07-05-2025
Are You Sick of Giant Touchscreens Taking Over Car Interiors?
Over the past decade or so, the rise of touchscreen devices—your smartphones, tablets, and their ilk—has been amazing to watch. In less than a generation's time, they've gone from digital novelty cradled by the tech elite to daily necessity required for everyday existence.
As they've been rapidly taking over our lives, they've just as quickly been taking over the interiors of our cars. What once was the territory of endless knobs and buttons is now the domain of the capacitive touch display. In some, they literally span door to door in a periphery-dominating pixel flex.
This game of digital one-upmanship is driven by a sizeable portion of modern buyers who want more pixels and more screens, a generation that sees physical buttons as vestigial signs of simpler times. But lately, a growing and increasingly vocal number of car shoppers are rising up to say enough, and even safety organizations are getting behind the call for physical controls.
Is there a solution? Can we maintain the progress of in-car technology but dial down the overwhelming presence of screens? Or are display-averse shoppers stuck driving the same old rides until the end of time? There's reason for optimism, and here are some of the technologies giving us hope.
Hidden Screens
Sit yourself inside a Bentley Continental GT, and you'll immediately notice the sumptuous leather upholstery as it cradles your backside. The plush carpet is so thick, you'll want to take off your shoes, and the woodgrain trim just has to be the real thing.
What you probably won't notice, though, is a giant touchscreen in your face. That's because the Continental GT swings its touchscreen out of view when the vehicle is off. And, if you like, it can disappear while you're driving, too.
While various manufacturers have been iterating on this concept for years, we're seeing something of a resurgence of interest in hidden displays. The 277-mph Bugatti Tourbillon, for example, features an infotainment display that only appears when needed.
The stealthy displays of tomorrow's cars might even be hidden in plain sight. Continental has demonstrated a technology it calls "In2Visible," which effectively enables displays that blend into the dashboard and completely disappear when not needed. They can even shine through a simulated woodgrain surface.
Look for this tech to appear in high-end road cars soon, but there's another display-free solution coming soon to something far more attainable.
Bring Your Own Devices
You've probably heard of BYOB parties, where whatever beer you'll be drinking is whatever beer you were bringing. There's a similar development on the technology side called BYOD: Bring Your Own Device.
BYOD has traditionally referred to technologies that allow employees at corporations and the like to securely access company data on private devices. The idea is that instead of having one phone for work and a second for personal use, you can have one phone that does both.
Now, thanks to Slate, we're seeing the same concept applied to cars.
The Slate is the $27,000, two-passenger truck that promises to reboot what we think a modern car should be. The company has pared everything down to the bare essentials, creating a little truck that not only doesn't have a touchscreen—it doesn't even have a sound system.
Yes, there's a screen in the Slate, but it's just a little thing behind the steering wheel, forming the gauge cluster and acting as the government-mandated rearview display. If you want more, you'll need to connect your phone or tablet and mount it on the dashboard yourself.
That means you can have as large or as small a display as you prefer, and you can then mount a Bluetooth speaker or the like in your car to listen to some tunes while driving. It's all very DIY and basic but in keeping with the Slate's concept.
The best part of a BYOD-style implementation? If you're feeling like a little distraction-free motoring and just want to enjoy the drive, you can pop that phone back into your pocket.
Next-Gen Head-Up Displays
The humble head-up display has been beaming information back at you off of the windshield since the Oldsmobile Cutlass Supreme Indianapolis 500 Pace Car Edition pioneered the tech in 1988. Since then, HUDs have gotten bigger, brighter, and far more packed with information, but fundamentally, they've always done the same basic thing.
That's about to change with a new generation of HUDs that will span the entire windshield and, eventually, cover it from top to bottom.
With its upcoming Neue Klasse models, BMW will be the first to bring something like this to market. Neue Klasse will be the foundation for the company's next-generation EVs, and while the new electric drivetrain is the big story, the Panoramic iDrive system that dominates the interior is certainly worth getting excited about.
It'll run from pillar to pillar, providing a customizable view of everything from speed and navigation information to media playback and even details about your next destination. But it won't be the vehicle's only display device.
No, BMW isn't getting rid of the screen on the dashboard for Neue Klasse. The iDrive Panoramic system is augmented by a 17.9-inch, rhomboid-shaped display that stands out from the dashboard in the conventional place. Still, it's easy to imagine a future where the on-dash display is no longer needed.
Screens on Your Face
Both Apple and Meta (Facebook's parent company) have spent billions of dollars researching ways to get better and brighter displays that are small and light enough to mount onto goggles you can wear.
The results—Vision Pro from Apple and the latest Meta Quest—are truly impressive, able to virtually teleport you away to a foreign land or bring you back to reality at the touch of a button. Video gaming is still far and away the most promising application, but plenty of auto manufacturers have ideas about taking this technology to the road.
Audi was one of the first, partnering with Holoride for a back-seat solution intended to keep your kids content in their own little virtual world. Yes, if your first thought was how violently ill you'd get wearing a headset like this in a moving car, you're not alone, but someone's come up with a fix.
Holoride relies on a virtual horizon and other in-game visual cues to give your brain an indicator of what's happening outside in the real world. Elements in the games shift and move along with the motion of the car, keeping your stomach settled without ruining the impression that you're somewhere else. The tech works remarkably well.
But it's going to take something more advanced to bring that technology to the front seats and eventually eliminate in-car displays. BMW and Mini have shown off mixed-reality solutions, using the integrated cameras in a high-end Varjo headset to add virtual elements on top of a view of the real world.
The effect is compelling, and there's potential here, but we're still a long way from technology like this being proven safe to wear while you're driving. At least until we get cars that can properly drive themselves. (No, your Tesla doesn't count.)
Retinal Projection
The final step in this evolution of in-car displays, the technology that could finally banish all screens from your interior forever, might just be something called retinal homing. It's a form of retinal projection, which uses various technologies to paint images directly onto the retina of your eyes.
Retinal projection is a real technology today, and it works, but modern implementations often require that you wear bulky glasses on your face, which fully block or at least partially obscure your view. That's not ideal when you're driving a car.
Retinal homing is another evolution of this technology, where those laser projectors could track your eyes in real time and do so from some distance. Eventually, this could mean you wouldn't need to look through a lens or stare into a fixed projector to see free-floating, three-dimensional images.
A 2023 concept created by researchers at the University of Tokyo used a robotic arm that tracked the position of a user's eyes. The arm carried dual laser projectors and bounced the projected light from a retroreflective surface onto the user's retina. The result? A stereoscopic, holographic image without the headgear.
This technology is far from reality, and, as far as we know, nobody has yet discussed its use in an automotive application. But, if perfected, it could allow you to have all the digital information you could ever desire without a single screen in sight.
