You know it, we know it: cars are increasingly less about feel and more about how many inches of screen real estate can be fitted inside. But fitting more displays inside a car doesn’t necessarily mean it’s easier to use.
It might be impressive, but it can get old (and tiring) fast. So here we are, asking you fine people what’s electric car on sale today has the best user experience. Do you have to go through five menus on the screen just to disable an annoying feature, only to have it re-activated when you start the car again? That sucks, and we want to know about it.
(Welcome to Live Wire, where we draw on the knowledge and opinions of the InsideEVs reader community. Keep it smart and keep it civil in the comments.)
Earlier today, Porsche’s head of style, Michael Mauer, said that the German luxury sports car maker will steer clear of tacky, tablet-like displays glued on top of the dashboard. That’s not to say future Porsche vehicles won’t have any screens–that would be a bit too analog for what is considered a luxury brand. Instead, the company will stick to smaller displays and, probably more importantly, physical buttons.
On the other side of the spectrum, there are companies like Tesla, which have gone all minimalistic, transferring as many physical buttons as possible into a single large screen to keep costs down. At the same time, however, Tesla has one of the best digital user interfaces in the industry, but that doesn’t mean that it’s the best user experience overall–we kind of miss those column stalks and some kind of gauge cluster would be useful.
Mercedes-Benz has the admittedly visually impressive Hyperscreen, which–in simple English–means that the whole dash is made of displays. Rivian went for a more conventional approach, with a central infotainment screen and a driver’s instrument cluster. And for future models, it's adding these multi-purpose steering wheel dials that click, rotate, swivel and actuate in other ways for different functions.
But it doesn’t matter how many diagonal inches there are or how fancy the ambient lighting is. We want to know from you which is the best to use on a day-to-day basis. So head over to the comments section and have at it.
