I drove a hire car on a holiday recently and spent the first ten minutes just trying to figure out how to adjust the air conditioning. No knobs. No buttons. Just a touchscreen that buried the climate controls three taps deep behind a menu that also, inexplicably, contained the seat massage settings.
It’s a small thing. But it’s the kind of small thing that tells you something has shifted in how car makers think about their product. They’re not designing for the person who needs to turn down the fan while merging onto the freeway. They’re designing for the person who spends twenty minutes in the showroom poking at the screen, impressed by how clean and minimal everything looks.
The car interior has become a consumer tech product. Whether that’s entirely a good thing is a different question.
Tesla Broke the Mould, Then Everyone Copied It
The honest starting point here is Tesla. Before Tesla, cars had software in the sense that your microwave has software. It was there, it did its job, and nobody thought about it much.
Tesla redesigned the vehicle from scratch as a software platform rather than a machine with software bolted on. Instead of dozens of independent control units from different suppliers, it built a centralised computing architecture it owned and controlled. That one decision made everything else possible: over-the-air updates, software-based feature upgrades, and the ability to push improvements to every car on the road simultaneously, exactly like Apple updating every iPhone overnight.
The results have been genuinely impressive. Tesla has pushed thousands of OTA updates since the Model S launched, improving acceleration, range, safety features, and the entire dashboard interface. A Tesla you bought three years ago is meaningfully different software today than the day you drove it off the lot. No other consumer product depreciates in price while improving in capability at the same rate.
Every other manufacturer has spent the years since trying to catch up. Most haven’t yet.
The Car Is Now a Platform
The phrase doing the rounds at CES 2026 was “software-defined vehicle.” The idea being that the hardware is increasingly just the shell, and what differentiates one car from another is the software running inside it.
Sony Honda’s AFEELA 1 illustrated this pretty clearly. The interior is dominated by a dual-screen digital dashboard running a 12.3-inch display alongside a 28.5-inch screen stretching pillar to pillar, designed partly for immersive entertainment and partly for PlayStation Remote Play. The car shipped with a conversational AI assistant built on Microsoft’s Azure OpenAI service, which Sony Honda called the “AFEELA Personal Agent.” Deliveries in California are scheduled to begin this year.
That’s a Sony product inside a Honda product. The car as platform, third-party software as the experience layer.
BMW is doing something similar from the other direction. Its Panoramic iDrive system, introduced in the Neue Klasse models, runs a head-up display across the base of the entire windscreen, a 3D secondary display on the glass itself, and a large language model powering the voice assistant. BMW’s pitch is that it’s combining physical controls with digital ones rather than eliminating buttons entirely, which is quietly an acknowledgment that the all-screen approach has limits.
Honda’s 0 Series went the opposite direction entirely. Five screens, a “Thin, Light, and Wise” design philosophy, and Honda’s own ASIMO operating system handling personalised driver settings and over-the-air updates. Level 3 autonomous driving capability is included, meaning the car can handle itself under specific conditions while you, theoretically, do something else.
The McKinsey Stat Worth Noting
A McKinsey survey found that 71% of automotive executives now believe vehicle interiors will become more crucial to buyers than exteriors. Only 38% said the same about exteriors.
That’s a significant reversal from how the industry has always operated. For most of automotive history, you bought a car because of how it looked and how it drove. The inside was functional. Comfortable, if you were lucky. But not the point.
Now the interior is increasingly where the differentiation lives, because once cars are quiet and smooth and computerised, the driving experience starts to converge. What’s left to compete on is the software, the screens, the voice assistant, and the ambient lighting that cycles through seventeen colours when you pull onto a motorway.
The Subscription Problem
Here’s where it gets genuinely uncomfortable.
Tesla has had subscription features for years. Full Self-Driving runs $99 USD per month in the US, or $12,000 as an outright purchase. You can subscribe to driver assistance features that are, technically, already present in the hardware you’ve already paid for. The feature exists in your car. You just need to keep paying to use it.
Other manufacturers have taken the same road. BMW offered a heated seat subscription in some markets before reversing course after the backlash. The underlying logic was the same: the hardware is there, the software just needs enabling, so why not charge for that separately?
This is where the smartphone analogy starts to break down. When Apple releases a new iOS feature, it doesn’t charge you extra because the hardware already supports it. You just get it. Car makers are trying to have it both ways: the recurring revenue model of software, but applied to physical hardware you’ve already bought outright.
Automakers are finding OTA updates harder than expected in practice too. What looks like a simple software push is actually a fundamental restructuring of how vehicles are designed and maintained across their entire lifecycle. Several manufacturers have quietly scaled back ambitious update programmes after discovering the operational complexity and cost involved. The gap between what Tesla does and what most carmakers can currently manage is still significant.
The Buttons Argument
There’s a real debate worth having about whether removing physical controls is actually progress.
Touchscreens are visually clean. They’re flexible. They let you do more things with fewer physical components. But they require you to look away from the road to use them, which a temperature dial or volume knob does not. Researchers and regulators have been pointing this out for years, and some manufacturers are starting to listen.
BMW’s decision to retain physical controls alongside its digital systems isn’t nostalgia. It’s an acknowledgment that some interactions don’t belong on a touchscreen. You shouldn’t need to navigate a menu to adjust the fan speed. That should be a button you can find by feel, without taking your eyes off the road.
The all-screen interior looks great in a showroom. It photographs beautifully. It gives the car a deliberately minimal aesthetic that reads as premium, even when the underlying execution is mediocre. But the minimalism is partly a design choice and partly a cost-saving measure. Removing buttons is cheaper than making good ones.
Where It’s All Heading
The direction is clear enough. Cars will increasingly behave like the other connected devices in your life. They’ll update overnight. They’ll learn your preferences. They’ll run third-party apps and support voice commands that actually understand natural language rather than requiring you to memorise specific phrases.
At CES 2026, the consensus view was that the cockpit is evolving from an infotainment screen into something more like a connected operating environment. Heads-up displays layering navigation over the actual road ahead. Voice systems powered by large language models that let you issue complex requests in one sentence. Personalised profiles that load your preferences when you sit down.
Most of this is genuinely useful. The best version of it disappears into the background and makes driving easier. The worst version is a 37-inch touchscreen that requires three taps to turn down the heat.
The car interior has always been the space where you spend time with the machine. Now the machine is spending time with you differently. Whether that changes driving for better or for worse probably depends on who’s designing the software, and whether they’ve ever actually tried to change the fan speed while doing 100 on the Monash.
