Are proper physical buttons making a comeback in cars?

For years we’ve been told by carmakers that drivers prefer controls on a touchscreen, because they’re ‘familiar with smartphones’. But now, like old king Canute failed to do, we’re turning back the tide.

Sir Jony Ive, who at Apple pioneered bringing touchscreen interfaces into our hands, has been engaged to work on a car, the new Ferrari Luce EV. He told Top Gear’s Jason Barlow: “Practically and functionally, a large touchscreen doesn’t work in a car. That’s incontrovertible.” So the Luce has a beautiful and useable mix of physical and screen-based instruments and controls.

Why doesn’t an all-screen interface work in a car? I’ve been banging on for years that it’s about the environment. An iPad is designed to enchant your gaze; you stare at it as you interact. A car interface has to reject your gaze. You’re meant to be looking out of the windscreen, stupid. So in a car you need things your fingers can find with a glance.

Ive’s and Ross Lovegrove’s work on the Luce illustrates something else, too. Physical stuff is where the sense of quality lies. Done well it’s tactile and jewel-like and gorgeous. See also the instruments on the Bugatti Tourbillon, like a six-figure mechanical watch.

Audi’s design chief Massimo Frascella was dissed by his Mercedes oppo Gorden Wagener for the Concept C’s small screen. Frascella unrepentantly explained his thinking to me: “This mix of digital and analogue, the tactility, the metal parts, the perception of quality is important for Audi. We talk about the Audi click.”

Even the Chinese, who along with Tesla have been villains-in-chief in all this, appear to be getting it. The facelifted MG4 acquired some extra metal buttons and rocker switches. Elsewhere the Cupra Born and Golf GTI have swapped ghastly touch-sensitive steering wheel buttons (too easily brushed when you’re turning) for actual switches that, ironically, were reserved for the cars closer to basecamp in the group’s price elevation. Ferrari will now retrofit your Roma’s capacitive steering wheel controls with the real buttons from the newer Amalfi.

Obviously your car has too many functions these days for everything to have its own button. There’d be hundreds. Imagine a 1990 BMW 850i… squared. But climate controls and ADAS, at the very least, need them.