To be eligible for the maximum safety rating […], cars will need to use buttons, dials, or stalks for hazard warning lights, indicators, windscreen wipers, SOS calls, and the horn.
There should be no doubt this makes perfect sense but, just in case, let me mention some passages from User Friendly: How the Hidden Rules of Design Are Changing the Way We Live, Work, and Play by Cliff Kuang and Robert Fabricant.
During WWII, the American Air Force faced an alarming number of plane crashes. Initially, these were attributed to pilot error or poor training. But Lieutenant Paul Fitts and psychologist Alphonse Chapanis noticed a pattern: many crashes occurred because pilots were mistakenly retracting the landing gear when they intended to adjust the wing flaps.
They were right next to each other and looked exactly the same, and while pilots brought the airplane to the ground it was shockingly easy to retract the landing gear when they meant to lit the laps.
Between 1940 and 1942, this design flaw led to 457 crashes. Chapanis proposed a simple yet effective solution: shape-coding the knobs. By making the landing gear control feel different from the wing flap control, pilots could distinguish them by touch alone, reducing errors significantly.
The lesson here is clear: when people need to make quick, high-stakes decisions, tactile feedback matters. Despite all the historical knowledge we have, car manufacturers are increasingly moving in the opposite direction, replacing intuitive, physical controls with touchscreens. If this principle is now a legal requirement in all airplanes, why shouldn’t it be the same for cars?
Moreover, an echo of the idea remains in the way that buttons all around you —on keyboards, remote controls, in cars, even digital ones on your smartphone—are shaped differently so that you can know them by touch or at a glance.
Touchscreens demand visual attention. You can’t feel for a volume knob or adjust the AC without taking your eyes off the road. Apart from being extremely annoying, it’s a serious safety risk.
We are still surrounded by two other foundational solutions that Chapanis came up with. The first, inspired by pilots like the one haplessly wheeling his plane around on the tarmac, was putting all the instruments in a plane into standardised positions. The second: making sure that controls move in a “natural” direction.
Standardised placement and natural control movements reduce cognitive load. And both are being ignored by car manufacturers chasing minimalist dashboards.
I can’t wait for this to happen.