The history behind in-car screens
Screens have taken over your life and now they’ve taken over your car. The takeover was swift, sneaky and relatively painless. Gigantic in-car screens are only becoming larger, taking up more and more dashboard real-estate. The trend seems unstoppable at the moment, but a turning point may be in sight.
First, how did this takeover happen?
A few automakers dabbled in cathode-ray tube screens and even digital LED displays in the 1970s and ’80s.
The 1979 Aston Martin Lagonda — an overly ambitious wedge-shaped sedan, which, adjusted for inflation, cost the equivalent of $350,000 Canadian dollars — had an elaborate array of LED screens to display dashboard information.
The screens were so expensive to make, in 1984 Aston replaced them with a trio of small Tv-style cathode-ray displays, which according to Hemmings magazine, were originally developed for the F-15 Eagle fighter jet.
Luc Donckerwolke, who began his career as a car designer in 1990, said digital displays for the radio and car-stereo equalizers became common in the ’80s.
“The first [screens] were for radio frequency,” said Luc Donckerwolke, who took the top design job at Genesis after leaving Bentley. “You went from a frequency on an analog bar to a frequency on a digital screen.” These screens were tiny, only an inch or two wide. By the mid ’80s they were displaying more information like fuel consumption and temperature.
Digital displays for the radio and car-stereo equalizers became common in the ’80s, he said.
“Screens became bigger and bigger, and then suddenly somebody put navigation information on it. And then from this [navigation] unit, screens suddenly exploded onto the whole architecture of the car’s interior.”
The 1987 Toyota Royal Crown, a big luxury sedan produced for the Japanese market, had a colour display for a CD-ROM based navigation system that relied on dead-reckoning. The 1990 Mazda Eunos Cosmo took a big step forward, using a Gps-based navigation system with in-dash colour display.
In 1986, the Buick Riviera was likely the first production car to have a touchscreen. It used a green-and-black cathode-ray tube display, but Buick discontinued it in 1990. At the time, Popular Mechanics wrote the touchscreen, “violates the First Commandment of ergonomics — you must take your eyes off the road to make any adjustments.”
With the 2017 Series, BMW introduced its idrive system, which featured a central (nontouch) screen mounted high, next to the instrument cluster. The screen became a hub of vehicle interaction.
“We had a pretty rudimentary navigation before that, but with [idrive] it really became more of a modern approach, with a larger screen and a new interface,” said Don Smith, technology product manager for BMW North America.
The original idea was to simplify and streamline control for a growing number of features.
“We recognized that more technology was coming into the vehicle, so to add more and more buttons is more of a distraction,” said Smith. “Idrive created an interface that allowed us to add more features into the vehicle with less distraction. There were both positive and negative reactions, but it was a leap . . . and you’ve seen a lot of automakers follow.”
Since then, in-car displays have only grown larger while touchscreens have become available on cars at all price points.
Tesla’s Model S was a bigscreen pioneer. The verticallyoriented 17-inch touchscreen controls nearly every function of the vehicle, including the sunroof and “ludicrous” speed mode.
In the upcoming Mercedes A-class, a sub-compact car, are two 10.5-inch screens side-by-side which stretch more than half-way across the cabin.
Audi’s mid-size A6 sedan features three screens: a 10.1-inch upper display, 8.6-inch lower display, and a 12.3-inch instrument cluster display. There are four screens, if you count the head-up display.
For reference, Apple’s ipad screens range from 7.9-inches to 12.9-inches.
The biggest screens are still reserved for high-end cars, but that’s changing fast. The all-new 2019 Ram pickup truck has a 12-inch central touchscreen that dominates the dashboard.
It doesn’t seem as through we’ve hit peak-screen yet either.
At Milan Design Week, Chinese startup Byton showed a near production-ready SUV concept which has a 49-inch wide screen running the entire width of the dashboard, plus another 10-inch screen on the steering wheel.
With bigger screens comes the potential for bigger distraction.
If it’s illegal to hold an ipad in a car because it’s too distracting, how is it safe to use an ipad-sized screen mounted on the dashboard?
Every automaker will tell you they go to great lengths to ensure these big screens are safe and not distracting to the driver. However, there’s no universal safety standard, and there’s no question these screens are more distraction than the old standard: an AM/FM radio.
A 2017 study by the University of Utah for the AAA Foundation for Traffic Safety found, “Invehicle Information Systems take drivers’ attention off the road for too long to be safe.”
“Certainly you have this competition between the real world behind the windscreen and the virtual world inside of screen,” said Luc Donckerwolke. “And this is exactly the problem: the distraction is getting big. If you’re talking about autonomous, great, but do you really want to be in an IMAX box? You’re going to be radiated with all those images . . . It’s going against, for me, tranquility,” he said.
The turning point, a move away from huge in-car screens, may in fact already be underway. Many of the technologies that could replace screens are still relatively young.
Sangyup Lee, who works alongside Donckerwolke in the Genesis design department, said touchscreens are a middle step on the way to a better user experience design (UX).
Holographic displays, or smart buttons that only appear when you need them are two possible solutions, Lee suggested. Augmented reality technology, like Microsoft Hololens, could alert drivers to potential hazards ahead by highlighting them in real-time. Audi and Cadillac already have touchscreens with rudimentary haptic feedback. BMW is working on better gesture control; just wave your hand in the air to scroll through menus and selection options. Several automakers are also adopting cloud-based voice recognition systems that use machine-learning to better understand natural language and carry out complex instructions.
“When the iphone came along,” Donckerwolke said, “I had a discussion with people saying, nobody wants a touchscreen in the car, nobody wants fingerprints all over the car. It’s 18 years later now. You have Echo, Alexa, Siri and the younger generation, they don’t type anymore, they talk.”
In another 18 years, we may be looking back wondering how voice control and in-car AI replaced all those big screens.
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