I’m having a hard time thinking of a new U.S.-market car you can buy without at least a small dashboard screen in 2024. Heck, some cars don’t have anything on the dash but a screen. But I know I’m not the only one who’s tired of looking at lit-up displays all day every day. When I’m driving a car with an easy way to turn off the center display, I almost always make use of that function. Anybody else?
After almost a year with our BMW F31 wagon, I finally bothered to try night driving with the dashboard screen off. The designers of this car clearly didn’t plan for the screen to be switched off often—the toggle is like three menus deep off the home screen. But once I found it, the aesthetic was really quite pleasant. The simple orange gauges and remaining dash illumination created that classic slightly Halloweeny BMW evening ambiance I enjoy in my 20-year-old E46.
I used to have a third-gen Acura TL, a 2005, which was the era where in-dash navigation still felt pretty fancy, and Bluetooth could be used for phone calls but not music. The screen on that thing was exceptional—large, but it didn’t dominate the dash design, nicely integrated with the cockpit, and interestingly, you had to tap “OK” on a “watch the road” warning screen which would appear as soon as you turned the car on. If you declined to hit the button, the screen would simply go blank after a short period.
It’s so funny to think how fundamentally different that approach is to how modern human-machine interfaces are. Like, the assumption was that you would only use the screen if you needed it, whereas today automakers look for excuses to use a screen because they’re cheap. Well, that and I’m pretty sure car designers know most people are more obsessed with their phones than their cars—so dashboard screens have been serving to bridge the gap.
The pervasiveness of screens in cars (and life in general … looking at you, McDonald’s, and every store with self-checkout) bums me out and I complain about it often. Sometimes people tell me I can just turn the car screen off, but for me, how inclined I am to do that really depends on the car. Some are so much more convenient than others.
Now I’m curious to hear from you, dear readers—not so much whether or not you like screens, but specifically, if you make use of their off switch with much regularity.
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