Why your next car might not have any touchscreens at all
Also, an ode to ice racing
Hello again to you all from home base. It’s been a final week without flights before I'm back on the wing soon. It's been a lovely break, but duty calls. Over the next month and change, I'll be driving some incredible cars in incredible places and visiting an amazing event I've wanted to attend for years.
But there'll be time to talk about that later. This past week, I cruised down to BMW North America's striking new headquarters in NJ to check out the 2026 version of the BMW iX, the electric SUV that's loved by everyone who can get past the awkward first impression it makes and actually take one for a drive.
I say that confidently because, of course, I own one of the things. Or lease it, anyway. In fact, I drove our iX down to BMW NA HQ to meet its successor, the new iX, which might be seen as a somewhat cruel thing if you're the sort who humanizes cars as I often do. Don't worry, I still love our big white SUV, but as to my thoughts on the new iX, sadly, I can't share those just yet.
Here's what I can tell you about.
A dashboard without screens?
There's a small-scale rebellion against touchscreens going on, and let me tell you, I'm here for it. Don't label me a Luddite, I've been evaluating the quality and responsiveness of touchscreens since they required a firm press from a pointy stylus to activate. They certainly have a place in our lives, and they have a place in our cars, too, but I thoroughly reject the notion that our cars should be built around them.
Touchscreens can provide a great user experience, but they'll never provide a great driving experience.
With that in mind, it's great to see the pendulum swinging away from the Tesla-led mission to turn every knob and button into pixels and menus. It's a slight shift, too early to call it a movement yet, but I take encouragement from the BYOD (Bring Your Own Device) approach of the new Slate, plus the more subtle integration of displays into more driver-oriented machines.
What might that trend bring us if we look a little further down the road, say a decade or so? In my latest piece for MotorTrend, I gather some technologies in the works that might just make our next cars' interiors a lot more warm and welcoming without depriving us of access to all the features and capabilities those machines will surely offer.
An ode to ice racing
Get me talking about motorsports, and it probably won't be long before I wax lyrical about the joys of ice racing. It's something I'm pretty passionate about and something I'm perhaps too quick to bring up in conversation, but I maintain it's the most fun thing you can do on four wheels.
The problem is, it's getting harder to do. I've been lucky to compete on the ice for about two decades now, but I'm still a youngling compared to many members of the group that I've raced with. That club has been around since the '60s, but lately, finding lakes with enough ice to host races has been all but impossible. We haven't had an event in years.
We're far from alone. Even professional ice racing series have shuttered as the world’s winters, and the frozen lakes they formerly produced, become less predictable. My trip up to a winter weather testing ground in northern Sweden earlier this year was met with open water and unseasonably early rain. It's a sad state of things to say the least.
That's all from yours truly this week. I'm soon headed down south to drive Hyundai's new electric three-row SUV and see whether it's the battery-powered family hauler the market needs. More details on that, plus a bunch of other cars and even spaceships, to come.
Until then, enjoy some time to yourselves today.
Found this on a “cars without screens” deep dive, and I appreciate the insider knowledge that we may have a future without the large and distracting screens in all cars. Until then, I just may hold onto my 2007 manual Jetta, unless of course, a truly compact truck returns to the market.
I'd add that another advantage of BYOD is that the device is always up to date. I doubt that the touchscreen interface in any vehicle will be updated past about 5 years or so. Any companion apps will eventually be unsupported or stop working. But my phone will always be up to date.