The Only Thing Worse Than a Car Infotainment Screen Is Not Having One

From the May 2023 issue of Car and Driver.

Before today’s Screenozoic era, automobile “infotainment” mostly meant “stereo.” Modern systems, such as the 2023 BMW X7’s iDrive, let you do way more than just play tunes. Controlling the myriad functions is increasingly done through massive touchscreens, leading some car buyers to ask, “Can’t we just have a knob?” We gave our illustrator free rein to imagine a touchscreen-free cockpit for the X7 that still offers all the features we want in a modern car.

Let There Be Light

The 2023 X7 M60i’s interior lighting offers 15 color options on top of 11 brightness levels for the background and accent lighting. And you can adjust what the interior lights do when you change driving mode, receive a call, play music, or enter and exit the vehicle. Not to be outdone, the head-up display has 21 brightness levels and an equal number of settings for the image’s height and tilt; you also can select what content is included. That all makes for a lot of on/off switches in our illustration.

Controlling Your Comfort

Do you want to personalize the suspension, steering, and drivetrain? Try using toggles or dials. For the stereo, you’ll need some old-fashioned sliders to tweak the fader, balance, bass, and treble. Rotary knobs should work well for adjusting the temperature and fan speed in each of the three rows. We’re thinking buttons to switch on windshield and rear-window defrosting, plus a few more for air conditioning, seat heaters, various massage settings, and seat-position memory.

Hope You Like Orienteering

Large displays are ideal for navigation, which will become apparent the first time you unfold a paper map or stick a Post-it with handwritten landmarks to the console. Get ready to save your favorite destinations with a highlighter. Need turn-by-turn directions? Ask your passenger. And have them look out the sunroof too, because there’s no 360-degree camera view anymore.

Safety Somewhere

Eliminating the touchscreen and its menus would require individual switches for enabling forward-collision and rear-cross-traffic warnings, blindspot monitoring, rear-collision mitigation, and automatic lane changes. Then you’d need more—and maybe throw in some dials—for the parking distance control, speed-limit assist, and steering-wheel feedback.

Closing Thought

Suddenly the touchscreen isn’t looking so bad anymore, or at least it won’t once we clean off the fingerprints.