The current age infotainment systems are being given more control than needed!
Large Infotainment Screens – Do We Need Them?
Cars of the recent model years seem to all have one thing in common, infotainment screens. Displays have become more and more predominant in our lives, and our cars are no exception. Infotainment systems went from being a sweet feature in high-end cars to a feature that can make or break a car’s verdict.
Like every other trend, this one has been taken up by manufacturers as an intense mission to stand out amongst the competition. This is necessarily not a bad thing, as competition drives innovation. But sometimes the line can be crossed between a useful feature and a distracting gimmick. Let us see how.
Infotainment Systems – A Compliment To Your Drive
The advantages are quite obvious. With a screen, everything is easier to read and do! The GUI of these systems is fluid and intuitive to use. In good examples, they even feel like an extension of our mobile phones! Plus, this design of screens everywhere falls in line with the current trend of screens everywhere (even a refrigerator!).
Also, integration with widely used services like Google Maps through Android Auto/Apple CarPlay keeps you away from your phone while driving. Using such services is quite inevitable in this day and age because of their usefulness. So, using them through your car and not your phone keeps you focused only on what’s important, the road.
Properly made digital gauge clusters take this to another level, as they put the required information right in your line of sight. Clever features like 360-degree camera view would not be possible if it weren’t for such screens present in cars. Overall, properly made and sized infotainment systems truly elevate your driving experience, and compliment it!
When Infotainment Systems Become Big
Honestly, we will have to thank Tesla for this revelation. Since the debut of that massive 17-inch infotainment system in 2012 via the Model S, everybody took a page from Tesla’s book and started making bigger and bigger infotainment systems. Nowadays, the minimum size of these systems itself is 7-inches, that too in budget cars. Move up the order, and this size keeps increasing. This is not a bad thing until you realise what these companies do with all of that extra screen real estate.
Distractions
These huge screens take the space of buttons and dials and replace them with icons. First of all these on-screen “buttons” are a pain to hit while driving, and they start becoming distracting. Want to increase the volume? Software slider! Need to change the temperature? Software slider! In some cases, even headlight controls are placed under a menu in the infotainment.
Things like steering mounted audio controls exist so that the driver does not need to take their eyes off the road to change things. Adding all such innovative features only to make the climate control a page in the infotainment system is a step backward in terms of intuitiveness.
But do note that in some examples this has been somewhat taken care of with haptic response. Screens scream for attention, something you can’t afford to give when you have to focus on the road. Again, when they are properly sized, they stay out of the way when needed, but the big ones don’t.
Cost
Apart from the obvious, think about something like replacement. If your climate control or stereo buttons fail, it’s a cheap replacement. But the same cannot be said for the enormous infotainment system that is in these cars. A large sheet of glass tacked at the centre of the interior of a car is much easier to accidentally break than buttons and dials that they replace.
Once the infotainment breaks, many of the car controls are now inaccessible, so an immediate replacement is needed. And this replacement comes at a price, a high price at that! It almost seems like large infotainment systems are becoming a business strategy to make people pay more visits to the service centres, and buy their newer models more often.
Why? Because the very nature of digital technology is that they get updated very quickly. So what might look like cutting edge today will look very old in a few years down the line, such is, the pace of updates. While a smartphone or a laptop might last a maximum of 7 years or so, cars can last a very long time if proper care is taken (even 20-30 years!). It’s easy to make a car feel futuristic or outdated with these infotainment systems. And the bigger they are, the better they kindle this feeling.
Value
The latest infotainment systems take up a large portion of the dashboard of the cars that roll out today. When these systems eventually become outdated and slow, suddenly the entire car feels old. This can easily depreciate the value of these cars.
These systems are starting to define the interior of the car and the car itself. So it’s easy to see why they can define the price tag the vehicle in the used market. Cars already face a very high depreciation rate. The last thing we need is elements that make this phenomenon worse. But as of now proper software updates and high-end hardware does seem to mitigate this issue to some extent.
Bugatti, with their Chiron, did not want to include an infotainment system even if they could, as they knew it would date their car. But they did give into in this trend, as digital information displays were included in the gauge cluster due to their usefulness. They knew that their cars are going to be preserved for a long time.
Conclusion
Designs of interiors need to look good, obviously, but the looks should not take precedence over function and usability. Now I’m not saying we should have stuck with buttons and dials. I’m saying that these infotainment systems of the current day and age are becoming cinema screens instead of a useful tool.
Coming to the question. Do we really need large infotainment displays? In the current generation, I don’t think so. It’s important to look beyond the cool factor of any feature, and actually, see what it brings to the table. And in this case, all I can see is another large sheet of glass one has to worry about not breaking. The extra screen real estate is not needed as of now and only adds inconvenience.
But part of the journey to new technology is the inconvenience caused by the switch. The industry, especially higher up the price spectrum wants to switch from buttons to displays. Workarounds are already being developed like voice assistance, gestures, etc. to make them easier to use. It will be interesting to watch how companies make them better to use while driving.
