We Must Reject the Spread of Full-Dashboard Screens

The new electric Mercedes-Benz C-Class came out this week, and the design has a lot more personality than EV models the brand has trotted out in recent memory. It still has the silhouette of melted soap, but at least the face and taillights are interesting. The cockpit has some nice-looking details too, but most passengers will never notice after the car’s 39.1-inch display screen obliterates their occipital lobes.

Our guy Joel Feder was at the C400 4Matic Electric’s debut in person, and reported back that the interior “looks nearly identical to that of the electric GLC-Class.” The full-size dash-spanning 39.1-inch Hyperscreen is a high-tier option. Otherwise, you merely bask in the glow of the lesser “Superscreen” (three separate screens under one single piece of glass covering the 10.25-inch digital gauge cluster, 14-inch touchscreen infotainment system, and 14-inch passenger touchscreen).

Now, I mean no personal offense to those who worked on these vehicles—I’m sure a lot of time and energy was spent bringing the Hyperscreen to life. But as a critic, I must say, this is one of the most hateful car-design concepts I could possibly imagine.

There’s no tact, no grace, no depth, and no life to this high-saturation digital billboard you have to peer over to see the road from the front seats of this car. And those are not things that can be replicated with renderings. In fact, the more color and animations that get crammed into these interfaces, the less these cars resemble luxury products and the more they look like cheap toys.

It’s no big mystery why Mercedes and every other automaker are moving this way. A screen-based interface is far cheaper and easier to manufacture than a tactile one. A software-defined vehicle is easier to track and extract data from than a mechanical one. And think of all those recurring revenue opportunities with updates, apps, and DLCs. Finally, most NPC consumers hate cars but love their phones. So, yeah, of course, car companies are tripping over themselves to make driving feel more like scrolling.

The downside for us is that this sucks:

We lost wood grain, chrome, and the elegance of quality materials in exchange for… a giant picture of a wave.

The seats, steering wheel, and door handles inside the C400 actually look pretty cool, but they’re visually drowned out by the after-work happy hour aesthetic of the sensory-assaulting Hyperscreen.

I drive 40 to 60 new cars a year. Many of them have huge screens, and all of them have the same problem: A huge amount of the screen real estate is inevitably projecting nothing but illuminated dead space. From the images in Mercedes’ press release, this Hyperscreen looks like a case-in-point offender. Look at all the vast expanses of screensaver being served up here. There might be utility in some version of a 39.1-inch control panel, but this ain’t it. It’s just big for the sake of being big.

Passenger screens are especially egregious as far as useless ideas go. Why on Earth would I want to futz with a car’s limited operating system, fighting the seat belt and general road jostling, when I could just lose myself in the private personal screen (my phone) that’s in my hands every other moment of my life?

Anyway, I know we’re veering into old-man-yells-at-cloud territory here. But it’s my job to criticize, so I’ll do everything I can to convince automakers to move away from this race for who can distract their own drivers most effectively. Automotive UIs peaked about a decade ago—three-dimensional gauge clusters, phone projection screens about twice the size of iPhones. Physical buttons for all vehicular functions. That’s all we need to get back to.

Got a tip? Drop us a line at tips@thedrive.com.