Buttons are coming back, hurray!

The last time a British monarch was crowned, in 1953, much of life in the UK was much worse than it is today. The food was awful. Everyone smoked. The smog was thick and lethal.

But one thing they had in the 1950s were knobs, by which I mean buttons and dials and other physical protuberances that you could twist or push to control everything from a television to a car stereo.

I was reminded of this the other week when I rented a car where nearly every button had been replaced by a touchscreen so baffling I nearly ran off the road trying to change radio stations.

The good news is that, in some parts of the Machine industrybuttons are coming back.

Physical switches will do reported return in the new Porsche Cayenne SUVs and Volkswagen. Meanwhile, Hyundai and other button-enabled automakers say they will continue to steer clear of what critics have called “awful,” “stupid,” and “horrendous” touchscreens.

The less good news is that the forces that needlessly wiped out so many knobs are still very much alive, not least a slavish faith in the supremacy of the new technology. The question is, why? Why persist with devices that no one has asked for and that many drivers actively loathe, especially if they might be less secure?

One man who knows is Ian Callum, the award-winning British automotive designer who was Jaguar’s design director for 20 years until 2019.

Callum, who has also designed for Ford and Aston Martin, told me last week that the touchscreen advance began with sat nav screens more than 15 years ago. Tesla has amplified the trend by selling cars with little more than a giant tablet on the dashboard in a move that has intrigued many of his colleagues.

“A lot of marketers thought, ‘This is a great thing, this is modern technology and so we should follow suit.'”

Callum admires the simplicity and minimalism of Tesla’s design and is by no means a technophobe. But he’s spent a lot of time fighting what he says is “an enormous amount of pressure” to put most functions on touchscreens, including heating, air conditioning, ventilation, and more. “I held out until the time I retired.”

The cost explained some of the pressure he faced. Experts say screens can be much cheaper than many physical buttons. But Callum says that wasn’t the main driving factor.

“The real motivation was this visible technology that marketers really liked,” he says, adding that he was constantly being told to design for bigger and bigger screens.

His wariness of a touchscreen takeover stemmed from the knowledge that the tactile nature of physical switches is instinctively appealing, and you can easily operate a button without taking your eyes off the road.

This is the crucial point. It’s one thing if it takes a while to figure out how to navigate a touchscreen on a washing machine, but another thing if you’re on a busy highway.

Test last year by a Swedish car magazine shown why. They revealed that the driver of a 17-year-old Volvo with physical buttons that goes 68 mph took just 10 seconds to complete a series of tasks: turning on the radio, setting it to a certain station, turning on the defroster, and so on.

It took 23.5 seconds in a Tesla Model 3 and even longer in a BMW iX and other modern cars that have lost buttons to touchscreens.

It took the driver of an electric MG Marvel R nearly 45 seconds, when the car traveled 1,372 metres, more than four times the distance of the older Volvo. (All drivers took the time to get to know the cars.)

The touchscreen has its place of course. No smartphone could work without it. But that seat isn’t necessarily on a piece of heavy metal that moves at speed. Ask the US Navy. In 2019 he said he would return to physicist accelerates her destroyers after investigators discover a complex touchscreen system had contributed to a fatal collision off Singapore.

Humans are hardwired to appreciate new things, but we can also understand the risks. Social media has already shown us what generative AI is now threat to confirm: new technology is not always useful or even neutral. He’s not even always our friend.

pilita.clark@ft.com