Engineering. Precision. Three taps to defrost your windshield.

Let me be clear up front: I've no ideological commitment to knobs. Knobs are not inherently superior to touchscreens in any principled sense. What I'm committed to is a simpler idea: a control should be easier to use than the thing it controls.

The great automotive touchscreen consolidation has produced vehicles where the climate control, the seat heaters, the mirror adjustment, and in some cases the windshield defroster all live inside a central display. One that requires the driver to look away from the road, navigate a menu, and tap a precise location on a sheet of glass. While the car is moving.

The knob never asked for any of this. The knob had a position that corresponded to an outcome. Your hand knew where it was without looking. Turning it produced the outcome immediately. In the true engineering sense of the word, the knob was elegant. The simplest solution to the problem it was solving.

The touchscreen is solving a different problem: how to make the interior look like the bridge of a spacecraft. That's a design ambition, and a legitimate one. But the solution to the design problem created a usability problem, and the people solving the design problem either didn't notice or decided it was acceptable. Highway safety researchers have documented the distraction cost for years. It's gotten pointed enough that Euro NCAP, the European safety rating organization, announced that starting in 2026, cars can't earn its top safety rating without physical controls for essential functions. The regulators are now legislating knobs.

The manufacturers, meanwhile, have mostly kept shipping touchscreens, occasionally restoring a single physical volume knob as a concession to the humans inside. And here's the kicker: the vehicles where this is most true are the ones most aggressively marketed on engineering and precision. Capability. Control. Performance. Every system obsessed over. Except the one the driver touches most.

Picture it. Snowstorm. Visibility dropping. Both hands needed. And somewhere in there, a driver hunting through a submenu for the defroster.

— Gary Hopkins

Founder and principal of Method, a strategic marketing practice.