Here’s a look inside a six figure Land Rover. You’ll notice it looks a lot like what you can see inside a five figure Kia. No slam intended – as far as the Kia.
Ten years ago, smartphone emulating LCD instrument panels were still pretty uncommon in new vehicles. You mostly saw them in expensive vehicles. It was when you think about it a lot like the way that smartphones were initially uncommon. Many people didn’t have them as recently as about ten years ago. Today, almost everyone has one – including most kids. Similarly, almost every new car now comes standard with or is available with an LCD instrument panel. Many of them – such as the one in the ’27 Kia Seltos I recently reviewed – are as big as and look the same as the screens you used to only see in the most expensive, top-of-the-line luxury-brand vehicles.
I think this is a problem for the luxury brands. 
If you’re not getting something that not everyone else gets, what are you getting? That used to be the main reason for spending what it cost to buy a luxury brand vehicle.
The problem with LCD displays is they’re – fundamentally – cheap. Inexpensive, to be precise. That’s why it’s a problem for luxury-brands. Kia can install a display that looks like and functions like the displays inside six-figure luxury-brand vehicles. This greatly takes away from the exclusivity of the same thing inside a six-figure luxury brand vehicle.
There is also no meaningful way to make one of these displays appreciably “fancier.” Bigger was – briefly – a way to put some distance between the displays found in Kias (and other mass-market brands of cars) and the luxury-brand cars. Now everyone’s got a big screen – or soon will – because there is nothing inherently expensive about a bigger screen. Have you priced flatscreen TeeVees lately? The small ones are almost free and the huge ones cost what the small ones did just a few years ago. You can face them with glass rather than plastic (which VW has done) or you can make them curved (as in this Land Rover I’m driving right now) but at the end of the day, it’s still a screen and they’re all pretty much the same thing.
I think it’s a mistake to put them in luxury-brand vehicles at this point because it’s no longer a selling point. They can only be made so much bigger.
Going back to smartphone-emulating, which is responsible for this mess. I have a six-year-old unit I got at Wal-Mart for about $50. At a glance, it looks very much like a $1,000 unit. Pretty much the same size. Glass-faced. It glows when you swipe it on. It takes pictures and videos – granted, they are not as high-res, but I’m not Steven Spielberg – and it makes calls and sends texts just as well as the $1,000 unit does. That’s why I’m happy not spending $1,000 on a phone that’s basically the same thing as my $50 phone. I realize there are people who want to spend $1,000 on a phone because it’s not a $50 phone. That’s their prerogative, of course. It just seems a little silly to me.
Bugatti – which makes pretty much the most exclusive vehicles extant – is veering away from screens. The Tourbillon hasn’t got them. It has what an expensive luxury-brand car ought to have, which is something that does not look cheap. It has intricate, chronograph watch-emulating actual instruments. The italics are to emphasize the difference between a chronograph watch – a Rolex – and a watch you bought at the Dollar Store (or Wal-Mart). Both tell time – and the Rolex, with its intricate mechanical movement, may actually be just slightly less accurate than the Dollar Store or Wal-Mart watch.
Which would you rather wear?
Obviously.
Bugatti calls it Digital Detox. Exactly so.
Of course, most of us will never be able to afford to wear a Rolex – but isn’t that exactly the point? It is precisely what makes a Rolex something special and so, desirable. It used to be the same thing with luxury-brand vehicles. Not everyone could afford one, but most of us would have loved to drive one. Most of us still can’t afford to drive a luxury-brand car, but what does it matter – since we can afford to drive a Kia?
I hope the luxury-brands take a hint.
. . .
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‘This lemming-like instinct to emulate the smartphone.’ — eric
It’s almost 20 years since Steve Jobs introduced the iPhone on Jan 9, 2007. His breakthrough was to eliminate most hardware buttons in favor of a touchscreen. Given tight limits on the physical size of a phone — it should fit in a pocket — a touchscreen is an efficient use of limited space and an effective human interface.
Cars don’t have such space limits. They were around for a hundred years with all necessary functions controlled by buttons, levers and switches. No breakthrough opportunity awaited to transform their human interface. But once the shartphone [sic] interface reached popular acceptance, it migrated into vehicles anyway. 🙁
A broad definition of enshitification would be the superfluous replacement of simple, maintainable electromechanical tech with electronic chips, which are neither.
In the mid-20th century, ignition timing advance was accomplished by mechanical weights inside the distributor — an upgrade from a manual lever on the steering wheel in the 1920s. It meant that engine rpm was the only variable setting the timing. Now a chip can modify ignition timing to suppress knock when lower-octane fuel is used. It’s an upgrade in functionality.
But that’s not so for the enshitification of the automotive human interface — which was well developed by the mid 20th century — with superfluous douchescreens to ape shartphones. In others’ cars, I’ve watched passengers who were more menu-savvy help a mystified driver find an elusive GPS display mode. How dysfunctional is that?
Even the Bugatti Tourbillon instrument cluster in the embedded video exhibits a poor understanding of human interface. Its analog gauges have inappropriately tiny markings derived from watch dials, that are not easily read with a half-second glance at 85 mph.
Automotive engineers have made outstanding innovations in suspensions and drivetrains, tripling engine specific output and improving handling. But the rest of automotive technology has become trendy, dysfunctional crap, suffering simultaneously from ‘over-tech’ and poor maintainability. Bin it.
In high school math class we were asked to simplify problems, to break them down into manageable parts.
In automobile design and manufacture……
The door is wide open for enshitification reduction.