The REAL reason new cars have massive screens instead of buttons

Опубликовано 4 декабря 2025, 17:20

We’re gonna tell some truths today. You know how every new car has a big old screen (or three) inside? Well, that’s not about building you a better car—it’s really just a flashy trick to save automakers money and charge you more. And we’re pretty sick of it.

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Whether you want one or not, screens in new cars are inescapable in 2025. A massive touchscreen is the focal point of a car’s interior, housing critical controls like the audio system, HVAC, headlights, drive modes, and even glovebox releases. And now there’s usually a second screen right in front of you in place of the gauge cluster, or a third screen for the front seat passenger to play with. Some cars even have pillar-to-pillar screens spanning the entire dashboard. Meanwhile, buttons have become a critically endangered species.

Why? It wasn’t always like this, and no one really asked for it, but here we are. And the truth is that while the effort to put screens in cars started out like most technological advances—car companies want to offer the latest and greatest stuff so you’ll shell out tens of thousands of dollars—the way screens have taken over comes down to one thing. Money.

Automakers had been dreaming about putting screens in cars since the 1970s, but it was a swirl of surprising factors in manufacturing, society, and the global economy over the last 25 years that got us to where we are today. From the opening up of GPS for civilian use in the 1990s, to the introduction of backup cameras and the plummeting cost of manufacturing LCD screens in the 2000s, to the relentless cost cutting prompted by the Great Recession, to the rise of smartphones and Tesla and the Chinese market in the 2010s, to the 2020 pandemic and massive investments made in EVs, to the recent surge of subscription-based features… that is how we went from the BMW 7 Series having a single 6.5-inch screen on the dash in 2001 to a 31-inch TV fold down from the roof in 2025.

Screens started out as bit of flash that indicated a car was on the cutting edge of tech. But the real secret is that over that time, they became a cheaper way to design a car’s interior than filling it with a swath of buttons and analog gauges. Buttons are surprisingly expensive for automakers to build at scale, when you consider the cost of materials, the mechanisms, the wiring, and the need to accommodate a huge range of features and functions across different trims, models, and markets.

As prices for literally everything rose—especially since 2020—companies leaned harder and harder on them to save money and differentiate their products. Stuffing a car full of software is an easy way to make it seem like you’re getting more value, because a car can do more than ever now, and routing all that complexity through a screen makes it cheaper to produce.

And when screen fatigue sets in, as happens with all new technology, what can you do? Add a second screen, or a third, or just make the entire dashboard a screen. It looks like progress, but it’s actually just giving you more touch points to spend your money on features and subscriptions and data connections that are necessary to actually get the promised benefits of big screens.

Produced by → instagram.com/joeyrassool
Hosted by → instagram.com/kylecheromcha

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0:00 Intro
1:09 The root of all screens
4:11 How screens got cheaper in the 2000s
5:57 Enter Tesla and smartphones in the 2010s
8:38 Screen fatigue and subscriptions
12:38 The backlash
14:16 The return of buttons?