What's The Point Of Passenger Screens?

Photo: Audi

Recently, there’s been a trend in fancier vehicles: Passenger screens, where the person riding shotgun gets their own display. What should that screen actually show or do? Doesn’t matter! More screens, more better, right?

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Well, as it turns out: No. Buyers don’t like them, yet companies are insistent on putting them in more and more cars anyway. More screens is emphatically not more better, which brings up an obvious question: What’s even the point of passenger screens?

A car’s center screen is, definitionally, centered — within fairly equal reach of the driver and passenger. Many of them are tilted towards the driver, often more angled than you realize until you ride shotgun in your own car, but precious few are so turned away from the right side of the car that they’re entirely unusable from it.

In many iterations of the passenger screen, it simply displays what’s happening on the main screen just inches to its left. Different apps in the foreground, perhaps — maybe one’s doing music and another navigation — but it’s all tied into the same computer. Nothing accessible on the right screen is inaccessible on the left. Your passenger isn’t watching a YouTube video while you drive.

Which, of course, wouldn’t be better. We’re all isolated enough by tech, there’s no reason to build that isolation further into the literal design of your car. Being trapped with your passenger is a chance to hang out and connect, but the passenger screen means there’s just one less thing you two have to share.

Is the point of a passenger screen to isolate a car’s front seats, ensure the two need have nothing in common? Is it to avoid those occasional accidental moments where both of a car’s occupants reach for the same screen at the same time? Or is it just to say in the press release that there’s one more screen in there, as a way to add “value” that may not really add much at all?