Cars Peaked in the 1980s and the Buttons Are the Proof

The other day, I climbed into a modern electric vehicle. Clean, efficient, connected, everything a contemporary car is supposed to be. I wanted to adjust the temperature. Simple request. Universal human desire. So I reached for the climate control button and pressed it.

Nothing happened.

What followed was a journey, and I use that word with full irony intact, into a main menu, through a sub-menu, and across a touchscreen that the car's suspension made feel like trying to operate a smartphone while riding a mechanical bull. By the time the temperature changed, I'd already broken a mild sweat, taken my eyes off the road approximately four times, and developed a fresh, burning appreciation for a 1983 Mini Clubman.

Not because the Mini was sophisticated. But because every single control in it could be found in pitch darkness using nothing but muscle memory.

We have gone backwards. And the 1980s are the proof.

The Problem With Being Trapped Inside an iPad

Let's be precise about what's actually happening here, because the automotive industry has done an impressive job of framing regression as innovation.

The iPad is a genuinely brilliant device. As a handheld computer, a reading tool, a content platform, it's hard to argue with. As the dominant design paradigm for a vehicle's entire control interface climate, audio, navigation, seat adjustment, mirror adjustment, everything, it is a catastrophic usability failure dressed up in very nice glass.

Mercedes-Benz's Hyperscreen is the apotheosis of this trend. A curved display that stretches almost the full width of the dashboard, it is visually dramatic, technically impressive, and practically maddening. Adjusting the air conditioning requires eyes off the road, navigation through sub-menus, haptic feedback that mayor may not register, and a level of cognitive load that no driver should be carrying while doing the thing driving requires looking at the road.

The automotive press of the late 1980s and early 1990s used to complain that cars had too many buttons. Looking at a BMW 850CSi interior, you can understand the criticism; a lot was going on. But here's the thing: every single one of those buttons did exactly one thing, was exactly where you expected it to be, and could be operated entirely by touch without visual confirmation.

That's not clutter. That's design.

The Bruno Sacco Era and the Art of the Perfect Button

Bruno Sacco was the Italian-German designer who ran Mercedes-Benz's design department for decades, and the cars produced under his watch represent something that the industry has never quite managed to replicate: the complete integration of engineering precision and tactile luxury into every surface a driver touches.

The 560 SEC, the coupe version of the 1979 to 1991 S-Class, is the clearest illustration of what that actually means in practice.

Mercedes-Benz, during this era, reportedly spent significant sums of money engineering the perfect resistance for a button press. Not a good resistance. Not an acceptable resistance. The perfect resistance, the exact amount of pressure that felt substantial without being an obstacle, paired with the exact clicking sound that confirmed activation, positioned in the precise location that a driver's hand would find without eyes leaving the road.

That is not cost-cutting. That is the opposite of cost-cutting. That is an organisation that understood what luxury actually means when applied to an object a human being interacts with hundreds of times per journey.

Four Things the 560 SEC Got Right That Modern Cars Are Getting Wrong

The window switches. Located on the centre console, they require a deliberate, heavy press. They feel, as one writer described them, like industrial switchgear disguised as luxury hardware. Beautifully spaced, nothing adjacent to accidentally activate. You know when you've pressed one because you feel it, hear it, and the window moves.

The radio. The Becker or Alpine unit fitted to these cars had dials with a heavy, oiled damping to them. Adjusting the volume felt like calibrating a precision instrument. This is not hyperbole; it's a description of what it feels like when engineers care about the tactile experience of a simple rotary control.

The climate controls. Heavy mechanical rollers for temperature, knobs for fan speed, and airflow direction. The kind of controls that wouldn't feel misplaced in a modern Bentley, because Bentley is one of the few manufacturers that still understands this language.

The steering wheel. No buttons. None. The steering wheel steers the car. That's its job. The radical idea that a driver's hands on the wheel don't need to simultaneously manage the audio system, the phone, the cruise control, and the ambient lighting represents a philosophy of focus and intention that has been almost entirely abandoned.

The Uncomfortable Truth About Touchscreens

Modern automakers present large glass touchscreens as a premium feature, a symbol of technological advancement, evidence that you're buying the future. The reality is considerably less flattering.

A single glass panel is significantly cheaper to manufacture than dozens of individually engineered, precision-damped mechanical switches. The shift from buttons to screens is not primarily a design decision. It is primarily a cost decision that has been marketed as a design decision with considerable success.

The materials tell the same story. The 560 SEC's interior featured Zebrano or Burl Walnut wood and matte plastics that look as good today as they did in 1988. Modern luxury car cabins are dominated by high-gloss piano black plastic and glass surfaces that look exceptional for approximately thirty seconds in a showroom before becoming a comprehensive record of every fingerprint, dust particle, and micro-scratch that has come near them.

The 1980s understood that luxury meant materials that aged with dignity. The present confuses luxury with surfaces that require daily cleaning to look like they did when new.

The 1980s Even Warned Us.

Interestingly, the decade wasn't without its cautionary tales. The Aston Martin Lagonda featured a fully digital dashboard with touch-sensitive controls. They were notoriously unreliable. In 1988, the Buick Reatta brought similar technology to a more accessible price point. The results were similarly troubled.

These were warnings. They should have been treated as such. Instead, they were treated as early prototypes of an inevitably superior future, and here we are, sliding fingers across glass to change the temperature while the suspension makes the screen bounce.

What Luxury Actually Means

Luxury, in the context of a car's interior, used to mean comfort, ease of use, space, quality materials, and the quiet confidence of controls that work exactly as expected every single time. Technology played a supporting role; it enhanced those things rather than replacing them.

The confusion of technology for luxury is the defining design failure of the contemporary automotive interior. A screen with thousands of mood lighting settings is not luxurious. It is complicated. A beautifully weighted volume knob that makes the music louder when you turn it right and quieter when you turn it left is luxurious. Because it works. Immediately. Without looking. Without menus. Without a prayer that the haptic feedback registers.

The 1980s didn't get everything right. But they got this right, and the proof is sitting in a perfectly preserved 560 SEC every switch exactly where your hand expects it, every click confirming exactly what you intended, every material looking exactly as good as the day it left Stuttgart.

We called that progress once.

We should probably call it that again.