A touchscreen is great on your smartphone. In fact, unless you still hanker after a Blackberry keypad, it’s hard to imagine life without one. It’s the same in cars too, with touchscreen infotainment dominating today’s dashboards. However, there seems to be a definite pushback against too much touchscreen tech in vehicles.
It was a key point being made at the third Car Design Event 2025 event held at Munich’s Drivers & Business Club this week. Users were all too ready to voice their concerns to designers about just how fed up they are with much that lives within the omnipresent infotainment screen of modern cars. Sure, there’s a place for a touchscreen, but folks want good old buttons and switches too.
The recently unveiled Slate Truck pickup is a prime example of this desire for minimalism. Look at the dashboard and there’s no touchscreen, just a mount for your own screen of choice. It makes total sense because so many drivers just want to get behind the wheel, plug in their own system and use that, instead of picking through endless infotainment menus.
Simplicity could be the secret of Slate’s success and, if they can bring it to market at around $20,000 dollars that will certainly help. The other key factor is that by using our own smartphones or tablets as the ‘infotainment’ system, buyers can keep their vehicles up to date. Over-the-air software updates are all well and good, but many of the screens in even some of the best electric cars are going to look mighty tired and outdated in just a few years’ time.
Slate’s approach is refreshing, even if we’re not going to be able to get this Jeff Bezos-backed funky little pickup truck here in the UK for now. It starts out basic, but the buyer can create their own vehicle thanks to several core options that turn it from a pickup into an SUV. From there, the Slate can be further customised with myriad personalisation options. A neat idea.
Alongside Slate, user interface and experience (UI/UX) topics were heavily featured during presentations from BMW, General Motors, Genesis, Hyundai, Kia, Lamborghini, Pagani, Volkswagen and even the reborn Yugo brand (remember them?). And, even if you’ve had your fill of touchscreen infotainment systems, it is perhaps BMW that could be about to deliver the most refreshing variation on this theme.
The forthcoming BMW Panoramic iDrive, which we tried for ourselves a while ago, is a fantastic amalgam of a Panoramic Vision dashboard layout, which actually runs along the complete length of the lower windscreen, supplemented by a head-up display and, yes, a touchscreen oriented toward the driver.
However, the icing on the cake is the way the new multifunction steering wheel offers lots of control right there at your fingertips. BMW says ‘hands on the wheel, eyes on the road’, which definitely sounds like the way to go and could make for the perfect compromise when it appears in its Neue Klasse vehicles that will arrive later this year.
The Car Design Event is the brainchild of automotive journalists Jens Meiners and Des Sellmeijer. It’s a unique mix of car design experts, suppliers and educational institutions plus media and influencers.
And, one thing was very apparent throughout, it might be time designers start listening to consumers and bring a few more buttons back into the mix of their future creations.
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