury equipment and advanced driver assistance programs, which make many decisions for you, take away the pleasure of holding the steering wheel and driving the car, feeling that the wheels are obeying your commands.
But not everything is so bad. While there is a trend in some states and other parts of the world to ban the sale of new cars with an internal combustion engine, that doesn't mean electric car manufacturers won't buck the trend and start installing physical buttons and knobs in its electric cars.
Especially since European car regulators recently asked car manufacturers to bring back those analogue controls. Volkswagen has already responded to this call and will bring back the buttons. We can expect at least a few more companies from Europe to follow the same path.