The first
2001 · BMW 7 Series E65 (iDrive)
The E65 7 Series shipped with iDrive in late 2001 — a single rotary controller in the centre console operating a colour LCD screen high on the dashboard. It centralised radio, navigation, climate, telephony and trip computer into one menu system, and it deleted the majority of the physical buttons that had previously cluttered the centre stack.
Almost everyone hated it. Reviewers hated the menu depth. Owners hated never being able to find the demist function. Chris Bangle, who designed the E65, took most of the blame and probably didn't deserve all of it. By 2005 BMW had quietly added back a row of preset buttons to give people a way around the menus, and the iDrive software was on its third major rewrite.
But — and this is the bit that matters — every other premium manufacturer copied it. Mercedes launched COMAND in 2002, Audi launched MMI in 2002, Lexus launched Remote Touch in 2009. Inside fifteen years, every German car you could buy used a rotary-controlled centre screen as its primary input.
The reason iDrive worked — eventually — was that the rotary controller solved a real ergonomic problem. A driver moving at 70 mph cannot accurately touch a 5cm icon on a screen 60cm away. A driver moving at 70 mph absolutely can rotate a knob and click it. The first generation of iDrive failed because the menu structure was wrong (too deep, with too many context-dependent shortcuts), but the input method was correct. By 2008 BMW had simplified the menu structure to the point where iDrive was widely regarded as the best automotive infotainment system in the industry. It held that title until Tesla deleted the rotary controller entirely.
The version that made it stick
2012 · Tesla Model S
The Model S didn't have a rotary controller. It didn't have any controller at all. It had a 17-inch touchscreen mounted vertically in the centre stack, running a custom Linux UI, and it absorbed almost every physical button on the dashboard — including, controversially, the glovebox release.
It was hated and copied at the same time, exactly like iDrive. By 2015 the Model S had set the template for the next decade of car interiors: big central touchscreen, almost no physical buttons, OTA software updates, smartphone-style icon grid.
Every car launched between 2018 and 2023 was, secretly, trying to be a Tesla Model S inside.
The Mercedes EQS (2021) put a curved glass panel across the entire dashboard and called it the Hyperscreen. The Volkswagen ID.3 (2020) deleted physical climate controls in favour of touch sliders for fan speed, temperature and volume. The Ford Mustang Mach-E (2021) shipped with a 15.5-inch portrait screen straight out of the Tesla playbook. Even Volvo — Volvo, the safest mainstream brand on Earth — moved climate controls into a touchscreen menu on the XC40.
What Tesla had actually done that mattered, beyond the screen size, was three things:
Over-the-air software updates. Tesla cars could be updated remotely. New features (the rear-view camera display, the autopark function, eventually Autopilot) arrived without dealer visits. Owners experienced their car getting better over time — something that had never happened before. Every other manufacturer scrambled to copy this between 2017 and 2024.
A unified UI for all functions. A Tesla had one screen, one icon grid, one consistent navigation pattern. A 2014 BMW had iDrive, plus a separate cluster, plus a head-up display, plus physical climate buttons, plus steering-wheel scroll wheels — all running different software stacks, with no consistent visual language. Tesla's reduction to one interface was a genuine UX simplification.
Smartphone-app integration. The Tesla mobile app could lock, unlock, summon, charge-monitor, climate-precondition, and locate the car. Every manufacturer has copied this. Most copied it badly.
The reckoning
The pushback started in 2022. Not from journalists — from regulators.
In 2024 Euro NCAP announced that from 2026, cars without physical buttons for indicators, hazards, wipers, horn and emergency calling would lose stars in the safety rating. The body cited eye-tracking studies showing that a driver took roughly 1.8 seconds to operate a touchscreen function vs 0.6 seconds for a physical control — at 70 mph that's 50 metres of road covered without looking.
Manufacturers responded immediately. The Volkswagen Golf Mk8.5 facelift (2024) added back physical climate buttons. The Hyundai Ioniq 5 N (2023) kept hard buttons for everything safety-critical from launch. Most importantly, BMW announced in 2025 that the Neue Klasse platform would re-introduce physical climate controls across all body styles. The pendulum had reached its limit.
The data that drove the regulation was striking. The Swedish trade publication Vi Bilägare did a controlled study in 2022 comparing driver eye-off-road times for the same task (adjust climate, change radio, defrost) across eleven cars from 2005-2022. The 2005 Volvo V70 — physical buttons throughout — scored fastest at 10 seconds total task time. The 2022 BYD Atto 3, with all functions on a 12.8-inch touchscreen, took 44.6 seconds for the same tasks. That's a 4.4x slower interaction, with the driver's eyes off the road for an additional 30+ seconds across the test. At motorway speed, that's nearly a kilometre of distance.
What's actually settled
The current consensus, as of 2026, looks something like this:
- Touchscreen for navigation, media, settings, and anything you'd otherwise do on your phone. Apple CarPlay and Android Auto have become the default UI for any non-Tesla on the market. Most drivers ignore the manufacturer's own software and project from their phone. - Physical buttons for climate, hazards, indicators, and any control you might need to operate while looking at the road. The five years of "everything must be touchscreen" was an aesthetic phase, not an ergonomic improvement. - Voice for everything else. The "Hey Mercedes" / "Hello BMW" generation of voice assistants are finally accurate enough to be useful, mostly because they're routing the hard work to cloud LLMs rather than running on automotive-grade silicon.
The Tesla Model S is now a 14-year-old car. The interior, with its single big screen and zero physical buttons, looks aggressively dated against a Polestar 4 or an EQS — both of which have moved towards mixed UIs. The same thing that happened to iDrive happened to the Tesla template: hated, copied, eventually softened.
The Apple CarPlay capture
What's worth noticing is who actually won the in-car interface war: Apple. Roughly 80% of new car buyers in 2025 use Apple CarPlay or Android Auto in preference to the manufacturer's native infotainment. Most drivers' day-to-day in-car experience is now an iPhone projecting onto a car-supplied screen, with the car's own software effectively unused.
Manufacturers reacted to this in two ways. Most (BMW, Mercedes, Volvo, Volkswagen, Hyundai-Kia) integrated CarPlay deeply, accepting that the phone is the user interface and the car's own software is a fallback. A small minority — most prominently General Motors, which announced in 2023 that GM EVs would no longer support CarPlay at all — tried to keep customers inside the car's own software ecosystem to capture data and subscription revenue. The GM decision was widely criticised by reviewers; sales of the GM EVs underperformed targets through 2024. As of 2026 most analysts expect GM to reverse the decision.
Tesla never supported CarPlay or Android Auto in any of its cars, but Tesla owners are also self-selected for tolerance of the manufacturer's UI. Outside Tesla, the manufacturer-locked-in approach has not survived consumer pushback.
The next stage
The thing replacing the touchscreen, slowly, is the head-up display. Mercedes, BMW and Audi are all moving towards augmented-reality projection across the entire bottom of the windscreen — speed limits painted on actual lanes, navigation arrows pointing at actual junctions. The Mercedes EQS has been doing a primitive version since 2021. By 2030 the centre touchscreen may end up being mostly for passengers, not drivers.
A more interesting frontier is haptic feedback for touchscreens — surfaces that physically deform under the fingertip when you touch a "button." Bosch has demonstrated automotive haptic touchscreens since 2019, but cost has kept them out of production cars. The first to ship will probably be the next-generation Audi A8 (expected 2026), with a touchscreen that vibrates and clicks when icons are pressed, attempting to give back the muscle-memory feedback that physical buttons provided.
The lesson of iDrive and Tesla is the same: the most interesting interior technology of any era is the one being copied by everyone else, and the second-most-interesting is whatever the manufacturers have to do five years later to undo the damage.
The 2001 BMW 7 Series, with its rotary controller and its tall centre screen and its hated-then-copied UI, was probably the most influential car interior of the 21st century. Every car you've sat in since 2010 has been a downstream consequence. The Tesla Model S extended the template. The 2026 generation of cars is busy walking the template back. The cycle is the same as every other technology: introduce, lionise, criticise, refine, normalise.